Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies – serie

Bringing together the most important writings on television in theoretical, historical, empirical and political terms, from the USA and Europe, with significant coverage of other international works, this collection demonstrates television's global significance, as a field of study, to disciplines across both the humanities and social sciences.

This major new collection:identifies the critical and theoretical concepts which have been most significant in the study of filmpresents chronologically the most influential and important writing on these conceptsprovides an historical and intellectual context for the material presented.New introductions by the editors guide the reader through the work, and make this an essential source of ideas and insights for students and researchers in the field of Film Studies.

'Hollywood' as a concept applies variously to a particular film style, a factory-based mode of film production, a cartel of powerful media institutions and a national (and increasingly global) 'way of seeing'. It is a complex social, cultural and industrial phenomenon and is arguably the single most important site of cultural production over the past century.This collection brings together journal articles, published essays, book chapters and excerpts which explore Hollywood as a social, economic, industrial, aesthetic and political force, and as a complex historical entity.

Popular music studies is a rapidly expanding field with changing emphases and agendas. The music industry has changed in recent years, as has governmental involvement in popular music schemes as part of the culture industry. The distinction between the major record labels and the outsider independents has become blurred over time. Popular music, as part of this umbrella of the culture industry, has been progressively globalized and globalizing. The tensions within popular music are now no longer between national cultural identity and popular music, but between the local and the global.This four volume collection examines the changing status of popular music against this background. Simon Frith examines the heritage of popular music, and how technology has changed not only the production but the reception of this brand of sound. The collection examines how the traditional genres of rock, pop and soul have broken down and what has replaced them, as well as showing how this proliferation of musical styles has also splintered the audience of popular music.

Visual culture incorporates a number of different visual practices including art, design, performance, architecture, film and photography. The study of visual culture is interdisciplinary, deriving in part from the new art history that emerged in the 1980s, the developing studies of design and material culture, and film, as well as the concepts and methods associated with psychoanalysis, semiotics, gender, class and post-colonialism.This collection is composed of essential articles written by the most stimulating academics working in the field of visual studies today. These texts represent both the formation of visual culture and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.Each volume is divided into three sections, with the first two providing a substantive collection of texts that interrogate the theme of each volume, and the last delivering a relevant case study that addresses the issues discussed.

This remarkable four-volume collection brings together a range of essays at the cutting edge of, communication theory. Selections included provide in-depth theoretical analysis and overviews rather than specific study of phenomena within a given theoretical tradition.The collection provides academics and students with access to a free-standing body of theoretical work which is applicable to a range of different topics within communications, media and cultural studies. Including a new introduction by Paul Cobley, a chronological table of articles and a full index, it is undoubtedly an exceptional and invaluable research resource.

Cultural Heritage is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Edited by Laurajane Smith of the University of York, UK, this four-volume collection brings together the essential Anglophone literature of heritage studies. Encompassing both contemporary material and material of historical significance from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the collection is explicitly interdisciplinary, with research drawn not only from the three disciplines of archaeology, architecture and history traditionally associated with material heritage, but also from subjects such as geography, anthropology, museology, sociology, cultural studies, performance studies and tourism studies. As an emerging field of academic enquiry, the sheer scale of the growth in research output in heritage studies makes this collection especially timely, and meets the demand for a comprehensive reference work to give greater clarity and focus to this fast-developing area. Its value also lies in its bringing together the best scholarship from the various disciplines that are newly turning their attention to issues relating to ‘heritage’, as well as in identifying cultural heritage’s key themes and debates.The first volume (‘History and Concepts’) in the collection describes the development of the modern concern with conserving and preserving material from the past—often conceptualized as ‘heritage’. It also gathers the best research about the key concepts and principles underlying heritage management and conservation practices.Volume 2 (‘Critical Concepts in Heritage’) traces the dissonant and contested nature of heritage practices and the various attempts that have been made to theorize heritage conservation, curation and preservation practices. The volume contains work on the debates over indigenous heritage, national identity, and memory and heritage, together with papers that attempt to explain and contextualize these debates.Volume 3 (‘Heritage as an Industry’) collects the most significant scholarship on issues about the so-called ‘commodification’ of the past and the creation of ‘consensual histories’, while Volume 4 (‘Interpretation and Community’) contains the key material on the practice of heritage interpretation and community heritage projects, as well as work on the developing debates about the nature of intangible heritage.The collected materials are supplemented by an introduction to each volume, newly written by the editor, together with a full index. It is destined to be welcomed by scholars and teachers of cultural heritage—and those working in allied disciplines—as an invaluable reference resource.

Subcultures attract a great deal of interest, both in popular media and in academic work. Comprehensive and fascinating, these four volumes represent work on subcultures across several disciplines: cultural history, cultural studies, criminology and sociology. Beginning by looking at accounts of subcultures in sixteenth-century England, the set then presents case studies that contrast work on gangs and graffiti with CCCS work on subcultures. Volume three then follows CCCS work on punks, by turning to music subcultures, and, lastly, the fourth volume highlights five recent trends in subcultural studies - body subcultures, sexed subcultures, fan and micro-media communities, grassroots and ‘neo-pagan’ subcultures, and ‘virtual communities’ and cybercultures.

This Major Work from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series is a four-volume set of key theoretical, empirical, and historical writings on journalism. Adopting a pluralist theoretical approach, the collection brings together the very best foundational and cutting-edge scholarship from the various disciplines that make up the field to comprise an internationally oriented reference work which contributes significantly to the social, economic, political, cultural, and practical understanding of journalism. The editorial scope of the collection is wide and inclusive and incorporates diverse perspectives from both current developments and historical changes within journalism and journalism studies.The collection is divided into ten parts. Parts 1 (‘Histories’), 2 (‘Definitions’), and 3 (‘Socialization and the Newsroom’) are contained in Volume I. Volume II consists of Parts 4 (‘Theories and Models’) and 5 (‘Journalist—Source Models’) while Parts 6 (‘Professionalism and Occupation’), 7 (‘Education’), and 8 (‘Ethics and Objectivity’) make up Volume III. Finally, Parts 9 (‘Global News and Global Journalism’) and 10 (‘Journalism and its Futures’) can be found in Volume IV.Journalism is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

This new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area as it has emerged and developed. It is a collection of foundational and the best cutting-edge scholarship in the field. Radio is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students of media and cultural studies, as well as those engaged in more specialized radio courses, as a vital one-stop research resource.

Over the last forty years or so academic interest in fashion has burgeoned, and, since the 1970s at least, attempts to define, analyse, and critically explain fashion phenomena have become vital areas of research and study in almost all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.As serious academic work on and around the theory and practice of fashion continues to flourish as never before, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area as it has emerged and developed. It is a landmark collection of foundational and the best cutting-edge scholarship in the field and is organized in four volumes.What is meant by fashion? Volume I provides a conspectus of some of the most important definitions and philosophies of fashion. The philosophical sources of the various senses of the word ‘fashion’ in the work of Kant and Adam Smith, for example, are represented here.Volume II examines the many ways in which analysts have tried to make sense of the incredible variety of things that people wear. One of the simplest ways of doing this is to describe and classify those things. A slightly more sophisticated approach has been to attempt an analysis of them. Volume II presents the best of both the descriptive and analytical approaches to the understanding of fashion.In addition to describing and analysing fashion, many scholars and other thinkers have tried to account for the very possibility of fashion. The critical task of explaining what makes fashion possible may be described as answering the question ‘Why does this item of clothing look the way it does?’ and it demands social, cultural, economic, and political answers. Volume III, therefore, collects the pre-eminent and most influential work to explore and explain what people wear.From whence does our individual and personal identity spring? Is it even appropriate, in an age of mass fashion, to think of ourselves as having individual identities? Volume IV gathers the essential scholarship which addresses these and other hotly contested questions about identity, image, and performance that are raised by postmodern critical analyses of fashion.Fashion is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Books are the cornerstone of our culture. They disseminate ideas, and preserve and transmit literature. Their contents underpin great religions, and have been responsible for wars and revolutions. They lie at the heart of education and scholarship. They have brought pleasure (and some pain) to countless millions of people for nearly three millennia.The systematic study of books and the means by which they are created and distributed began in the eighteenth century, but it is only in the last 150 years or so that it has developed into an important field of scholarship. After an intellectual transformation in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the history of books—and particularly the commercial history of books—is now a vibrant and widely practised area of study and research. Literary scholars, historians, and many others in the humanities and social sciences, have a keen interest in how texts have reached us, how they were created, marketed and distributed, and what impact the commercial processes of publishing had on their contents.As serious academic work on and around publishing and the printed book continues to flourish as never before, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area as it has emerged and developed. It is a landmark collection of foundational and the best cutting-edge scholarship in the field and is organized in four volumes.Volume I (‘Concepts and Theories: Issues in Book History’) deals with the discipline itself, its parameters, its theoretical foundations, and the issues and controversies which have helped it to develop and which are still carrying it forward. Volume II (‘Publishing and the Book Trade’), meanwhile, focuses on the development of the publishing industry, the commercial heart of the book world, and the engine of its evolution. In the third volume (‘Publishers and Authors’), the emphasis is on the extremities of the chain of production and distribution—the authors who create books, and the readers who use them—and on the complex relationships between both and the publishers. The final volume (‘Printing and Book Production’) is concerned with the history of printing—the most important single technological development in the whole history of the book.The materials gathered in this collection exemplify schools of thought and the development of ideas about the discipline, as well as embodying some of the key results of scholarship, to give a coherent view of its achievements and of its potential for further development. For the novice or advanced student, the collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. And, for the more advanced scholar, it will be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. For both, Book Publishing will be valued as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Coinciding with the massive growth of consumerism after the Second World War, ‘everyday life’ has emerged as a crucial site of scholarly exploration. The critical study of quotidian routines, rules, spaces, and objects has become a central concern for scholars working in cultural studies. Furthermore, everyday life has also engaged the close attention of thinkers—including philosophers, cultural geographers, historians, and sociologists—from a range of other disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.As research in and around everyday life flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary literature. Edited by a leading scholar, Everyday Life gathers foundational and canonical work, together with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions.With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Everyday Life is an essential work of reference. For the novice or advanced student, the collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. And, for the more advanced scholar, it will be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. For both, Everyday Life will be valued as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Public Relations is increasingly recognized as a well-established communication and management science. Indeed, the discipline has now generated an abundance of serious scholarly research which is very wide-ranging and which continues to flourish as never before. But much of the relevant literature remains inaccessible or is highly specialized and compartmentalized, so that it is difficult for many of those who are interested in the subject to obtain an informed, balanced, and comprehensive overview. This new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series answers the need for an accessible, one-stop reference work to make sense of the subject’s vast and dispersed literature, and the ongoing explosion in research output.Edited by Robert L. Heath, a leading scholar in the field, the four volumes of the collection bring together classic and contemporary contributions to provide a ‘mini library’ of the best and most important research. The collection is global and multidisciplinary in scope and the gathered materials explore a range of issues, not least the increasingly important role PR plays in society. In particular, the collection addresses why—and how—corporations, governments, and other bodies practise PR. The collected works also interrogate the history and ethics of Public Relations, and consider the dizzying challenges posed by new, often interactive, technologies and social media.Public Relations includes a full index and is supplemented by an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected works in their historical and intellectual context. It is certain to be welcomed by advanced students, academics, and practitioners as a vital resource for reference and research.

Serious scholarly writing and research on British cinema has burgeoned to a dizzying degree in recent decades, and this new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative reference work to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large body of scholarship, and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Robert Murphy, the leading expert in the field, this new title is a ‘mini library’ of the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on British cinema.British Cinema provides an indispensable one-stop resource on the major periods, genres, studios, filmmakers, and debates in British cinema from the nineteenth century to the present day. The collection addresses a wide range of issues and topics including: British cinema as a ‘national’ cinema; its often difficult relationship with Hollywood; censorship; gender representation; distinctively British genres (not least, horror, comedy, and costume film); and the output of studios and directors (including immortals such as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Alexander Mackendrick, and Michael Powell).British Cinema includes a full index and a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students of film studies as a vital research tool.

Japanese cinema is historically one of the world’s most important national film industries and one that continues to have a significant global influence. From the Golden Age of the 1930s and the 1950s art-house success of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu to the 1960s New Wave of Imamura and Oshima and the ubiquitous contemporary presence of sci-fi and anime, Japan has produced directors and genres of central importance to the development of cinema as both art and industry. Indeed, no college or university course on international film history or modern world cinema is complete without substantial reference to Japan’s mighty achievements.Despite the crucial contribution of work on Japan to the development of Film Studies as a distinct object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the ongoing vibrancy of Japanese Cinema Studies as a dynamic interdisciplinary endeavour, to date no reference work has gathered all the most important scholarly writings on the topic. This welcome addition to Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series remedies that omission. It presents for the first time the most significant English-language work on the history and culture of Japanese cinema.Edited by two leading scholars in the field, this major new reference resource offers a multi-dimensional overview of one hundred years of filmmaking in Japan. It explores the subject from all key angles, encompassing production and the role of commercial film studios, distribution, exhibition, issues of critical reception, fandom, and the cultural status of cinema as aesthetic medium. Every major period is represented, including early and silent cinema, the years of empire and war, postwar resurgence and political strife, globalization and multimedia reconfiguration. In addition, the collection includes consideration of key films and filmmakers, alongside approaches to Japanese cinema’s perceived uniqueness and debates on its relation to society, as well as to Hollywood and other film industries. Contributions are drawn from the various disciplines where the most important work on Japanese cinema has been produced, including Film Studies, Japan Studies, Asian Studies, and Cultural Studies.Japanese Cinema is supplemented by a comprehensive index. It also includes a full introduction, newly written by the editors, which outlines the various historical contexts for the emergence of mature scholarly approaches to the subject.

Serious research on Bollywood—perhaps the most well-known and vital aspect of contemporary Indian culture—has flourished in recent decades. This new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative anthology to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large body of scholarship, and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Rachel Dwyer, a leading expert in the field, this new Routledge title is a ‘mini library’ of foundational and the very best cutting-edge work.Bollywood provides an indispensable one-stop resource on the development of popular cinema within India, with, of course, an emphasis on Hindi films produced in Bombay. Tracing the development of Indian popular cinema from the early twentieth century onwards, the collection allows users fully to comprehend the role of film and popular culture in colonial and independent India, the evolution and nature of different film genres, the importance of film music, and the great regional diversity 'Bollywood' encompasses. The collection also brings together the best and most influential scholarly works on topics that include: the silent era; the studio period; the ‘Golden Age’; and the so-called ‘segmentation’ of cinema. The contribution of major stars and directors is also assessed.Bollywood includes a full index and a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students as a vital research tool.

Of all European cinema, the most important is French. France annually produces more films than any other European nation, and throughout its history it has been the key competitor to Hollywood; it is Cannes that matters most after the Oscars. Moreover, the study of film as an academic discipline emerged from France during the 1950s, and was shaped by the work of French intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s. And in the broad field of international scholarship that is Film Studies, after Hollywood, there are more scholars working in French cinema than any other national cinema.As serious research on French cinema continues to flourish, this new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative anthology to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large body of scholarship, and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Phil Powrie, Chief General Editor of the only academic journal specifically devoted to French cinema, and chair of the Association for Studies in French Cinema, this new Routledge title is a ‘mini library’ of foundational and the very best cutting-edge work. The gathered major works bring together the best and most influential writing on French cinema. Volume I engages with two different forms of scholarship: popular cinema (genres and stars) and influential conceptualizations of French cinema. Volume II adopts the more canonical–historical approach for the period up to the New Wave, assembling the best work on the silent period, the Golden Age of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the New Wave of the early 1960s. Volumes III and IV, meanwhile, focus on the post-New Wave period from the mid-1960s onwards.The set includes an introduction to the subject, newly written by the editor, which places the gathered materials in their historical and intellectual context. Indeed, French Cinema is an essential work of reference, and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students as a vital research tool.

The close and complex relationship between conflict and communication has been vividly illustrated in work spanning the writings of Homer and Thucydides to blogs bashed out on contemporary battlefields. And in recent decades there has been a huge growth in scholarly and popular interest in the subject. As serious research flourishes as never before, this new two-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series has been assembled by the field’s leading thinker to meet the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of cross-disciplinary literature.Drawing on disparate, and sometimes less accessible, sources, the two volumes gather together canonical and the very best cutting-edge scholarship to cover a diverse range of key themes, including: the theory and reality of journalistic practice; the effects of conflict communication on the policy process; and the impact of technology on the very nature of war and conflict.The collection also includes a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. War and Conflict Communication is an essential work of reference and will be welcomed as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Especially over the past thirty years, serious research on early cinema has blossomed as never before. This rapid growth has included the establishment of international organizations such as Domitor (founded in 1987), with its biannual conferences; film festivals such as Le Giorante del cinema muto (established in Pordenone, Italy, in 1984); the centenary celebrations of cinema’s emergence (in 1994–6); and a host of publications, culminating with the release by Routledge of the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (2005) (reissued in a revised paperback edition in 2010).Early Cinema is a new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. It meets the need for an authoritative reference work to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited with the assistance of an international board of consultants by Richard Abel, a leading scholar in the field, this collection brings together in four volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on early cinema.Early Cinema includes a full index and a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students of film studies as a vital research tool.

Research in and around popular culture continues to flourish. And its study is, more than ever, a key component of Media and Communications Studies courses, and a vital part of Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology curricula.The sheer scale of the available research exploring popular culture—and the breadth and complexity of the canon on which it draws—makes this new four-volume Routledge collection especially timely. It answers the urgent need for a wide-ranging collection which provides ready access to the key items of scholarly literature, material that is often inaccessible or scattered throughout a variety of specialist journals and books from a broad range of disciplines.Volume I (‘History and Theory’) brings together the best work on the rise of popular culture as a subject for serious academic study, uncovering its roots and exploring its rapid development in the years after the Second World War. Key debates (e.g. between base and superstructure, hegemony and control, colonialism and postcolonialism) are traced to provide users with a clear understanding of the foundational approaches that inform the more applied examinations of popular culture in the succeeding volumes.Volume II assembles the most important thinking on ‘Ideology and Representation’, including work drawn from feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Volume III gathers crucial work on ‘Fissures and Fusions’, while the last volume in the set is organized around ‘Critical Departures’.Popular Culture is supplemented with a full index, and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students as a vital research and reference resource.

Academic analysts and practitioner-theorists of advertising draw on rich and innovative multidisciplinary resources where cultural and media analysis meet economics, anthropology, semiotics, gender studies, social psychology, linguistics, and applied neuroscience. This new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series answers the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. The collection connects researchers and advanced students to the best in contemporary social and cultural theory, while maintaining a stringent focus on advertising—as industry, as cultural form, and as evolving (multi-) media technology.With the economics of media cultures in flux, the four volumes bring together a comprehensive collection of the best scholarship on advertising communication, tracking the evolution of the essential themes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection is also attentive to the global development of advertising, and incorporates various academic responses to advertising in, for example, Japan, India, China, Latin America, and Africa.Advertising qua commercial pop art form, and as professional practice, cuts through crucial questions in the history and theory of modern media. Advertising exists as the pre-eminent object for the critical scrutiny of media culture, and presents a high-profile everyday cultural site for the emergence and rehearsal of questions around, for example, gender, cultural value, ethnicity, and representation. This Routledge collection gives ready access to the major landmark and cutting-edge work engaged in such dizzying debates.In the near future, the industry dismissed by George Orwell as ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket’ will confront intense pressure to change and redevelop. There will, it is widely thought, be a complex restructuring in the provision and reception of commercial–cultural brand communications. Navigating this terrain will demand a heightened alertness to a wider range of thinking than has typically informed the advertising business to date. Both inside and without the academy, old questions will be posed anew, and this collection will enable users to draw on a unique database of the very best canonical and contemporary scholarship.With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Advertising is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and practitioners as a vital work for research and reference.

Documentary film is cinema’s oldest form, dating back to the medium’s invention at the turn of twentieth century. From cinema’s earliest days, important documentary films and film-makers have emerged continuously and, today, interest in documentary film remains substantial, and is rapidly growing. Standing conferences have been instituted, and new scholarly journals and festivals devoted to the genre are blossoming. Indeed, documentary film culture flourishes, particularly in the developing world and in non-democratic states. China’s burgeoning underground documentary film movement, for example, has garnered much critical attention in recent years.Documentary Film is a new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. It meets the need for an authoritative reference work to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Compiled by Ian Aitken (who also edited Routledge’s landmark Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (2006)), this collection brings together in four volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on documentary film.Documentary Film includes a full index and comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editor, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students as a vital research tool.

Sound Studies is the primary theoretical and empirical alternative to our understanding of media and culture by visual means. The field is now well established as a serious area of research and study. Concentrating on the history of audio media, Sound Studies explores the nature of sound and listening, and its role in modern experience and perception. Furthermore, the subdiscipline questions the adequacy of previous—visually based—epistemologies of media and culture to offer a comprehensive understanding and interpretation of central facets of everyday life, historically, comparatively and in terms of present-day experience. Sound Studies investigates the different ways in which people experience the world of sound and how sound is embedded in culture, history, institutions, design, architecture, and technologies.If Sound Studies incorporates the sonic turn in Media Studies and coheres around Cultural Studies, it also extends into Urban Studies, Aesthetics, History, Architecture, and Anthropology. It looks at the wide array of sonic experiences in society to include sound, music, and silence. In so doing it goes beyond the traditional disciplines of Ethnomusicology, History of Music, and the Sociology of Music.As research in and around Sound Studies flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary literature. Edited by a leading scholar, Sound Studies gathers foundational and canonical work, together with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions.With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Sound Studies is an essential work of reference. For the novice or advanced student, the collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. And, for the more advanced scholar, it will be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. For both, Sound Studies will be valued as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Chinese cinema is the only non-English language cinema to have a significant global presence. From multiplex blockbusters like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to festival hits such as Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Chinese cinema succeeds like no other foreign-language cinema. The interdisciplinary field of Chinese Cinema Studies has boomed alongside these developments and, today, no Asian Studies, Chinese Studies, or Film and Media Studies programme is complete without courses that cover Chinese cinema, including the cinemas of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the wider Chinese diaspora.While research in and around Chinese cinema flourishes as never before, not least because of its highly interdisciplinary nature, much of the relevant literature remains inaccessible or is highly specialized and compartmentalized, so that it is difficult for many of those who are interested in the subject to obtain an informed, balanced, and comprehensive overview. This new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, addresses that problem and meets the need for a reference work to help make sense of the subject’s vast and widely dispersed literature, and the continuing explosion in research output.The materials gathered by the editor, a leading scholar in the field, include major works that explore: aesthetics through key films and directors; film cultural practices, such as consumption, distribution, exhibition, reception and criticism; production practices, for instance, genres, stars, studio structures, and marketing; and cinema’s connection to society and its relationship to issues such as the nation-state, revolution, and gender. The collection’s temporal scope extends from the arrival of cinema via the Lumière Brothers in 1895 to the present day, and it ranges widely across all territories to include full coverage of the films produced by the ethnic Chinese diaspora.Chinese Cinema is supplemented by a full index and chronological tables of contents. It also includes an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the gathered materials in their historical and intellectual context.

From an area of specialist research a decade ago China’s media has become now an important element of research and teaching worldwide, not only in specific Chinese cultural studies courses at the university level but increasingly in post-graduate research and in the domain of business consultancy.Edited by Michael Keane and Wanning Sun, leading experts in the field, this new title is a ‘mini library’ of the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on Chinese media

Since at least the early 1970s, when Claire Johnston observed that despite ‘the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema … woman as woman is largely absent’, the relationship of cinema to the construction of gender identities and gendered pleasures has been a central concern within Film Studies. Bringing together the political concerns of second-wave feminism and the dizzying developments in theorizing about representation, culture, and society, early work—as exemplified by Johnston’s writing—changed radically the nature of Film Studies and the issues which it would address. Later scholars attended to concerns about sexuality, drawing on queer theory; and race and ethnicity, often influenced by postcolonialism. Most recently, Global Cinema Studies has sought to refocus these concerns yet again, whilst ‘postfeminism’ has questioned many of the assumptions on which Film Studies work on gender has rested.Film and Gender is a new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. It meets the need for an authoritative reference work to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large literature, its history, and its continuing centrality within Film Studies. Compiled by Sue Thornham, whose work includes Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (1997) and Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (1999), and Niall Richardson, author of The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman (2009) and Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (2010), this eagerly awaited collection brings together in four volumes the foundational and the very best and most provocative scholarship on film and gender.Film and Gender includes a full index and comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editors, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students as a vital research tool.

Information Science is concerned with the theoretical and practical aspects of effective information provision and consumption. In particular, information scientists explore the theoretical underpinnings and practical competencies involved in the generation, collection, organization, processing, management, storage, retrieval, distribution, communication, and utilization of information.In today’s knowledge societies (shaped, in the words of the editors of this new Routledge title, ‘by an unabatedly accumulating abundance of information’), it is perhaps unsurprising that Information Science is more than ever a crucial site for scholarly exploration. And as serious research in and around the discipline flourishes as never before, this four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the urgent need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary literature. Edited by two leading scholars of international repute, Information Science gathers foundational and canonical work, together with more innovative and cutting-edge scholarship.Volume I brings together the best and most influential materials to provide a wide-ranging critique of the theoretical framework and historical context of Information Science. Starting with the changing definitions, concepts, and roles of information throughout history, the major works gathered here examine the nature of Information Science as a discipline, including an exploration of its philosophy and core mission; its intellectual content and concerns; its scope and boundaries; and an appraisal of how libraries, information services, and information management evolved over the years.Volume II assembles the essential thinking on the management of information for its optimum accessibility and usability. It encompasses the entire chain of information (the process through which recorded knowledge is transmitted from its originator to the consumer). The crucial research brought together here also considers the vast array of information products, systems, and services on offer and the principal agents for the provision of knowledge in our age of omnipresent information, including: governmental, scholarly, commercial, and individual content providers; publishers; and traditional and virtual libraries.Volume III, meanwhile, focuses on the use and users of information. It concentrates on present-day information requirements and practices against the backdrop of our traditionally held notions concerning people’s information needs and information behaviour. Themes covered here include human–computer interaction and sophisticated, IT-enabled measures for gauging information use, such as bibliometrics and webometrics.The final volume collects key scholarship to explore the ever more central role that knowledge and information assume in today’s fast changing, technology-driven economy. The emphasis here is on the economics of information: the knowledge industry and the notion of information as capital at its heart; the economic characteristics of information as a commodity of major value; the contradictory perceptions of information as a public good versus private property; information creation, processing, flows and use from an economic perspective; and the value of information and the benefits it accrues for individuals, communities, and organizations.With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Information Science is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by scholars—as well as by policy-makers and information professionals—as a vital one-stop research tool.

The International Federation of Library Associations was founded as early as 1927, but in recent years serious academic and practical work on and around international librarianship has flourished as never before. Now, this new title from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative collection of major works to make sense of a growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area as it has emerged and developed. Organized in four volumes, it is a landmark collection of foundational and the best cutting-edge scholarship in the field.International Librarianship is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and will be welcomed by scholars, librarians, library educators, and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.