Download Free Producing Mass Entertainment Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Producing Mass Entertainment and write the review.

Investigates the historical factors, practices, and strategies involved in the production and proliferation of the Yellow Kid comics.
With Amusement for All contextualizes what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships among social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the ways in which the entertainment world has reflected, changed, or reinforced the values of American society.
Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America's most popular commercial amusement from the mid-1890s to the First World War; at its peak, 5 million Americans attended vaudeville shows every week. Telling the story of this pioneering art form's rise and decline, David Monod looks through the apparent carnival of vaudeville performance and asks: what made the theater so popular and transformative? Although he acknowledges its quirkiness, Monod makes the case that vaudeville became so popular because it offered audiences a guide to a modern urban lifestyle. Vaudeville acts celebrated sharp city styles and denigrated old-fashioned habits, showcased new music and dance moves, and promulgated a deeply influential vernacular modernism. The variety show's off-the-rack trendiness perfectly suited an era when goods and services were becoming more affordable and the mass market promised to democratize style, offering a clear vision of how the quintessential twentieth-century citizen should look, talk, move, feel, and act.
From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.
The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States marked the beginning of the study of our postindustrial information society. Austrian-born economist Fritz Machlup had focused his research on the patent system, but he came to realize that patents were simply one part of a much bigger "knowledge economy." He then expanded the scope of his work to evaluate everything from stationery and typewriters to advertising to presidential addresses--anything that involved the activity of telling anyone anything. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States then revealed the new and startling shape of the U.S. economy. Machlup's cool appraisal of the data showed that the knowledge industry accounted for nearly 29 percent of the U.S. gross national product, and that 43 percent of the civilian labor force consisted of knowledge transmitters or full-time knowledge receivers. Indeed, the proportion of the labor force involved in the knowledge economy increased from 11 to 32 percent between 1900 and 1959--a monumental shift. Beyond documenting this revolution, Machlup founded the wholly new field of information economics. The transformation to a knowledge economy has resonated throughout the rest of the century, especially with the rise of the Internet. As two recent observers noted, "Information goods--from movies and music to software code and stock quotes--have supplanted industrial goods as the key drivers of world markets." Continued study of this change and its effects is testament to Fritz Machlup's pioneering work.
Authorizing Superhero Comics examines the comic book superhero as a lasting phenomenon of US popular serial storytelling. Moving beyond linear- or creator-centered models of genre development, Daniel Stein identifies authorization conflicts that have driven the genre's evolution from the late 1930s to the present. These conflicts include paratextually mediated exchanges between officially authorized comic book producers and, alternatively, authorized fans that trouble the distinction between production and its reception; storyworld-building processes that subsume producers and fans into a collective rooted in a common style; parodies that ensure the genre's longevity by deflating criticism through self-reflexive humor; and collecting and archiving as forms of memory management that align the genre's past with the demands of the present. Taking seriously the serial agencies of the superhero comic book as a material artifact with a particular mediality, the study analyzes letter columns, editorial commentary, fanzines, encyclopedias, and other forms of comic book communication as critical frameworks for understanding the evolution of the genre--assessing rarely covered archival sources alongside some of the most treasured figures from the superhero's multi-decade history, from Batman and Spider-Man to Wonder Woman and Captain America.
Celebrating the 80th birthday of Winfried Fluck, this volume of REAL gathers leading US-American and European literary scholars from English and American Studies to engage some of his classic essays, covering topics that range from the aesthetics of early American literature to the history of our digital present and from the Americanization of literary studies to the search for American democratic culture. Each of the volume's twelve dialogues consists of a republished essay by Fluck and a response by one his interlocutors, written specifically for this occasion. Contributors include field-defining scholars, long-time companions, and colleagues whose intellectual trajectory has been impacted by Fluck's incisive metacriticism and his reception-oriented approach to literary and cultural history. The twelve dialogues reassess debates that have shaped literary studies in the late twentieth century and they inquire into the paradigmatic shifts that are currently reorganizing the field.
Caribbean Diaspora in the USA presents a new cultural theory based on an exploration of Caribbean religious communities in New York City. The Caribbean culture of New York demonstrates a cultural dynamism which embraces Spanish speaking, English speaking and French speaking migrants. All cultures are full of breaks and contradictions as Latin American and Caribbean theorists have demonstrated in their ongoing debate. This book combines unique research by the author in Caribbean New York with the theoretical discourse of Latin American and Caribbean scholars. Focusing on Caribbean religious communities, including Cuban/Puerto Rican Santería (Regla de Ocha), Haitian Vodou, Shango (Orisha Baptist) from Trinidad and Tobago, and Brazilian Pentecostal church, Schmidt's observations lead to the construction of a cultural concept that illustrates a culture in an ongoing state of change, with more than one form of expression depending on situation, time and context. Showing the creativity of religions and the way immigrants adapt to their new surroundings, this book fills a gap between Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history. In this sophisticated and historically grounded analysis, anthropologist Jennifer Robertson draws from over a decade of fieldwork and archival research to explore how the Revue illuminates discourses of sexual politics, nationalism, imperialism, and popular culture in twentieth-century Japan. The Revue was founded in 1913 as a novel counterpart to the all-male Kabuki theater. Tracing the contradictory meanings of Takarazuka productions over time, with special attention to the World War II period, Robertson illuminates the intricate web of relationships among managers, directors, actors, fans, and social critics, whose clashes and compromises textured the theater and the wider society in colorful and complex ways. Using Takarazuka as a key to understanding the "logic" of everyday life in Japan and placing the Revue squarely in its own social, historical, and cultural context, she challenges both the stereotypes of "the Japanese" and the Eurocentric notions of gender performance and sexuality.
Bringing together key writings with original textbook material, the second edition of Media Studies: The Essential Resource explains central perspectives and concepts within Media Studies. Readers are introduced to a range of writing on media topics promoting an understanding of the subject from both contemporary and historical perspectives. The text is split into three parts covering Analysis and Perspectives, Media Audiences and Ecologies and Creativities. The key areas of study are discussed, with accessible readings from essential theoretical texts and fully supported with an author commentary. Theoretical perspectives are used to analyse contemporary media forms and activities direct students to interrogate readings further and apply their learning. Encouraging critical and analytical study, Media Studies: The Essential Resource helps students to understand the main theories and theorists within Media Studies.