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This title, for use in classrooms across the country, aims to unlock the door for serious popular culture analysis.

Like the nation that it symbolizes, the bold arch of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial poses enormous contradictions. It is a simple, classical architectural form constructed with the most sophisticated modern engineering. It is a national historic site created by demolishing nearly forty blocks of historic riverfront buildings. It is the perfect place to examine critical, historic tensions in American culture.

This book is an attempt to make sense out of Ronald Reagan by linking him to various grassroots dimensions of American popular mythology and mind. It attempts to utilize a variety of sources from American and popular culture studies, works on Reagan, and popular materials such as movies to offer an interpretation of reagan as an exemplar of the political relevance and power of popular culture.

Statistics indicate that more than half the population of America is illiterate or subliterate in the conventional sense, but very literate in other media such as television, sports, and leisure time activities. But statistics can lie or tell only half a fact. Since the languages of literacy are constantly expanding and developing, it is time that American educators, and the public in general, reexamine their definitions of literacy and the media in which we need to be literate. Therefore, educators must redefine literacy if they are to be realistic about its sources, uses, and values. The need is vital to a developing world.

The debate over the central issue confronted in "The Closing of the American Mind"--the role of the university and the liberal arts in the United States--has become increasingly urgent and contentious. The goal of this collection of essays is to see what we can learn about the dilemmas confronting American culture through consideration of both "The Closing of the American Mind" and the debate it aroused.

Staying Tuned: Contemporary Soap Opera Criticism examines serials. Broadcast first in 1926 on radio and since 1956 on television Monday through Friday 52 weeks a year, soap operas provide a clear promise to continue for as long as mass medicated entertainment exists. Over the last sixty years, billions have happily suffered along with the gallant men and women of the afternoon.

These essays assess the nature of nuclear war literature from a variety of perspectives. Scholars, activists, novelists, poets, and teachers challenge nuclear ideologies and traditional readings of apocalyptic texts.

Courtesan and criminal, thief and trollop, warrior and wanderer the picara embodies the continuing archetypal pattern of a woman s autonomy. She is the sly sharpster in Defoe s heroines such as Roxana and Moll Flanders. With an ancestress like Becky Sharp, the picara evolves into Scarlett O Hara before finding a comfortable niche as the female hero in fantasy written by women. The Picara traces the development of this character, from an autonomous woman in a harsh patriarchal society to the female hero of the modern fantasy novel."

While blacks have made perhaps their most obvious and substantial contributions to Western popular culture through music and dance, they have developed a rich popular culture in a number of other areas, including the visual arts, mass media, health practices, recreation, and literature.

Don Cusic presents gospel music as part of the history of contemporary Christianity. From the psalms of the early Puritans through the hymns of Isaac Watts and the social activism of the Wesleys, gospel music was established in eighteenth-century America. With the camp meetings songs of the Kentucky Revival and the spirituals and hymns that stemmed from the Civil War and beyond, gospel music grew through the nineteenth century and expanded through new technologies in the twentieth century.

Marginal Conventions contains twelve essays by social scientists centering around the general connections between popular culture and deviant behavior. In addition to speaking to the commonsensical view that exposure to representations of misbehavior makes people misbehave, this collection focuses on media presentations of crime, violence, and villainy; the utility of deviance theme for societal elites; and the "taste publics" centered around disreputable products and rituals."

John Dickson Carr is known as the master of the locked-room mystery the impossible crime. But Carr also wrote short stories, radio plays, essays, introductions, and book reviews. S. T. Joshi has written the first full-length study of Carr s entire work and pays particular attention to this author s three best-known detectives: Henri Bencolin, Dr. Gideon Fell, and Sir Henry Merrivale."

Often, the decade of the 1920s has been stereotyped with such labels as The Roaring Twenties, The Jazz Age, or The Lost Generation. Historical perspective has forced reevaluation of this decade. Articles in this collection are presented in the most definitive anthology dealing with 1920s America."

Dove states that the purpose of this book is "to develop a theoretical base for a critical approach to the interpretation of the formula story." Such an approach should take into account the relationship between author and reader that determines such tacit agreements as the two axioms of formula fiction, the reader-knowledge convention, and the signals that pass between author and reader. Specifically, the chief concern of this book will be the criticism/interpretation of the mystery.

Among the many writers who lent their talents to the creation of hard-boiled detective fiction, few have approached it from a more original perspective than Chester Himes. A former criminal himself, Himes brought to the writing of detective fiction the perspective of the black man. Himes made his debut with the brilliant For Love of Imabelle, for which he was awarded the coveted Grand Prix de la Litterature Policiere."

The history of the study of popular culture in American academia since its (re)introduction in 1967 is filled with misunderstanding and opposition. From the first, proponents of the study of this major portion of American culture made clear that they were interested in making popular culture a supplement to the usual courses in such fields as literature, sociology, history, philosophy, and the other humanities and social sciences; nobody proposed that study of popular culture replace the other disciplines, but many suggested that it was time to reexamine the accepted courses and see if they were still viable. Opposition to the status quo always causes anxiety and opposition, but when the issues are clarified, often opposition and anxiety melt away, as they now are doing.

When The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katharine Green s first novel, was published in 1878, it quickly became a bestseller as well as a seminal work of detective fiction. Critics were to perceive Green s work as the link to Edgar Allan Poe in the American line of classic detective fiction. But the development of serial detectives is perhaps her greatest achievement. (Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police, who makes his first appearance in 1878, precedes Sherlock Holmes by almost a decade.) In examining the life and works of Anna Katharine Green, one discovers a slice of American life: in the social events of New York City, in the plight of young working women, in the moral dilemmas of upright citizens pursuing the American dream."

These essays, written by experts in their fields, demonstrate how necessary it is in the study of the humanities and social sciences to realize the interdependency of the fields and how rich the resulting study can be."

This book provides practical applications for nutrition information. Several different aspects of nutrition are included in this book, such as nutrition labeling and anthropometric measurements.

The humor of Sherlock Holmes, Donald Westlake, Agatha Christie, Michael Innes, and Edmund Crispin are just a few of those discussed. A major point highlighted by this book is simply that wit, slapstick. laughter, and an anything-can-happen motif appear in a significant amount of fiction about crime.

This is a study of the St. Peter's Fiesta celebrated annually by the Italian, or better, Sicilian-American community of Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA. The study deals specifically with the fiesta that took place 25 28 June 1970."

The essays in Gender Studies explore relationships between gender and creativity, identity, and genre within the context of literary analysis. Some of the essays are psychoanalytic in approach in that they seek to discover the sexual dynamic/s involved in the creation of literature as an art form. Still others attempt to isolate and examine the sexual attitudes inherent in the works of particular authors or genres, or to determine how writers explore the sensibilities of each gender.

Robert Herrick (1591 1674) achieved fame only in the nineteenth century. The book features approximately fifty reproductions of illustrations of Hesperides."

In 1984, America celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the first successful roller coaster device erected at Coney Island. This book examines every phase of roller coaster history, from the use of the roller coaster by Albert Einstein to demonstrate his theory of physics, to John Allen's use of psychology in designing one.

This second collection of defective detective stories features some of the best of the period, including Russell Gray s gimpy hero Ben Bryn, Edith and Ejler Jacobson s hemophiliac gum-shoe Nat Perry, John Kobler s glaucomatous troubleshooter Peter Quest, and Leon Byrne s deaf detective Dan Holden."