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Presents the story of one of the engineering marvels of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the Ferris wheel. The Ferris wheel, perhaps more than any other amusement ride, symbolizes all that is magic about amusement parks and county fairs. Towering above the carousel, hot dog stands, and kiddie rides, it lifts young and old alike.

An anthology that argues for the serious study of the literary oeuvre of Anne Rice. The essays assert that Rice expands the conventions of the horror genre's formula to examine important social issues. She searches for philosophical truth, examining themes of good and evil, the influence on people and society of both nature and nurture.

One of the very first books to take Stephen King seriously, "Landscape of Fear" (originally published in 1988) reveals the source of King's horror in the sociopolitical anxieties of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. In this groundbreaking study, Tony Magistrale shows how King's fiction transcends the escapism typical of its genre to tap into our deepest cultural fears: "that the government we have installed through the democratic process is not only corrupt but actively pursuing our destruction, that our technologies have progressed to the point at which the individual has now become expendable, and that our fundamental social institutions-school, marriage, workplace, and the church-have, beneath their veneers of respectability, evolved into perverse manifestations of narcissism, greed, and violence."

Stephen King's popularity lies in his ability to reinterpret the standard Gothic tale in new and exciting ways. He thus creates his own Gothic world and then interprets it for us. This book analyzes King's interpretations and his mastery of popular literature. The essays discuss adolescent revolt, the artist as survivor, and more.

This book seeks to explore how Barbara Pym subverts the discourse of the romance novel through her use of food, clothes, heroine and hero characterizations, and marriage customs.

Essential reading for those interested in the suspense novelist Cornell Woolrich, author of Rear Window. His autobiography includes accounts of his working methods, Victorian family and home, memories of childhood, college experience, sexual initiation, and philosophy of life.

American crime fiction has developed into writing that has a commitment to democracy and the democratic way of life, a compassion and empathy and a style which has created a significant branch of American literature.

From Hank Williams to hip hop, Aunt Jemima to the Energizer Bunny, scrapbooking to NASCAR racing, this volume invites readers to reflect on a sampling of modern myths, icons, archetypes, and rituals. Ray B. Browne has mined both scholarly and mainstream media to bring together essays that critical doors into the study of popular culture.

The greatest portrayer of blue-fire deviltry, Edward Fitzball was a melodramatist on the nineteenth-century British stage. His Theatre of the Macabre was very much a forebearer of the sensationalized media of today. This book discusses Fitzball s life, and his dramatic oeuvre."

This book attempts to analyze a major part of Mansfield's fiction, concentrating on an analysis of the various textures, themes, and issues, plus the point of view virtuosity that she accomplished in her short lifetime (34 years). Many of her most famous works, such as "Prelude" and "Bliss," are explicated, along with many of her less famous and unfinished stories.

The Twilight Zone explores the possibilities inhering in the ordinary. A Twilight Zone episode can move us by being poignant and intimate, rambunctious or thought provoking. It can also be orchestrated as a set of intertwined plot developments or as a serial progression. But regardless of whether it takes place on an asteroid, in a city pool room, or in the backwoods, it will usually convey both a folklorist's eye for detail and the born raconteur's sense of pace. Rod Serling, the show's founder, main scriptwriter, and artistic director, knew how much burden he could place on his rhetorical and dramatic gifts. Deservedly celebrated as a pioneer in TV science fiction, he also writes about history and loyalty, the grip of everyday reality, and the dangers of both forgetting about one's ghosts and giving them the upper hand.

For Americans World War II was a good war, a war that was worth fighting. Even as the conflict was underway, a myriad of both fictional and nonfictional books began to appear examining one or another of the raging battles. These essays examine some of the best literature and popular culture of World War II. Many of the studies focus on women, several are about children, and all concern themselves with the ways that the war changed lives. While many of the contributors concern themselves with the United States, there are essays about Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Japan."

Zalampas applies the psychological model of Alfred Adler to Adolf Hitler through the examination of his views on architecture, art, and music. This study was made possible by the publication of Billy F. Price s volume of over seven hundred of Hitler s watercolors, oils, and sketches."

This book is a literary history of the Noble Savage and a comprehensive metamorphology of the American mind. Wide-ranging and deep-diving, this book suggests many reevaluations of American heroes and attitudes.

This work explores John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, with special emphasis on MacDonald's examination of the conflicts and joys of twentieth-century American culture and society. MacDonald describes himself as a moralist and this, combined with his narrative gifts, infuses his ever-present concerns for the quality and durability of American life. The first and last chapters, respectively, discuss MacDonald's early novels and the four he wrote concurrently with the series. The remaining chapters analyze various themes that figure prominently in the series. MacDonald's thinking reflects many of the concerns of his fellow citizens during his writing career while revealing his own personal reaction to the society around him. Noting his sense of an uncaused evil in the world and his prolific inventiveness, this work examines MacDonald's narrative exploration of America in which he reveals an unwillingness to give up either his frequently pessimistic views of society or the hope that it can somehow continue. His posthumous Reading for Survival sounds the latter note in typical MacDonald fashion: Read and learn or die. McGee, in the hard-boiled detective tradition, exemplifies MacDonald's picture of the struggling, but coping, culture with no guarantees for the future.

There are hundreds of satisfactory and satisfying British mystery writers whose works should be studied both for their own individual accomplishments and for their comments on the society in which they were published, in the last 150 years, but who have not received any critical comment lately.    This volume is designed to correct that fault in a dozen of those unjustifiably neglected British authors: Wilkie Collins, A.E.W. Mason, G.K. Chesterton, H.C. Bailey, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Nicholas Blake, Michael Gilbert, Julian Symons, Dick Francis, Edmund Crispin, H.R.F. Keating, and Simon Brett.

What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? This collection offers responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, the book charts some of the key turning points in the ""culture wars.

Resituating the term in its neglected (sub)cultural context, this work offers a critical assessment of the ""Generation X"" phenomenon and its relation to the fashioning of different identities within and against the mainstream. Topics include punk subculture, the Internet, and alternative music.

Harold Schecter looks at the impossible tales and images of popular art - the space odysseys and extraterrestrial civilizations, the caped crusaders and men of steel, and monsters from the ocean floor. He finds close connections between religious myth and popular entertainment.

The histories of baseball and country music run in parallel, evolving with American society through wartime, the Civil Rights movement and into the age of superstars. Don Cusic offers an analysis of their growth, looking at race, gender, class, ethnicity, business, media and celebrity.

This work is a comprehensive, documented history of the soda fountain, which millions of Americans fondly remember. For 150 years, the soda fountain was a community social centre. In both cities and small towns, soda fountains were part of the social infrastructure that held the neighbourhood together.

Redefines the genre of horror fiction, calling into question the usual conventions, motifs, and elements. Unlike many critics of this genre, the author sees dis/affirmative horror fiction acting neither to soothe fears nor reduce them to the vicarious ""thrills 'n' chills"" mode, but as intensifying the fears inherent in everyday life.

Intertextual encounters occur whenever an author or the author's text recognizes, references, alludes to, or otherwise elicits an audience member's familiarity with other texts. This work ranges from the 1830s to the 1990s and from the canonical American novel to Bugs Bunny and Jerry Seinfield.

This work addresses some of the multi-faceted conceptual and theoretical issues connected with symbolic construction of reality through human memory and its subsequent representation. It presents a synthesis of the multiple meanings of memory and representation within the context of truth.

Native America can look to few more inventive contemporary writers than Gerald Vizenor. This work discusses his childhood in the Minneapolis of the Depression and World War II to his becoming a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Berkeley.

This volume focuses on the artistic and cultural implications of an important contemporary novelist.