Routledge Advances in Popular Culture Studies
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge popular culture research, where the monographs and edited collections included expand our understanding of popular culture as reflecting world challenges, contexts, and situations. The series places a particular emphasis on evolutions and transformations within popular culture — with a focus on icons, narratives, practices, and identities and aims to provide interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transmedia, and transnational perspectives. To that end, the editor of this book series encourages and welcomes proposals on the broader popular culture landscape, including but not limited to: genre evolutions and transformations; popular narrative platforms, from film to television, video games, web series, comics, anime, manga, games, music, and beyond; regional, national identities, Indigeneity and post-colonial discourses; multifaceted representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class in popular media and culture forms; shifts in media production, engagement, and viewership (including the impact of online streaming platforms); social media, and their influences and impact; digital cultures; the history of popular culture; film and media-based tourism in the 21st century; evolving forms of storytelling, from mainstream to the margins.
Transformation and Metamorphosis in Popular Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Sophia Staite
December 15, 2025
This book investigates the cultural significance of transformation and metamorphosis in popular media across diverse global and historical contexts. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship, the chapters examine how transformation is represented in a wide range of media—from poetry and ...
Romance in the Digital Game
1st Edition
By Amy Brierley-Beare
September 30, 2025
In the last decade, the popularity of ‘romance’ in the AAA game has exploded. It has become an expectation for major releases and a regular object of fan obsession. High profile games such as Baldur’s Gate III (2023), Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and Starfield (2023) all prominently feature in-game ...
The Barbie Phenomenon, Volume 1: Gender, Identity, Race and Sexuality
1st Edition
Edited
By Jo Coghlan, Lisa J. Hackett, Huw Nolan
September 10, 2025
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of Barbie’s role in shaping societal perceptions of identity, gender, race, and sexuality. It traces Barbie’s journey from a post-war American doll reflecting stereotypical ideals to a significant cultural icon whose image both reflects and influences ...
The Barbie Phenomenon, Volume 2: Icon, Brand, Celebrity and Fandom
1st Edition
Edited
By Jo Coghlan, Lisa J. Hackett, Huw Nolan
September 10, 2025
This book examines the evolution of Barbie as a brand and cultural icon, analysing her impact as a model for identity and a powerful influencer within the toy, fashion, and media industries. Since her debut in 1959, Barbie has evolved from a fashion doll to a symbol of empowerment, diversity, and ...
Ouija: Conjuring American Popular Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Katherine Schmidt
September 05, 2025
Tapping into a growing interest in American culture with the occult and new spiritualism, this book is the first scholarly work devoted entirely to the unique place of Ouija in American culture. On the one hand, Ouija has at different moments in history pointed to a deep fascination and openness ...
Depicting the Afterlife in Contemporary Film and Media: Morality, Religion and Death
1st Edition
Edited
By Angelique Nairn
August 19, 2025
What lies beyond death? This book brings together a diverse collection of scholarly voices to explore how popular culture imagines—and reimagines—the afterlife. Drawing from film, television, video games, literature, advertising, and digital technologies, this book examines how narratives ...
Critical Perspectives on the Hallmark Channel: Countdown to Romance
1st Edition
Edited
By Carlen Lavigne
July 31, 2025
This multinational, multidisciplinary collection of essays focuses on Hallmark Channel movies and Hallmark’s position in the changing North American media landscape. This book covers the ‘Countdown to Christmas’ offerings, year-round productions, made-for-TV mysteries and romances, Hallmark’s use ...
Meta Television: A History of US Popular Television's Self-Awareness
1st Edition
By Erin Giannini
July 31, 2025
The idea of metatextuality is frequently framed as a recent television development and often paired with the idea that it represents genre exhaustion. US television, however, with its early “live” performances and set-bound sitcoms, always suggested an element of self-awareness that easily shaded ...
The British Royals in Popular Culture: From the Tudors to the Windsors
1st Edition
By Jo Coghlan, Lisa J. Hackett, Huw Nolan
June 06, 2025
The British Royals in Popular Culture examines the intricate relationship between the monarchy and popular culture from the Tudors to the Windsors, illustrating how the institution has persistently adapted to maintain its symbolic, psychological, and theatrical significance over centuries. It ...
Down the Road and Back Again: Critical Approaches to The Golden Girls
1st Edition
Edited
By Jill E. Anderson, Alissa Burger
May 30, 2025
This is the first book‑length study of The Golden Girls, which ran for seven award‑winning seasons from 1985 to 1992 and produced two spin-offs. Through a cultural studies approach, this collection examines a wide range of topics, including race, sexuality, queerness, memory, familial mythmaking, ...
Reassessing Murder, She Wrote: The Afterlives of a Popular Culture Phenomenon
1st Edition
Edited
By Eva Burke, Jennifer Schnabel
March 18, 2025
This book provides a critical overview of the cultural impact of the Murder, She Wrote TV series and its paratextual elements, including board and video games, podcasts, fan conventions, collectible figures, and ghostwritten novels. It also explores the series’ position within the crime genre, ...
Women, Violence and Postmillennial Romance Fiction
1st Edition
By Emma Roche
October 08, 2024
This book interrogates the significance of the revival and reformulation of the romance genre in the postmillennial period. Emma Roche examines how six popular novels, published between 2005 and 2015 (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, Sharp Objects and The Girl on the Train), reanimate and...