Comedia
About the Book Series
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.
The Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and Critical Media Studies
1st Edition
By Jostein Gripsrud
March 28, 1995
The Dynasty Years documents and analyses in detail 'the Dynasty phenomenon', the hotly debated success of the Hollywood-made 'Rolls Royce of a primetime soap' which heralded a profound transformation of European television.From the operatic camp of Krystle and Alexis' fight in the lilypond or the ...
To Be Continued...: Soap Operas Around the World
1st Edition
By Robert C. Allen
January 20, 1995
To Be Continued... explores the world's most popular form of television drama; the soap opera. From Denver to Delhi, Moscow to Manchester, audiences eagerly await the next episode of As the World Turns, The Rich Also Weep or Eastenders. But the popularity of soap operas in Britain and the US pales ...
Migrancy, Culture, Identity
1st Edition
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 '...
Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema
1st Edition
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 `...
Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology
1st Edition
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 ...
The Consumerist Manifesto: Advertising in Postmodern Times
1st Edition
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 ...
Advertising International: The Privatisation of Public Space
1st Edition
By Armand Mattelart
November 20, 1991
A survey of the changes in the advertising industry in the last twenty years including coverage of the emergence of international conglomerates and the diversification of the agencies into public relations and media buying....
Timeshift: On Video Culture
1st Edition
By Sean Cubitt
April 25, 1991
Focusing on the aesthetics of video, Timeshift tests current semiotic, postmodernist and psychoanalytic approaches in the laboratory of real-life video viewing....
The Known World of Broadcast News: International News and the Electronic Media
1st Edition
By Stanley Baran, Roger Wallis
November 16, 1990
Radio and television news are expanding everywhere, often at the expense of print media. Developments in global communications, in theory at least, have made the world smaller. An event anywhere can theoretically be reported anywhere else on radio within minutes; on television within hours. But ...
Consumption, Identity and Style: Marketing, meanings, and the packaging of pleasure
1st Edition
Edited
By Alan Tomlinson
April 19, 1990
First Published in 1990. This is a book about the meaning of our lives as consumers. It is about leisure, lifestyle, and markets in today’s consumer culture. In 1986 one measure of people’s use of time in Britain identified television watching as the major activity for both men and women outside ...
Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things
1st Edition
By Dick Hebdige
April 28, 1989
Dick Hebdige looks at the creation and consumption of objects and images as diverse as fashion and documentary photographs, 1950's streamlined cars, Italian motor scooters, 1980's 'style manuals', Biff cartoons, the Band Aid campaign, Pop Art and promotional music videos. He assesses their broad ...
The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display
1st Edition
By Robert Lumley
August 01, 1988
A provocative contribution to the current debate on museums, this collection of essays contains contributions from France, Britain, Australia, the USA and Canada....