The Comedia series features new theoretical and empirical work exploring the dynamics of the arts and culture industries, and addressing critical issues in the field of contemporary popular culture: issues of production, design, marketing, and consumption. While the principle focus is contemporary, the series also offers historical, educational, and policy-oriented perspectives across a broad range of media and cultural forms, from the news media to the visual arts.
By Martin P. Davidson
August 14, 1992
Advertising is no longer on the defensive. It has survived the snobbery of the 50s, the conspiracy theories of the 60s and the semiology of the 70s to be embraced and apotheosised by the 80s. The Consumerist Manifesto is the first book to examine the advertising process from within the agency ...
By Elizabeth Evans
July 08, 2013
The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television industry. The development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for content directly linked to television programming has offered a challenge to the television set’s status as the sole domestic ...
By Jonathan Gray
December 16, 2005
Using our favourite Springfield family as a case study, Watching with The Simpsons examines the textual and social role of parody in offering critical commentary on other television programs and genres. Jonathan Gray brings together textual theory, discussions of television and the public sphere, ...
By Yvonne Tasker
December 07, 1993
While films such as Rambo, Thelma and Louise and Basic Instinct have operated as major points of cultural reference in recent years, popular action cinema remains neglected within contemporary film criticism.Spectacular Bodies unravels the complexities and pleasures of a genre often dismissed as `...
Edited
By Jostein Gripsrud
July 27, 2010
For over half a century, television has been the most central medium in Western democracies – the political, social and cultural centrepiece of the public sphere. Television has therefore rarely been studied in isolation from its socio-cultural and political context; there is always something ...
By Catherine Johnson
November 22, 2011
Branding Television examines why and how the UK and US television industries have turned towards branding as a strategy in response to the rise of satellite, cable and digital television, and new media, such as the internet and mobile phone. This is the first book to offer a sustained critical ...
Edited
By Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp, Friedrich Krotz
November 20, 2009
"This volume assembles an estimable range of critical analyses of one of the most important mediated artifacts of the modern world—the media event. The authors challenge the construct, extend its usefulness, expand its theoretical basis and application, and examine media events in a far larger and ...
By Iain Chambers
January 05, 1994
In Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers unravels how our sense of place and identity is realised as we move through myriad languages, worlds and histories. The author explores the uncharted impact of cultural diversity on today's world, from the 'realistic' eye of the painter to the '...
By Shaun Moores
August 31, 2005
From an established author with a growing international profile in media studies, Media/Theory is an accessible yet challenging guide to ways of thinking about media and communications in modern life. Shaun Moores draws on ideas from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and...
By David Morley
October 30, 2006
From best-selling author David Morley, this book presents a set of interlinked essays which discuss and examine some of the key debates in the fields of media and cultural studies. Spanning the last decade, this fascinating and readable book is based on interdisciplinary work on the interface of ...
By Ann Gray
December 12, 1992
The 1980s saw an explosion in the use of the domestic video cassette recorder (VCR), arguably the most significant new form of home entertainment technology since television. In Video Playtime Ann Gray investigates what women themselves felt about the VCR, both in terms of the ways these ...
Edited
By Kuan-Hsing Chen, David Morley
February 29, 1996
Stuart Hall's work has been central to the formation and development of cultural studies as an international discipline. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies is an invaluable collection of writings by and about Stuart Hall. The book provides a representative selection of Hall's ...