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This volume considers the changing patterns of American thought and culture in its transition into the early twenty-first century. One of the questions this book tackles is whether the twenty-first century will prove to be ‘the next American century’, or one in which challenges to the structure of nation-states will radically transform the status, prestige and global role of the United States. The study is stimulated by two perceived turning points in American life: the political swing back towards the right represented by the election of George W. Bush in November 2000 and the attacks of 11 September 2001. The 18 chapters address domestic American issues, but also the place of the United States within a broader global narrative of commerce, cultural exchange, international diplomacy, ideological conflict, terrorism and war. The contributors to this volume take both long and short historical views of shifting intellectual trends and cultural patterns: comparing contemporary issues with the climate of the 1990s, but also looking back to earlier twentieth-century moments and concerns. In addition to assessing specific challenges arising in recent years, contributors address emerging issues and points of intensification that are likely to take effect in future years. The book has a thematic structure and is divided into three sections, dealing in turn with Politics, Society and Culture, and covering a wide span of topics that address issues of nationhood, globalization, ideology and cultural representation.

How do we understand Christmas? What does it mean? This book is a lively introduction to the study of popular culture through one central case study. It explores the cultural, social, and historical contexts of Christmas in the UK, USA, and Australia, covering such topics as fiction, film, television, art, newspapers and magazines, war, popular music, and carols. Chapters explore the ways in which the production of meaning is mediated by the social and cultural activities surrounding Christmas (watching Christmas films, television, listening or engaging with popular music and carols), its relationship to a set of basic values (the idealised construct of the family), social relationships (community), and the ways in which ideological discourses are used and mobilised, not least in times of conflict, terrorism, and war. Packed with examples ranging from Charles Dickens' seminal text, A Christmas Carol, Coca-colonisation and Santa Claus, Victorian cartoons and Christmas cards, to Dr Who, The Office, ‘A Fairy Tale of New York’, ‘Happy Christmas (War is Over)’, and such dystopian films as Jingle All the Way and All I Want For Christmas, the case studies offer an incisive account of the ways in which Christmas relates to social change, and how such recent events as 9/11 and the continuing conflict in Iraq focus attention on traditional themes of community and family.

This book is about the artist David Wilkie (1785–1841), the first British painter to become an international celebrity. Based on original research, it explores the ways in which Wilkie's images, so beloved by his contemporaries, engaged with a range of cultural predicaments close to their hearts. In a series of thematic chapters, whose concerns range far beyond the details of Wilkie's own career, the book shows how, through Wilkie's thrillingly original work, British society was able to reimagine its own everyday life, its history, and its multinational (Anglo-Scottish) nature. Other themes covered include Wilkie's roles in defining the border between painting and anatomy in the representation of the human body, and in transforming the pleasures of connoisseurship from an elite to a popular audience.

This book presents an account of how music interacts with young people's everyday lives. Drawing on interviews with and observations of youth groups together with archival research, it explores young people's enactment of music tastes and performances, and how these are articulated through narratives and literacies. A review of the field reveals an unhealthy emphasis on committed, fanatical, spectacular youth music cultures such as rock or punk. On the contrary, this book argues that ideas about youth subcultures and club cultures no longer apply to today's young generation. Rather, archival findings show that the music and dance cultures of youth in 1930s and 1940s Britain share more in common with youth today than the countercultures and subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s. By focusing on the relationship between music and social interactions, the book addresses questions that are scarcely considered by studies stuck in the youth cultural worlds of subcultures, club cultures and post-subcultures: What are the main influences on young people's music tastes? How do young people use music to express identities and emotions? To what extent can today's youth and their music seem radical and progressive? And how is the ‘special relationship’ between music and youth culture played out in everyday leisure, education and work places?

This book on Ɂimālah (inclination) poses challenges to readers, both native and non-native speakers of Arabic. The challenge for the native, in part, is because this work was the first systematic formalization of the grammar of the language. In the process of creating it, a whole new set of terms and a new paradigm of Arabic linguistics was introduced that was different from the traditional method, and more authentically descriptive. The book poses an even greater challenge to non-native Arabic readers schooled in different traditions, who will encounter not only a new language but a new and different paradigm, with its attendant conceptual framework. It considers the Arabic paradigm of doing linguistics not as a replica of the Western or of any other paradigm, but as being with its own imagery and its own theoretical scaffolding. The book aims to overcome the obstacles and challenges posed by Sībawayh's treatise. Transcriptions of Arabic words included within the English translation are in italics, and their corresponding glosses are enclosed in single quotes.

During the late 1970s and 1980s speaking out about the traumatic reality of incest and rape was a rare and politically groundbreaking act. Today it is a ubiquitous feature of popular culture and its political value uncertain. This book explores the complexity and consequences of this shift in giving first-hand testimony by focusing on debates over recovered memory therapy and false memory syndrome, the spectacle of talkshow disclosures, discourses of innocence and complicity, as well as the aesthetics and effect of shock. In counterpoint to the frequently cynical readings of personal narrative politics, it advances an alternative reading built around the concept of unrepresentability. Key to this intervention is the stress placed by the text on the limits of representing sexually traumatic experiences and how this requires both theoretical and methodological innovation. Based on close readings of survivor narratives and artworks, the book demonstrates the significance of unrepresentability for a feminist understanding of sexual violence and victimisation.

Is it possible that various disciplines, theorists and cultural commentators have been hurtling down a blind alley in the last thirty years, searching for the holy grail of the postmodern? What if, after all, we have never have been postmodern? Or what if we are, instead, now living ‘after postmodernity’? As global culture rushes off the cliff of catastrophe with its neo-liberal, neo-conservative ideologies mangled in the process, this book provides theory at the speed of light designed to capture the fast flickering images of the real, gone before you can blink in today's accelerated culture. It sets out a variety of reasons why we should move away from seeing the recent era as ‘postmodern’ and our culture as ‘postmodernist’ through a series of analyses of contemporary culture; highlights key theorists, such as Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard, who, despite the pitfalls of their work, chart a new route map out of the trajectories of the catastrophic; envisages a new object of knowledge for the contemporary world — mobile accelerated nonpostmodern culture (MANC); and provides some of the building blocks and conceptual resources for a ‘claustropolitan sociology’ of the global future in order to better understand the catastrophic present, where claustropolis is rapidly replacing cosmopolis.