Books published by The Popular Press

Approximately 50 historical novels dealing with the American Revolution were published in the USA from 1896 to 1906. This work examines the narrative strategies employed in these novels, the ways in which fiction is made to serve the purpose of vivifying national history.

This book of essays carefully written by twenty-four authorities on their subjects provides a deep understanding of and appreciation for the coherence, primacy, and importance of the search for identity in the divergent areas of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe."

This book takes another look at politics and popular culture. The author has tried to explain the politics of popular culture as part of historical and cultural processes, helping the reader understand not only how popular culture has affected our politics, but also where it is taking us.

Joinings and Disjoinings illustrates the importance of marriage or singleness in short stories and novels and suggests the diverse perspectives the topic can provide on specific works and on analysis of the cultural importance of marriage and marital status. Essays discuss canonical and lesser-known works, providing social, historical, and literary context."

The essays in this book trace many of the multitudinous forces at work on the Constitution and in the popular culture and show how the forces control and benefit each other. The subject is of profound importance and, beginning with these essays, needs to be studied at great length for the benefit of us all.

The subjects treated in this symposium have one major characteristic in common, that they have recently, or relatively recently, enjoyed high popularity among readers. Also, they have received from substantial to torrents of comment.

One group of male authors created fiction about the prostitute. The author examines how they attempted to turn an outcast into a heroine in a literature otherwise known for its puritanical attitude toward fallen women. She re-evaluates Stephen Crane's ""Maggie: A Girl of the Streets"", and other works of fiction. She draws on many period sources.

This study examines sports as both a symbol of American culture and a formative force that shapes American values. Leverett T. Smith Jr. uses high culture, in the form of literature and criticism, to analyze the popular culture of baseball and professional football.

A perspective on the gothic novel in America, this study engages underlying currents that define American culture as one of consumption through the rereading of canonical texts by Hawthorne, Poe, James and Faulkner, and contemporary gothic novels of Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Rice.

The reactions of ordinary people to unusual events reveal the general psychology of a society. These essays are footage in the human action of coping with the phenomena of everyday life. They are accounts of ourselves in the human quest for comfort and safety in a world that is short on both.

Is it possible to understand genres such as drama and theatre without considering the influence of television? This work argues that television's dominance of the entertainment industry demands a continual negotiation of subject position from all other cultural forms and institutions.

Heralded in her day as an ""unsurpassed genius"" and as the ""first lady"" of the Ohio River Valley, Julia Louisa Dumont wrote about the past and present life of ordinary people, pioneers and settlers, when the area was still known as the West. This anthology collects ten of her stories.

This collection of essays articulates the pedagogical strategies of using detective fiction texts to investigate the politics of difference.

The vampire has proliferated in literature in a variety of guises - some antagonistic, some heroic, and many falling into a fascinating ""In between.

Ritual occasions in the movies can bring us to laughter and tears and hope and regret; the chords they strike suggest the complex intersection between American movies and our lives. Major ritual occasions of weddings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, funerals, graduations, and birthday parties appear in hundreds of popular films produced by Hollywood throughout the 20th century. This study suggests that these stock scenes are more significant to American film than we might have thought.

The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association found a fixed canon and revolutionized the study of the humanities and social sciences in the United States and around the world by making that canon fluid. The full ramifications of this revolt against traditional academia not finished nor fully understood. This is a record of the goals and accomplishments of the pioneers in this field. The essays recall the barriers that the first pop culture scholars faced and tracks their achievements.

"Rednecks" have long been subjects of scorn and ridicule, especially in the South because of an antebellum caste and class system, parts of which persist to this day. In A Question of Class, Carr probes the historical and sociological reasons for the descent of "rednecks" into poverty, their inability to rise above it, and their continuing subjugation to a stereotype developed by others and too often accepted by themselves. Carr also records the progress in southern fiction of this negative stereotype - from antebellum writers who saw "rednecks" as threats to the social order, to post-Civil War writers who lamented the lost potential of these people and urged sympathy and understanding, to modern writers who reverted, in some sense, to Old South attitudes, and finally, to contemporary writers who point toward a more democratic acceptance of this much maligned group.

The Great Depression was one of the most traumatic eras of recent American history. The author has analyzed, and provided context for, the vast collection of poetry and song lyrics in the Hoover and Roosevelt presidential libraries to assess another aspect of American public opinion. The poets voiced their opinions about New Deal agencies.

The educational opportunities of the new millennium are endless if our efforts are informed. If not, they will be catalogs of failures or half-successes. The essays in this collection, written by some of the leading scholars in Popular Culture Studies, turn the page on the new millennium to see what are the directions of approach and the opportunities to be gained in recognition of the compelling need for studies in everyday cultures. These essays help chart the course for themes and directions of such studies into the new world that is waiting to be born. Their value is indispensable.

The author of this book describes in detail the chronology of the year 1927, when the great New York Yankees became The Wonder Team - probably baseball's best team ever. That club included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Waite Hoyt, Tony Lazzeri, Earle Combs, Herb Pennock, Bob Meusel, and Wilcy Moore. Also part of the narrative are owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, manager Miller Huggins, business manager Ed Barrow, and scout Paul Krichell. No participant of that great team is omitted. The author's chronicle is thoroughly buttressed by interviews, research, and records. In detailing the events leading to the 1927 World Series, Trachtenberg weaves players' profiles and histories, along with those of the Yankee owner, management, coaches, scouts, trainer, and batboy/mascot. The reader becomes acquainted with players' personalities, baseball skills, records, and hijinks on and off the field. Players' backgrounds, how they became involved in the great ball club, how they were viewed by the press, how their careers flourished and waned - all of this is covered in The Wonder Team. Also included are 1927 stats, photos from Yankee archives, and biographical sketches.

This volume contains fourteen essays by authoritative academics studying the field of mystery and detective fiction. The essays all concentrate on the first novels in established series, analyzing ways in which the opening books of the series do or do not create patterns followed in succeeding novels.

This is the first study of Hollywood by an anthropologist. Jorja Prover examines how different groups of individuals, separated from one another superficially by ethnicity, race, and sex, function as writers in Hollywood. She describes the white "majority" Hollywood writers and explores their concerns and creative processes, and then discusses other writers who, until recently, have been virtually invisible in the entertainment industry--women, the physically challenged, gays, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians. In detailing their efforts at gaining professional acceptance, these writers introduce new, previously unmentioned issues involving access, advancement, talent, sexual harassment, and discrimination.

Even before the 1889 baseball season began, battle lines had been drawn. In the National League, the Players Brotherhood, challenged the insulting classification system devised by league owners. While American Association players had no Brotherhood, they proved capable of organizing impromptu responses to abusive treatment by owners.

This work emphasizes the particularly American variant of this marginal youth movement and the damage it has caused to society.

A great American institution; the bane of feminist ideology; a cornucopia of corn--few are neutral about the Miss America Pageant. Live from Atlantic City traces the pageant's history from its birth as pseudo-event in 1920 through its emergence as American popular culture icon.

The doctor as the main character of a novel is largely a phenomenon of the 1900s. Noting the great popularity of the doctor novel and its contribution to literature, the author of this study characterizes and examines a significant subtype the medical research novel, whose protagonist is the doctor or medical student searching for answers to underlying medical questions or for cures or pain relief through research. Through close examination of seven novels and citations from eleven others, the author illustrates how this subtype of literature deals with basic psychological, moral, and metaphysical questions as well as medical and scientific ones."