Theorising the Popular
While chiefly a site of popular pleasure and merriment, popular culture also offers a profound sense of meaning-making, where it functions as a site and source through which identities are inhabited, brokered and contested. As a significant domain within contemporary society, popular culture is both shaped by and has the capacity to shape developments occurring at the wider social, cultural and political levels of human life. Taking popular culture seriously – as an arena of everyday life that has merit in its own right – the contributors to this wide-ranging collection of essays offer unique insight into various elements of contemporary popular culture. Drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as the performing arts and creative industries, this volume offers theoretical reflections on the significance of particular elements of popular culture: from the performative effects of interactive and immersive theatre, through developments in the shifting cultural landscape of a post-television age, to contemporary popular literature of various sorts and its basis for identity and fandom. Above all else, what these essays demonstrate is the radically porous nature of popular culture, and the ways in which it continually defies attempts at neat categorisation by transcending traditional boundaries and genres.
Michael Brennan is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Liverpool Hope University, UK. He has published widely on death, dying and bereavement and its relationship to culture. His most recent book, The A–Z of Death and Dying: Social, Medical and Cultural Aspects, was published in 2014.
“This collection provides an excellent mix of work by senior academics, cultural professionals and post-graduate students starting out on their careers. The international flavour of this edited collection, with contributors from Croatia, Finland, France and the Netherlands, as well as the UK, helps make this a varied and valuable addition to the field of cultural studies.”
Professor Suzanne Bray
l’Université Catholique de Lille, France
“Theorising the Popular provides a stimulating range of essays that reveal the theoretical sophistication of cultural studies. This volume is another welcome addition to the struggle to erase obsolete boundaries between manifestations of so-called high and low culture.”
Dr Felicity Hand Cranham
Senior Lecturer, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
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