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Science fiction is filled with spacecraft. On Earth, actual rockets explode over Texas while others make their way to Mars. But what are spacecraft, and just what can they teach us about imagination, ecology, democracy, and the nature of objects? Why do certain spacecraft stand out in popular culture? If ever there were a spacecraft that could be detached from its context, sold as toys, turned into Disney rides, parodied, and flit around in everyone’s head—the Millennium Falcon would be it. Spr...

This book defines the key ideas, scholarly debates, and research activities that have contributed to the formation of the international and interdisciplinary field of Metal Studies. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including popular music, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, this volume offers new and innovative research on metal musicology, global/local scenes studies, fandom, gender and metal identity, metal media, and commerce. Offering a wid...

In Fighting the Flames, Sally contextualizes, historicizes, and theorizes the spectacular performance of fire at turn-of-the-twentieth century Coney Island. The performance of fire included staged exhibits, such as Fire and Flames and Fighting the Flames, and the real fires that plagued its history. While Coney Island placed fire center stage in its fire-based disaster spectacles, fire has continuously burned its own bridge, destroying the producer who wants to make fire the star of his show. Th...

Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation is a vibrant, in-depth, and visually appealing history of punk, which reveals punk concert flyers as urban folk art. David Ensminger exposes the movement's deeply participatory street art, including flyers, stencils, and graffiti. This discovery leads him to an examination of the often-overlooked presence of African Americans, Latinos, women, and gays and lesbians who have widely impacted the worldviews and music...

This wide-ranging book looks at the reality of how pirates lived and operated, from the ancient world right up to the pirates of today's cargo ships or luxury yachts in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The History of Pirates also examines the actions and pirate ethics of less famous pirates and their eras, such as the Japanese pirates of the 13th-16th centuries and Zheng Yi and his wife's pirate alliance in 19th century China. With features on particular pirates such as Blackbeard and...

Tokyo Clash is an extraordinary encounter with Japanese design culture. Author and photographer Ralf Bahren presents Japan's megacity in a visually stunning collection of images, vividly colourful and rich in contrast. He transports readers on an exciting trip through Japanese everyday life - a world that doesn't want to conform to the cliche of Asian reticence. Eye-catching signs, glittering games of chance, Manga characters and countless other items in this collection of Japanese products comp...

In Dark Laughter, Juan F. Egea provides a remarkable in-depth analysis of the dark comedy film genre in Spain, as well as a provocative critical engagement with the idea of national cinema, the visual dimension of cultural specificity, and the ethics of dark humour. Egea begins his analysis with General Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s-a regime that opened the country to new economic forces while maintaining its repressive nature-exploring key works by Luis Garcia Berlanga, Marco Ferreri, Fer...

The introduction sets Isaiah Shembe and the Nazareth Baptist Church in the context of contemporary South African religion, social history and politics and offers a new reading of the importance of place, memory and literacy in the early history of the church. The three texts in Zulu and English, from the 1920s and 1930s, open a window onto the intellectual and religious life, and the social organisation of this important African church. Marriage, adultery, healing, the priesthood, visions, the r...

This book's purpose is to demonstrate, via the examination of popular youth literature (primarily pulp magazines and comic books) from the 1920s through to the 1950s, that the stories therein drew their definitions of heroism and villainy from an overarching, nativist fear of outsiders that had existed before the Great War, but intensified afterwards. These depictions were transferred to America's ""new"" enemies both following the United States' entry into the Second World War as well as during...

Finley Peter Dunne, American journalist and humorist, is justly famous for his creation of Mr. Dooley, the Chicago Irish barkeep whose weekly commentary on national politics, war, and human nature kept Americans chuckling over their newspapers for nearly two decades at the beginning of this century. Largely forgotten in the files of Chicago newspapers, however, are over 300 Mr. Dooley columns written in the 1890s before national syndication made his name a household word. Charles Fanning offers...

Interest in preternatural and supernatural themes has revitalized the Gothic tale, renewed explorations of psychic powers and given rise to a host of social and religious movements based upon claims of the fantastical. And yet, in spite of this widespread enthusiasm, the academic world has been slow to study this development. This volume rectifies this gap in current scholarship by serving as an interdisciplinary overview of the relationship of the paranormal to the artefacts of mass media (e.g....