The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture
About the Book Series
Dedicated to a renewed engagement with culture, this series fosters critical, contextual analyses and cross-disciplinary examinations of popular culture as a site of cultural politics. It welcomes theoretically grounded and critically engaged accounts of the politics of contemporary popular culture and the popular dimensions of cultural politics. Without being aligned to a specific theoretical or methodological approach, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture publishes monographs and edited collections that promote dialogues on central subjects, such as representation, identity, power, consumption, citizenship, desire and difference. Offering approachable and insightful analyses that complicate race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability and nation across various sites of production and consumption, including film, television, music, advertising, sport, fashion, food, youth, subcultures and new media, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture welcomes work that explores the importance of text, context and subtext as these relate to the ways in which popular culture works alongside hegemony.
Class and Conjuncture in Television, Cinema, and Literature
1st Edition
By Yiannis Mylonas
April 15, 2026
This book presents a critical examination of how cultural forms, ranging from cinema and TV to literature, address class within the overarching context of a crisis conjuncture, specifically the period following the 2008 financial crash. It demonstrates how culture serves as a crucial site for ...
Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism: Do You ‘Seriously Believe That’ After 9/11
1st Edition
By Jerry C. Jaffe
October 27, 2025
Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism presents a contemporary account of religious satire as evidenced by the modern art of stand-up comedy. Focused on the context of the post-9/11 American culture phenomenon, sometimes referred to as the New Atheism – as embodied by public intellectuals such ...
Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia
1st Edition
By Joanne Faulkner
October 08, 2024
This book critically investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children and childhood figure in Australia’s cultural life to mediate Australians’ ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-colonial futures. Engaging with representations in literature, film, ...
Isn't it Ironic?: Irony in Contemporary Popular Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Ian Kinane
January 09, 2023
This volume addresses the relationship between irony and popular culture and the role of the consumer in determining and disseminating meaning. Arguing that in a cultural climate largely characterised by fractious communications and perilous linguistic exchanges, the very role of irony in popular ...
Reborn of Crisis: 9/11 and the Resurgent Superhero
1st Edition
By Annika Hagley, Michael Harrison
April 29, 2022
This book examines the dominant popular culture convention of the superhero, situated within the most significant global event of the last 20 years. Exploring the explosion of the superhero genre post-9/11, it sheds fresh light on the manner in which American society has processed and continues to ...
AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora's Surrealist Fiction
1st Edition
By Rochelle Spencer
August 02, 2021
Examining the surrealist novels of several contemporary writers including Edwidge Danticat, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Junot Díaz, Helen Oyeyemi, and Colson Whitehead, AfroSurrealism, the first book-length exploration of AfroSurreal fiction, argues that we have entered a new and exciting era ...
Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Method of Madness
1st Edition
By Lisa A. Guerrero
June 30, 2021
This book examines the ways in which contemporary works of black satire make black racial madness legible in ways that allow us to see the connections between suffering from racism and suffering from mental illness. Showing how an understanding of racism as a root cause of mental and emotional ...
Death in Contemporary Popular Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Adriana Teodorescu, Michael Hviid Jacobsen
June 30, 2021
With intense and violent portrayals of death becoming ever more common on television and in cinema and the growth of death-centric movies, series, texts, songs, and video clips attracting a wide and enthusiastic global reception, we might well ask whether death has ceased to be a taboo. What makes ...
Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear
1st Edition
Edited
By Victoria McCollum
March 31, 2021
Horror films have traditionally sunk their teeth into straitened times, reflecting, expressing and validating the spirit of the epoch, and capitalising on the political and cultural climate in which they are made. This book shows how the horror genre has adapted itself to the transformation of ...
Prestige Television and Prison in the Age of Mass Incarceration: A Wall Rise Up
1st Edition
By Victoria Bryan
March 31, 2021
Television shows that we might call ‘prestige television’ represent prison in ways that are sometimes reductive, sometimes powerful, and sometimes exceedingly complex. This book examines various programmes across the genres of drama, comedy and horror that utilize prison or places of incarceration ...
Convergent Wrestling: Participatory Culture, Transmedia Storytelling, and Intertextuality in the Squared Circle
1st Edition
Edited
By CarrieLynn Reinhard, Christopher Olson
September 30, 2020
This book examines how the current era of "convergence" has affected, and is reflected in, the world of professional wrestling, which combines several different genres, including drama, action, comedy, horror, science fiction, and even romance. Professional wrestling’s business practices exist...
Consumerism on TV: Popular Media from the 1950s to the Present
1st Edition
By Alison Hulme
June 30, 2020
Presenting case studies of well-known shows including Will and Grace, Birds of a Feather, Sex and the City and Absolutely Fabulous, as well as 'reality' television, this book examines the transformations that have occurred in consumer society since its appearance and the ways in which these have ...