Download or read book Criminals as Heroes in Popular Culture written by Roxie J. James and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-07 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book delves into humanity’s compulsive need to valorize criminals. The criminal hero is a seductive figure, and audiences get a rather scopophilic pleasure in watching people behave badly. This book offers an analysis of the varied and vexing definitions of hero, criminal, and criminal heroes both historically and culturally. This book also examines the global presence, gendered complications, and gentle juxtapositions in criminal hero figures such as: Robin Hood, Breaking Bad, American Gods, American Vandal, Kabir, Plunkett and Macleane, Martha Stewart, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Eleven, and Let The Bullets Fly.
Download or read book Criminals as Heroes written by Paul Kooistra and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Popular Culture Crime and Social Control written by Mathieu Deflem and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains contributions on the theme of popular culture, crime, and social control. This title includes chapters that tease out various criminologically relevant issues, pertaining to crime/deviance and/or the control thereof, on the basis of an analysis of various aspects and manifestations of popular culture, including music, and movies.
Download or read book Heroes In Hard Times written by Neal King and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-your-face look at the cop action movie genre.
Download or read book Killer Fandom Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer written by Judith May Fathallah and published by mediastudies.press. This book was released on 2023-11-06 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Killer Fandom is the first long-form treatment of serial killer fandom. Fan studies have mostly ignored this most moralized form of fandom, as a stigmatized Bad Other in implicit tension with the field’s successful campaign to recuperate the broader fan category. Yet serial killer fandom, as Judith May Fathallah shows in the book, can be usefully studied with many of the field’s leading analytic frameworks. After tracing the pre-digital history of fans, mediated celebrity, and killers, Fathallah examines contemporary fandom through the lens of textual poaching, affective community, subcultural capital, and play. With close readings of fan posts, comments, and mashups on Tumblr, TikTok, and YouTube, alongside documentaries, podcasts, and a thriving “murderabilia” industry, Killer Fandom argues that this fan culture is, in many ways, hard to distinguish from more “mainstream” fandoms. Fan creations around Aileen Wuornos, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Richard Ramirez, among others, demonstrate a complex and shifting stance toward their objects—marked by parodic humor and irony in many cases. Killer Fandom ultimately questions—given our crime-and violence-saturated media culture—whether it makes sense to set Dahmer and Wuornos “fans” apart from the rest of us.
Download or read book Violence in American Popular Culture written by David Schmid and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely collection provides a historical overview of violence in American popular culture from the Puritan era to the present and across a range of media. Few topics are discussed more broadly today than violence in American popular culture. Unfortunately, such discussion is often unsupported by fact and lacking in historical context. This two-volume work aims to remedy that through a series of concise, detailed essays that explore why violence has always been a fundamental part of American popular culture, the ways in which it has appeared, and how the nature and expression of interest in it have changed over time. Each volume of the collection is organized chronologically. The first focuses on violent events and phenomena in American history that have been treated across a range of popular cultural media. Topics include Native American genocide, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and gender violence. The second volume explores the treatment of violence in popular culture as it relates to specific genres—for example, Puritan "execution sermons," dime novels, television, film, and video games. An afterword looks at the forces that influence how violence is presented, discusses what violence in pop culture tells us about American culture as a whole, and speculates about the future.
Download or read book Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream written by Paul A. Cantor and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2019-05-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The many con men, gangsters, and drug lords portrayed in popular culture are examples of the dark side of the American dream. Viewers are fascinated by these twisted versions of heroic American archetypes, like the self-made man and the entrepreneur. Applying the critical skills he developed as a Shakespeare scholar, Paul A. Cantor finds new depth in familiar landmarks of popular culture. He invokes Shakespearean models to show that the concept of the tragic hero can help us understand why we are both repelled by and drawn to figures such as Vito and Michael Corleone or Walter White. Beginning with Huckleberry Finn and ending with The Walking Dead, Cantor also uncovers the link between the American dream and frontier life. In imaginative variants of a Wild West setting, popular culture has served up disturbing—and yet strangely compelling—images of what happens when people move beyond the borders of law and order. Cantor demonstrates that, at its best, popular culture raises thoughtful questions about the validity and viability of the American dream, thus deepening our understanding of America itself.
Download or read book Punishment in Popular Culture written by Austin Sarat and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, and its particular way of responding to evil. Punishment in Popular Culture examines the cultural presuppositions that undergird America’s distinctive approach to punishment and analyzes punishment as a set of images, a spectacle of condemnation. It recognizes that the semiotics of punishment is all around us, not just in the architecture of the prison, or the speech made by a judge as she sends someone to the penal colony, but in both “high” and “popular” culture iconography, in novels, television, and film. This book brings together distinguished scholars of punishment and experts in media studies in an unusual juxtaposition of disciplines and perspectives. Americans continue to lock up more people for longer periods of time than most other nations, to use the death penalty, and to racialize punishment in remarkable ways. How are these facts of American penal life reflected in the portraits of punishment that Americans regularly encounter on television and in film? What are the conventions of genre which help to familiarize those portraits and connect them to broader political and cultural themes? Do television and film help to undermine punishment's moral claims? And how are developments in the boarder political economy reflected in the ways punishment appears in mass culture? Finally, how are images of punishment received by their audiences? It is to these questions that Punishment in Popular Culture is addressed.
Download or read book Work and Labor in American Popular Culture written by Jason Russell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-05 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crisis and decline in the working class were frequent themes in American popular culture during the 1970s. In contrast, more positive narratives about America’s managerial and professional class appeared during the 1980s. Focusing on these two key decades, this book explores how portrayals of social class and associated work and labor issues including gender and race appeared in specific films, television shows, and music. Comparing and contrasting how forms of popular media portrayed both unionized and non-unionized workers, the book discusses how workers’ perceptions of themselves were in turn shaped by messages conveyed through media. The book opens with an introduction which outlines the historical context of the immediate post-war period and the heightened social, political, and economic tension of the Cold War era. Three substantial chapters then explore film, television, and music in turn, looking at key works including Star Wars, Coming Home, 9 to 5, Good Times, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the music of Bruce Springsteen and rap artists. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, the book is principally situated within wider labor and working-class history research, and the relatively new history of capitalism historical sub-field. This book is vital reading for anyone interested in issues around labor and work in the media, labor history, and popular culture history during two key decades in modern American history.
Download or read book Policing Popular Culture and Political Economy written by Robert Reiner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Reiner has been one of the pioneers in the development of research on policing since the 1970s as well as a prolific writer on mass media and popular culture representations of crime and criminal justice. His work includes the renowned books The Politics of the Police and Law and Order: An Honest Citizen's Guide to Crime and Control, an analysis of the neo-liberal transformation of crime and criminal justice in recent decades. This volume brings together many of Reiner's most important essays on the police written over the last four decades as well as selected essays on mass media and on the neo-liberal transformation of crime and criminal justice. All the work included in this important volume is underpinned by a framework of analysis in terms of political economy and a commitment to the ethics and politics of social democracy
Download or read book Popular Culture in Nordic Noir A Study of Selected Works of Maj Sjowall Per Wahloo Henning Mankell and Steig Larsson written by Dr. Raunak Singh Rathee and published by Shineeks Publishers. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses that the genre of crime fiction is suitable for the presentation of the crises, conflicts, and indeterminacies present in the plot of the selected works. This book exposes the darker side of Scandinavian countries, particularly Sweden, as the writers and works selected for the book are based on Swedish society. Though as a matter of fact, Scandinavian countries are considered to be the most egalitarian and progressive welfare societies all over the world. The present book explores how popular culture may prove to be a significant thematic approach to studying Scandinavian crime fiction (also called Nordic Noir). The Swedish authors use popular culture as a tool through which they try to convey their concerns regarding various serious issues like anti-immigration, racism, xenophobia, violence against women, the violence of human rights, crimes like the drug trade, human trafficking, etc. By assigning the central place to Sjowall and Wahloo’s Roseanna (1965), The Laughing Policeman (1968), The Terrorists (1975), Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers (1991), Sidetracked (1995), The Fifth Women (1996), Steig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), The Girl who Played with Fire (2006), and The Girl who kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007), this book enunciates the notion of popular culture and crime fiction genre in the propagation of the socio-critical reflections of life in the welfare state. Hence, this work also analyses the plot, characters, and themes in the aforementioned works to locate the elements of popular fiction in Scandinavian crime novels by representing this genre’s ubiquitousness in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Searching for a Demon written by Steven M. Chermak and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2002 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative volume thoroughly examines the ways in which the media demonized militia groups following the devastating bombing of the Alfred F. Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Using quantitative and qualitative research methods, Steven M. Chermak offers a fresh perspective on how news coverage and popular entertainment transformed a largely overlooked movement into a symbol for this new threat of domestic terrorism and ignited a national panic over the "militia menace." Searching for a Demon describes the representation of the militia movement in the news media, editorial cartoons, films, and television. Chermak delves into such topics as the type and amount of coverage after the blast, how social problems are constructed in the news, the motivations and biases of authoritative or "celebrity" figures used as news sources, and why images of militias were framed in specific ways. Chermak balances his account with an in-depth look at the philosophies, activities, and strategies of militia groups. Drawing on extensive interviews he conducted at gun shows and preparedness exhibitions, the author compares and contrasts media depictions of militia life and ideology with the firsthand accounts of members and leaders themselves, and he assesses how media coverage affected changes in the movement. In conclusion, Chermak discusses the parallels between media treatment of militias in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the coverage of the al-Qaeda terrorist network after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Solidly grounded in social constructionist theory, Searching for a Demon fills a significant gap in the literature on terrorism as well as on the roles of the news media and popular culture in reshaping the public consciousness after dramatic crimes.
Download or read book Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection 2 volumes written by Mitzi M. Brunsdale and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-26 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to 24 iconic figures, real and fictional, that have shaped the detective/mystery genre of popular literature. Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection: From Sleuths to Superheroes is an insightful look at one of our most popular and diverse fictional genres, providing a guided tour of mystery and crime writing by focusing on two dozen of the field's most enduring creations and creators. Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection spans the history of the detective story with series of critical entries on the field's most evocative names, from the originator of the form, Edgar Allan Poe, to its first popular running character, Sherlock Holmes; from the Golden Age of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Charlie Chan—in fiction and films—to small screen heroes, such as Columbo and Jessica Fletcher. Also included are other accomplished practitioners of the craft of mystery/crime storytelling, including Agatha Christie, Tony Hillerman, and Alfred Hitchcock.
Download or read book Post Yugoslavia written by D. Abazovic and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary examination of present-day identities and histories of the former Yugoslavia explores relationships with the social, political, cultural and historical 'facts and fictions' that have marked the different parts of the region. It shows that while nationalism remains important other social dynamics also exert a strong influence.
Download or read book Celebrity Culture and Crime written by R. Penfold-Mounce and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-01-20 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 21st century celebrities and celebrity culture thrives. This book explores the much noted but little analyzed relationship between celebrity and crime. Criminals who become celebrities and celebrities who become criminals are examined, drawing on Foucault's theory of governance.
Download or read book Criminals as Heroes written by Paul Kooistra and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History written by Graham Seal and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an overview and analysis of the global tradition of the outlaw hero. The mythology and history of the outlaw hero is traced from the Roman Empire to the present, showing how both real and mythic figures have influenced social, political, economic and cultural outcomes in many times and places. The book also looks at the contemporary continuations of the outlaw hero mythology, not only in popular culture and everyday life, but also in the current outbreak of global terrorism. The book also presents a more general argument related to the importance of understanding folk and popular mythologies in historical contexts. Outlaw heroes have a strong purchase in high and popular culture, appearing in film, books, plays, music, drama, art, even ballet. To simply ignore and discard such powerful expressions without understanding their origins, persistence and especially their ongoing cultural consequences, is to refuse the opportunity to comprehend some profoundly important aspects of human behaviour. These issues are pursued through discussion of the processes through which real and mythical outlaw heroes are romanticised, sentimentalised, sanitised, commodified and mythologised. The result is a new position in the continuing controversy over the existence the 'social bandit' that highlights the central role of mythology in the creation and perpetuation of outlaw heroes.
