Books published by The Popular Press

One of the very first books to take Stephen King seriously, "Landscape of Fear" (originally published in 1988) reveals the source of King's horror in the sociopolitical anxieties of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. In this groundbreaking study, Tony Magistrale shows how King's fiction transcends the escapism typical of its genre to tap into our deepest cultural fears: "that the government we have installed through the democratic process is not only corrupt but actively pursuing our destruction, that our technologies have progressed to the point at which the individual has now become expendable, and that our fundamental social institutions-school, marriage, workplace, and the church-have, beneath their veneers of respectability, evolved into perverse manifestations of narcissism, greed, and violence."

Stephen King's popularity lies in his ability to reinterpret the standard Gothic tale in new and exciting ways. He thus creates his own Gothic world and then interprets it for us. This book analyzes King's interpretations and his mastery of popular literature. The essays discuss adolescent revolt, the artist as survivor, and more.

This book seeks to explore how Barbara Pym subverts the discourse of the romance novel through her use of food, clothes, heroine and hero characterizations, and marriage customs.

Essential reading for those interested in the suspense novelist Cornell Woolrich, author of Rear Window. His autobiography includes accounts of his working methods, Victorian family and home, memories of childhood, college experience, sexual initiation, and philosophy of life.

American crime fiction has developed into writing that has a commitment to democracy and the democratic way of life, a compassion and empathy and a style which has created a significant branch of American literature.

The greatest portrayer of blue-fire deviltry, Edward Fitzball was a melodramatist on the nineteenth-century British stage. His Theatre of the Macabre was very much a forebearer of the sensationalized media of today. This book discusses Fitzball s life, and his dramatic oeuvre."

This book attempts to analyze a major part of Mansfield's fiction, concentrating on an analysis of the various textures, themes, and issues, plus the point of view virtuosity that she accomplished in her short lifetime (34 years). Many of her most famous works, such as "Prelude" and "Bliss," are explicated, along with many of her less famous and unfinished stories.

For Americans World War II was a good war, a war that was worth fighting. Even as the conflict was underway, a myriad of both fictional and nonfictional books began to appear examining one or another of the raging battles. These essays examine some of the best literature and popular culture of World War II. Many of the studies focus on women, several are about children, and all concern themselves with the ways that the war changed lives. While many of the contributors concern themselves with the United States, there are essays about Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Japan."

Zalampas applies the psychological model of Alfred Adler to Adolf Hitler through the examination of his views on architecture, art, and music. This study was made possible by the publication of Billy F. Price s volume of over seven hundred of Hitler s watercolors, oils, and sketches."

This book is a literary history of the Noble Savage and a comprehensive metamorphology of the American mind. Wide-ranging and deep-diving, this book suggests many reevaluations of American heroes and attitudes.

This work explores John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, with special emphasis on MacDonald's examination of the conflicts and joys of twentieth-century American culture and society. MacDonald describes himself as a moralist and this, combined with his narrative gifts, infuses his ever-present concerns for the quality and durability of American life. The first and last chapters, respectively, discuss MacDonald's early novels and the four he wrote concurrently with the series. The remaining chapters analyze various themes that figure prominently in the series. MacDonald's thinking reflects many of the concerns of his fellow citizens during his writing career while revealing his own personal reaction to the society around him. Noting his sense of an uncaused evil in the world and his prolific inventiveness, this work examines MacDonald's narrative exploration of America in which he reveals an unwillingness to give up either his frequently pessimistic views of society or the hope that it can somehow continue. His posthumous Reading for Survival sounds the latter note in typical MacDonald fashion: Read and learn or die. McGee, in the hard-boiled detective tradition, exemplifies MacDonald's picture of the struggling, but coping, culture with no guarantees for the future.

There are hundreds of satisfactory and satisfying British mystery writers whose works should be studied both for their own individual accomplishments and for their comments on the society in which they were published, in the last 150 years, but who have not received any critical comment lately.    This volume is designed to correct that fault in a dozen of those unjustifiably neglected British authors: Wilkie Collins, A.E.W. Mason, G.K. Chesterton, H.C. Bailey, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Nicholas Blake, Michael Gilbert, Julian Symons, Dick Francis, Edmund Crispin, H.R.F. Keating, and Simon Brett.

What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? This collection offers responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, the book charts some of the key turning points in the ""culture wars.

Intertextual encounters occur whenever an author or the author's text recognizes, references, alludes to, or otherwise elicits an audience member's familiarity with other texts. This work ranges from the 1830s to the 1990s and from the canonical American novel to Bugs Bunny and Jerry Seinfield.

This work addresses some of the multi-faceted conceptual and theoretical issues connected with symbolic construction of reality through human memory and its subsequent representation. It presents a synthesis of the multiple meanings of memory and representation within the context of truth.

In journeys of self-discovery, quests to define our national identity, opportunities to escape from the daily routine, and expressions of social protest - the American road narrative has been a significant and popular literary genre for four decades. Romance of the Road captures America's love affair with roads, cars, travel, speed, and the lure of open spaces. With roots reaching back to quest romance and pilgrimage, the literature of the American highway explores our diverse and often conflicted cultural values. This comprehensive study of an important American art form examines how road narratives create dialogues between travelers, authors, and readers about who we are, what we value, and where we hope to be going.

At the memorial held after Martin Ritt's death in 1990, he was hailed as this country's greatest maker of social films. From No Down Payment early in his career to Stanley & Iris, his last production, he delineated the nuances of American society. In between were other social statements such as Hud, Sounder, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Norma Rae, and The Great White Hope. He was a leftist who embraced various radical movements of the 1930s and, largely because of this involvement, was blacklisted from television in the early 1950s. His film The Front, about the blacklisting, was his most autobiographical. He was a Jew from New York; yet he went to a small college in North Carolina, Elon, where he played football for "The Fighting Christians". His school days in the South gave him a lifelong love for the region. Thus, in his movies, he was just as much at home with southern as with northern topics. He did not deal totally in his southern experience with racism and poverty. He directed The Long Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury, both of which described conflicts between and among white social groups. He once remarked, "I have spent most of my film life in the South". Some referred to his films as "think movies", and perhaps this is why he never won an Oscar for best directing. But he gave moviegoers all over the world an opportunity to see what America was really like - from the viewpoint both of the wealthy and of the poor. It may be, unfortunately, that we will never see his likes again.

In Keating s novels, set in India, the bumbling, but always human, Inspector Ghote manages to solve crimes with a post-colonial mix of inherited Scotland Yard/Holmesian deductive methods and his understanding of his native country s culture. This book is based on the premise that successful sleuths have much in common with cultural anthropologists indeed the latter have often been termed detectives of cultures. Keating s Ghote novels are in the tradition of Tony Hillerman s Navajo Indian mysteries, and James McClure s South African novels, which serve up the human, experiential aspects of the cultural and ethnic conflicts that newspapers miss."

Gender is the mine field we pass through every day. In the United States of materialism, gender is all too often determined by which anatomical sex you are. From birth we are bombarded with gender propaganda that supports a repressive dual gender system that pits the sexes and the genders against each other. Transgenderists as gender nonconformists challenge us to rethink traditional discourses on sex and gender. Transgender Nation dares to look at the male-to-woman transgenderist and transsexual from a sociocultural and socio-political perspective and maintains that it is not the individual transgenderist that is sick and in need of treatment but rather the culture that must be treated. Transgender Nation explores historical sexological categories and decodes contemporary medical transsexual ideology, charging that contemporary "treatments" like sex reassignment surgery all too often encourage assimilation and negate differences. Proposals for endocrinological euthanasia are examined for what they reveal about persona and cultural attitudes about gender. In addition popular cultural representations of transgenderists as homocidal maniacs dressed to kill are contrasted with the grim reality that in a transgenderphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic culture they are more likely to be killed because they dress.

In this volume of the Beyond the Stars series, the subject of the various individual essays are discrete conventions of movie locales, but the subject of the volume as a whole as with the other books in the series is the viability of film convention studies as a tool for the study of film and American culture."

Staying Tuned: Contemporary Soap Opera Criticism examines serials. Broadcast first in 1926 on radio and since 1956 on television Monday through Friday 52 weeks a year, soap operas provide a clear promise to continue for as long as mass medicated entertainment exists. Over the last sixty years, billions have happily suffered along with the gallant men and women of the afternoon.

Often, the decade of the 1920s has been stereotyped with such labels as The Roaring Twenties, The Jazz Age, or The Lost Generation. Historical perspective has forced reevaluation of this decade. Articles in this collection are presented in the most definitive anthology dealing with 1920s America."

These essays, written by experts in their fields, demonstrate how necessary it is in the study of the humanities and social sciences to realize the interdependency of the fields and how rich the resulting study can be."

In 1984, America celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the first successful roller coaster device erected at Coney Island. This book examines every phase of roller coaster history, from the use of the roller coaster by Albert Einstein to demonstrate his theory of physics, to John Allen's use of psychology in designing one.

This book discusses the figure of the unchaste woman in a wide range of fiction written between 1835 and 1880; serious novels by Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Meredith, and George Eliot; popular novels that provided light reading for middle-class women (including books by Dinah Craik, Rhoda Broughton, and Ouida); sensational fiction; propaganda for social reform; and stories in cheap periodicals such as the "Family Herald" and the "London Journal," which reached a different and far wider audience than either serious or popular novels.

A collection of twenty-five essays from eight countries, illustrating the many approaches to science fiction.

In her fiction, Jessie Brown Pounds preserved the flavor of Ohio s rural village culture as the nineteenth century drew to a close. This anthology rediscovers Pounds s varied works and reminds modern students that Middle-Western culture included women writers as social critics and mythmakers. Included are short stories, sketches, one undated short story published posthumously in 1921, and Rachael Sylvestre, a first-person historical novel written in 1904."

Love Valley is a small town in rural North Carolina. Its genesis in 1954 marked the fulfillment of a dream for founder Andy Barker. Barker cultivated two visions as a young man he wanted to build a Christian community, and he wanted to be a cowboy. The result of his vision is Barker s utopian experiment. "