Ray and Pat Browne Book – serie

Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitzvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as: How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new? What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes? How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity? What does it mean for a child to be ""flower-girl material""? How does that role cement a girl's bond to her family and initiate her into society? What is the function of masks and costumes, and why do children yearn for these accoutrements of disguise? Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives suggests the manifold ways in which America's children come to know their society and themselves.

In a thoughtful, well-informed study exploring fiction from throughout Stephen King's immense oeuvre, Heidi Strengell shows how this popular writer enriches his unique brand of horror by building on the traditions of his literary heritage. Tapping into the wellsprings of the gothic to reveal contemporary phobias, King invokes the abnormal and repressed sexuality of the vampire, the hubris of Frankenstein, the split identity of the werewolf, the domestic melodrama of the ghost tale. Drawing on myths and fairy tales, he creates characters who, like the heroic Roland the Gunslinger and the villainous Randall Flagg, may either reinforce or subvert the reader's childlike faith in society. And, in the manner of the naturalist tradition, he reinforces a tension between the free will of the individual and the daunting hand of fate.

The histories of baseball and country music ran in parallel tracks from the fringes to the mainstream, gaining exposure and building heroes, first via radio broadcasts and then on the television screen. Both evolved with American society through wartime, the Civil Rights movement, and into the age of multimillion dollar superstars. Don Cusic offers an engaging and insightful analysis that addresses race, gender, class, ethnicity, business practices and marketing, performance, media, and the cult of celebrity.

From Hank Williams to hip hop, Aunt Jemima to the Energizer Bunny, scrapbooking to NASCAR racing, this volume - edited by a pioneer in the field - invites readers to reflect on a sampling of modern myths, icons, archetypes, and rituals. Ray B. Browne has mined both scholarly and mainstream media to bring together penetrating essays on fads and fashions, sports fandom, the shaping of body image, the marketing of food, vacationing and sightseeing, toys and games, genre fiction, post-9/11 entertainment, and much more. Like Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause's earlier Popular Culture: An Introductory Text, this book opens critical doors into the study of popular culture.

What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? Is it always conformist, or has it the power to resist and subvert the status quo? Is the line between ""high"" and ""low"" merely arbitrary? Do the popular arts have a distinctive aesthetics? This collection offers a wide range of responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology charts some of the key turning points in the ""culture wars.