Re–reading Popular Culture

Re–reading Popular Culture is a key guide to understanding the meanings and value of popular culture today. It explores the theme of cultural citizenship by combining textual analysis and media reception theory to analyze popular culture. It includes such contemporary issues as the rewriting of masculinity after the success of feminism, and the layers of meaning in semi–public and private talk of multiculturalism and ethnicity.

Joke Hermes tackles a variety of media forms and texts, including sports, detective fiction and police series, and children s television and games. This is a fascinating and illuminating study of popular culture and its audience.

Preface and Acknowledgments.

Introduction Popular culture/cultural citizenship.

1 Ethnicity, football and the nation.

2 Negotiating global popular culture.

3 Conservative feminism and the detective novel.

4 Masculinity and the merits of textual analysis as part of an audience study.

5 Critical viewership.

6 Children and media.

7 Popular culture: a modern and a postmodern genealogy.

Concluding remarks.

References.

Index

Joke Hermes is Lecturer in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Reading Women s Magazines (1995) and co–editor of Public Places, Popular Issues (1998).

A bold book, written with passion and verve, that challenges us to take a serious look at the role of popular culture in creating citizenship and democracy. It is that rare thing: a brilliant book for studying methods but also a political call for engagement. Christine Geraghty, University of Glasgow

"Hitting all the highlights of popular culture analysis, Joke Hermes reasserts the thesis that popular culture is a domain in which we practice the reinvention of who we are, while acknowledging the pitfalls of such a belief." Andrea Press, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign