Anthem Studies in Popular Culture – Serie

‘South Asian Media Cultures’ examines a wide range of media cultures and practices from across South Asia, using a common set of historical, political and theoretical engagements.  In the context of such pressing issues as peace, conflict, democracy, politics, religion, class, ethnicity and gender, these essays explore the ways different groups of South Asians produce, understand and critique the media available to them.

‘From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television’ is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key debates concerning the representations of motherhood, motherwork and the maternal role in contemporary television programming. The volume looks at the construction of motherhood in the ostensibly female genre of soap opera; the mother as housewife in the domestic situation comedy; deviant, desiring and delinquent motherwork in the teen drama; the single working mother in the contemporary dramedy; the fragile and failing mother of reality parenting television; the serene and selfless celebrity motherhood profile; and the new mother in reality pregnancy and childbirth television. ‘Motherhood and Popular Television’ examines the depiction of motherhood in this wide range of popular television genres in order to illustrate how the maternal role is being constructed, circulated and interrogated in contemporary factual and fictional programming, paying particular attention to the ways in which such images can be seen to challenge or conform to the ideal image of the ‘good’ mother that dominates the contemporary cultural landscape.

Edward FitzGerald's ‘Rubáiyát’, loosely based on verses attributed to the eleventh-century Persian writer, Omar Khayyám, has become one of the most widely known poems in the world, republished virtually every year from 1879 to the present day, and translated into over eighty different languages. And yet it has been largely ignored or at best patronized by the academic establishment. This volume sets out to explore the reasons for both the popularity and the neglect.

'Lesser Breeds' focuses on racism as manifested in the popular culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, exemplified by attitudes to the Chinese, Arabs, Blacks and Jews. This compelling book investigates the manifold expressions of prejudice in the popular arts of the period.