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This study portrays individuals, organizations, and events that contributed to the development of the world movement for women's rights between 1848 and 1948.

Detective, monk, father, herbalist, former Crusader and sailor, Celt, friend - author Ellis Peters bestows these attributes on her twelfth-century Benedictine monk-detective, Brother Cadfael. As a detective, Cadfael uses his analytic mind to solve crimes and administer justice. As a man of God, he dispenses mercy along with his famous cordials.

In a world that is witnessing the explosive forces of individualism, tribalism, cultism, religion, nationalism, and regionalism, can the "global village" concept as envisioned by Marshall McLuhan have any meaning or hope for fruition? Do the media merely electronically override the stronger forces of basic human expression without in any way changing them?

This chronologically selected anthology of fiction by eight Ohio women makes accessible a literary tradition that begins with lost aspects of frontier life in the 1830s depicted by contemporaries Julia L. Dumont and Pamilla W. Ball. It ends with Jessie Brown Pounds s retrospective recreation of the Western Reserve s frontier culture at the century s close. "

NASCAR Winston Cup stock car racing is America's fastest growing and most popular spectator sport. This book is a cultural and social reading of Winston Cup racing, the people who made the sport what it is today, and the corporations who sponsor the participants during their thirty-two race, ten-month quest for the national championship.

"The Reader and the Detective Story "is unique it treats the detective story as a special case of reading, governed by special rules and shaped by a highly specialized formula. The method of interpretation is the application of the principles of response theory (especially those developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans Robert Jauss) to the reading of a tale of detection. "

"Elusion Aforethought" provides significant new material on the work of crime and detection fiction writer Anthony Berkeley Cox, a popular and prolific English journalist, satirist, and novelist in the period between World Wars I and II. Cox has been called one of the most important and influential of Golden Age detective fiction writers by such authorities as Haycraft, Symons, and Keating, yet he occupies a surprisingly ambivalent position in the history of the crime genre.

In journeys of self-discovery, quests to define our national identity, opportunities to escape from the daily routine, and expressions of social protest - the American road narrative has been a significant and popular literary genre for four decades. Romance of the Road captures America's love affair with roads, cars, travel, speed, and the lure of open spaces. With roots reaching back to quest romance and pilgrimage, the literature of the American highway explores our diverse and often conflicted cultural values. This comprehensive study of an important American art form examines how road narratives create dialogues between travelers, authors, and readers about who we are, what we value, and where we hope to be going.

This volume explores the range of relationships among women writers, women detectives and women-centered mystery fiction, and women readers.

At the memorial held after Martin Ritt's death in 1990, he was hailed as this country's greatest maker of social films. From No Down Payment early in his career to Stanley & Iris, his last production, he delineated the nuances of American society. In between were other social statements such as Hud, Sounder, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Norma Rae, and The Great White Hope. He was a leftist who embraced various radical movements of the 1930s and, largely because of this involvement, was blacklisted from television in the early 1950s. His film The Front, about the blacklisting, was his most autobiographical. He was a Jew from New York; yet he went to a small college in North Carolina, Elon, where he played football for "The Fighting Christians". His school days in the South gave him a lifelong love for the region. Thus, in his movies, he was just as much at home with southern as with northern topics. He did not deal totally in his southern experience with racism and poverty. He directed The Long Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury, both of which described conflicts between and among white social groups. He once remarked, "I have spent most of my film life in the South". Some referred to his films as "think movies", and perhaps this is why he never won an Oscar for best directing. But he gave moviegoers all over the world an opportunity to see what America was really like - from the viewpoint both of the wealthy and of the poor. It may be, unfortunately, that we will never see his likes again.

This collection includes essays by scholars from around the world and five of Ray Browne's essays which he considers signal. The purpose of this book is to chart Popular Culture Studies into the next century.

This collection of essays on current and past images of the child offers a wide range of perspectives on an equally wide range of concerns.

Popular entertainments are windows into the attitudes and values of the people who participate in them. They both reflect and affect society as they celebrate an aspect of life. The fifteen essays in this collection demonstrate various aspects of celebrations of cultures and the importance they have in those cultures. Topics include: feminine processions and masculine parades; political activism and quietism in Shi'a rituals; civic socializing in Puritan New England; the circus and American culture; the Wild West shows; beauty pageants; theme parks; Bourbon Street, New Orleans; and Stonehenge.

"Stephen King's America" aims to heighten awareness of the numerous American issues that resonate throughout King's fiction, issues that bear universal application to the evolution of the human condition.

"You Know My Method" surveys the century following Edgar Allan Poe's invention of the fictional detective in 1841. The same century saw the development of the idea of the scientist as a person who defined himself by his use of a disciplined method of inquiry. By 1940, the detective had established himself as the most popular figure in literature, and science had become the custodian of truth in the modern world. These two developments were not unrelated. The four principal writers covered are Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, R. Austin Freeman, and Arthur B. Reeve. Another dozen more writers are treated somewhat more briefly: Gaboriau, Pinkerton, Green, Morrison, Futrelle, and Leroux, among others.

In Keating s novels, set in India, the bumbling, but always human, Inspector Ghote manages to solve crimes with a post-colonial mix of inherited Scotland Yard/Holmesian deductive methods and his understanding of his native country s culture. This book is based on the premise that successful sleuths have much in common with cultural anthropologists indeed the latter have often been termed detectives of cultures. Keating s Ghote novels are in the tradition of Tony Hillerman s Navajo Indian mysteries, and James McClure s South African novels, which serve up the human, experiential aspects of the cultural and ethnic conflicts that newspapers miss."

When the wounded bear he faced on a mountain ledge that day turned aside, James Curwood felt that he had been spared. From this encounter he became an avid conservationist. He wrote relentlessly--magazine stories and books and then for the new medium of motion pictures. Like many authors of his time, he was actively involved in movie-making until the plight of the forests and wildlife in his home state of Michigan turned his energies toward conservation. A man ahead of his time, and quickly forgotten after his death in 1927, his gift of himself to his readers and to nature has finally come to be appreciated again two generations later.

Eric Ambler's novelistic career falls into two halves. In the first half belong the works he published between 1935-1940. These include the highly acclaimed "Epitaph for a Spy" (1938) and "The Mask of Dimitrios" (1939), both of which were made into successful films in 1944. The intrigue books of this period unfold in interwar Europe, a bitten-up, anxious place reeling between the extremes of fascism and Soviet communism.

Gender is the mine field we pass through every day. In the United States of materialism, gender is all too often determined by which anatomical sex you are. From birth we are bombarded with gender propaganda that supports a repressive dual gender system that pits the sexes and the genders against each other. Transgenderists as gender nonconformists challenge us to rethink traditional discourses on sex and gender. Transgender Nation dares to look at the male-to-woman transgenderist and transsexual from a sociocultural and socio-political perspective and maintains that it is not the individual transgenderist that is sick and in need of treatment but rather the culture that must be treated. Transgender Nation explores historical sexological categories and decodes contemporary medical transsexual ideology, charging that contemporary "treatments" like sex reassignment surgery all too often encourage assimilation and negate differences. Proposals for endocrinological euthanasia are examined for what they reveal about persona and cultural attitudes about gender. In addition popular cultural representations of transgenderists as homocidal maniacs dressed to kill are contrasted with the grim reality that in a transgenderphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic culture they are more likely to be killed because they dress.

The humanities are the strongest dynamic that runs from the past into the future. Throughout history, except for the past one hundred fifty years, the strongest element in the humanities has been the culture of the folk. Now it is the everyday culture of a democratic society popular culture, a key to people s understanding themselves and their society. These sixteen essays by leading popular culture scholars demonstrate how elements in our everyday life flourished in the past, came to flower today, and will continue to shape us in the future."

Jack Seabrook discusses The Fabulous Clipjoint in depth, as well as Martians, Go Home, The Screaming Mimi, and all of the other classic Fredric Brown novels. He provides a careful analysis of the author's short stories and poems, tracking his work from the early days, through the years of the pulp magazines and SF digests, up to and including the final years with respectable magazines. Along with the discussion of the work are details of the author's unusual life, from his early years in Cincinnati through the Depression in Milwaukee, to a bohemian life in the Southwest.

In this volume of the Beyond the Stars series, the subject of the various individual essays are discrete conventions of movie locales, but the subject of the volume as a whole as with the other books in the series is the viability of film convention studies as a tool for the study of film and American culture."

American popular entertainers in the nineteenth century faced physical hardships, prejudices, and cultural barriers. This book examines the fascinating world of these itinerant actors and their experiences with early showboats, frontier theater, minstrelsy, panorama exhibitions, and the circus. Admirable and not-so-admirable characters, who possessed equal amounts of pluck, courage, and naivete, are contrasted popular cultural tastes"

This collection of essays examines modern country music in America, from its roots to today s music. Contributors look at aspects of the music as diverse as the creation of country culture in the honky tonk; the development of the Nashville music industry; and why country music singers are similar to the English romantic poets. Historians, sociologists, musicologists, folklorists, anthropologists, ethnographers, communication specialists, and journalists are all represented."