Palgrave Entertainment Industries – serie

This collection brings together the work of a range of scholars from around the world with different perspectives on one simple question: How can we assess the value of various entertainment products and forms?Entertainment is everywhere. The industries that produce it earn billions of dollars each year and employ hundreds of thousands of people. Its pervasiveness means almost everyone has something to say about entertainment, too, whether it be our opinion on the latest Hollywood blockbuster, a new celebrity couple, or our concerns over its place in the world of politics. And yet, in spite of its significance, entertainment has too-often been dismissed with surprising ease within the academy as a ‘mindless’, ‘lowbrow’ – even ‘dangerous’ – form of culture, and therefore unworthy of serious appraisal (let alone praise).Entertainment Values, challenges this assumption, offering a better understanding of what entertainment is, why we should take it seriously, as well as helping us to appreciate the significant and complex impact it has on our culture.

Combining media effects with aesthetic approaches this book offers the first substantial, systematic and coherent account of fun and its importance. But what exactly is fun and what purposes does it serve? Fun is a vital element of entertainment, and entertainment is the most important form of culture in modern Western democracies. It demonstrates that fun is at the heart of entertainment's effects – entertainment both offers its consumers fun and provides them with the intellectual materials to think about the nature of fun.More than this, the book argues that entertainment shows us that fun – pleasure without purpose – is at the heart of living a good life. Illustrated with detailed examples from entertainment – from the Urban Dictionary to The Simpsons, to the Culture novels of Iain M Banks – this book is intelligent, original, and even (dare we say it) fun.