Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture

Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture PDF Author: Rupa Huq
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780932243
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book explores how notions of suburbia have developed in our collective imagination, examining novels, cinema, popular music and television in the US and UK.

Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture

Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture PDF Author: Rupa Huq
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780932243
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book explores how notions of suburbia have developed in our collective imagination, examining novels, cinema, popular music and television in the US and UK.

Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture

Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture PDF Author: Rupa Huq
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780932588
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. We all know what suburbia is, indeed the majority of us live in it. Yet, despite this ubituity, with no formal definition of the contept, the suburbs have developed in our collective imagination through representations in popular culture, from Terry and June to Desparate Housewives. Rupa Huq examines how suburbia has been depicted in novels, cinema, popular music and on television, charting changing trends both in the suburbs and popular media consumption and production. She looks at the differences in defining suburbia in the US and UK and how characteristics associated with it have shifted in meaning and form.

The Sprawl

The Sprawl PDF Author: Jason Diamond
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895901
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
For decades the suburbs have been where art happens despite: despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. Time and again, the story is one of gems formed under pressure and that resentment of the suburbs is the key ingredient for creative transcendence. But what if, contrary to that, the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties and these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look.

The Promise of the Suburbs

The Promise of the Suburbs PDF Author: Sarah Bilston
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300186363
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
A study of the fast-growing Victorian suburbs as places of connection, creativity, and professional advance, especially for women From the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, the suburbs were maligned by the aristocratic elite as dull zones of low cultural ambition and vulgarity, as well as generally female spaces isolated from the consequential male world of commerce. Sarah Bilston argues that these attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural authority of the emerging middle class and to reinforce patriarchy by trivializing women’s work. Resisting these stereotypes, Bilston reveals how suburban life offered ambitious women, especially women writers, access to supportive communities and opportunities for literary and artistic experimentation as well as professional advancement. From more familiar figures such as the sensation author Mary Elizabeth Braddon to interior design journalist Jane Ellen Panton and garden writer Jane Loudon, this work presents a more complicated portrait of how women and English society at large navigated a fast-growing, rapidly changing landscape.

Neighborhood of Fear

Neighborhood of Fear PDF Author: Kyle Riismandel
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421439557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
How—haunted by the idea that their suburban homes were under siege—the second generation of suburban residents expanded spatial control and cultural authority through a strategy of productive victimization. The explosive growth of American suburbs following World War II promised not only a new place to live but a new way of life, one away from the crime and crowds of the city. Yet, by the 1970s, the expected security of suburban life gave way to a sense of endangerment. Perceived, and sometimes material, threats from burglars, kidnappers, mallrats, toxic waste, and even the occult challenged assumptions about safe streets, pristine parks, and the sanctity of the home itself. In Neighborhood of Fear, Kyle Riismandel examines how suburbanites responded to this crisis by attempting to take control of the landscape and reaffirm their cultural authority. An increasing sense of criminal and environmental threats, Riismandel explains, coincided with the rise of cable television, VCRs, Dungeons & Dragons, and video games, rendering the suburban household susceptible to moral corruption and physical danger. Terrified in almost equal measure by heavy metal music, the Love Canal disaster, and the supposed kidnapping epidemic implied by the abduction of Adam Walsh, residents installed alarm systems, patrolled neighborhoods, built gated communities, cried "Not in my backyard!," and set strict boundaries on behavior within their homes. Riismandel explains how this movement toward self-protection reaffirmed the primacy of suburban family values and expanded their parochial power while further marginalizing cities and communities of color, a process that facilitated and was facilitated by the politics of the Reagan revolution and New Right. A novel look at how Americans imagined, traversed, and regulated suburban space in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Neighborhood of Fear shows how the preferences of the suburban middle class became central to the cultural values of the nation and fueled the continued growth of suburban political power.

The End of the Suburbs

The End of the Suburbs PDF Author: Leigh Gallagher
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1591846978
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Originally published in hardcover in 2013.

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight PDF Author: Eric Avila
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520248112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
"In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila offers a unique argument about the restructuring of urban space in the two decades following World War II and the role played by new suburban spaces in dramatically transforming the political culture of the United States. Avila's work helps us see how and why the postwar suburb produced the political culture of 'balanced budget conservatism' that is now the dominant force in politics, how the eclipse of the New Deal since the 1970s represents not only a change of views but also an alteration of spaces."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Ballads of Suburbia

Ballads of Suburbia PDF Author: Stephanie Kuehnert
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439126852
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
A stunning tale of suburbia's darker underbelly by the critically acclaimed author of I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, Stephanie Keuhnert. Ballads are the kind of songs that Kara McNaughton likes best. Not the clichéd ones where a diva hits her dramatic high note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies, but the true ballads: the punk rocker or the country crooner reminding their listeners of the numerous ways to screw things up. In high school, Kara helped maintain the "Stories of Suburbia" notebook, which contained newspaper articles about bizarre, tragic events from suburbs all over America, and personal vignettes that Kara dubbed "ballads" written by her friends in Oak Park, just outside of Chicago. But Kara never wrote her own ballad. Before she could figure out what her song was about, she left town suddenly at the end of her junior year. Now, four years later, Kara returns to her hometown to face the music, needing to revisit the disastrous events that led to her leaving, in order to move on with her life. Intensely powerful and utterly engaging, Ballads of Suburbia explores the heartbreaking moments when life changes unexpectedly, and reveals the consequences of being forced to grow up too soon.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place PDF Author: Geoff Stahl
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501336290
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Popular music scholars have long been interested in the connection between place and music. This collection brings together a number of key scholars in order to introduce readers to concepts and theories used to explore the relationships between place and music. An interdisciplinary volume, drawing from sociology, geography, ethnomusicology, media, cultural, and communication studies, this book covers a wide-range of topics germane to the production and consumption of place in popular music. Through considerations of changes in technology and the mediascape that have shaped the experience of popular music (vinyl, iPods, social media), the role of social difference and how it shapes sociomusical encounters (queer spaces, gendered and racialised spaces), as well as the construction and representations of place (musical tourism, city branding, urban mythologies), this is an up-to-the-moment overview of central discussions about place and music. The contributors explore a range of contexts, moving from the studio to the stage, the city to the suburb, the bedroom to festival, from nightclub to museum, with each entry highlighting the diverse and complex ways in which music and place are mutually constitutive.

Time Passages

Time Passages PDF Author: George Lipsitz
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452905785
Category : Mass media
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description