Producing Mass Entertainment

Producing Mass Entertainment PDF Author: Christina Meyer
Publisher: Studies in Comics and Cartoons
ISBN: 9780814214169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Investigates the historical factors, practices, and strategies involved in the production and proliferation of the Yellow Kid comics.

Producing Mass Entertainment

Producing Mass Entertainment PDF Author: Christina Meyer
Publisher: Studies in Comics and Cartoons
ISBN: 9780814214169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Investigates the historical factors, practices, and strategies involved in the production and proliferation of the Yellow Kid comics.

With Amusement for All

With Amusement for All PDF Author: LeRoy Ashby
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813123976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 713

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Book Description
With Amusement for All contextualizes what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships among social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the ways in which the entertainment world has reflected, changed, or reinforced the values of American society.

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925 PDF Author: David Monod
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660563
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America's most popular commercial amusement from the mid-1890s to the First World War; at its peak, 5 million Americans attended vaudeville shows every week. Telling the story of this pioneering art form's rise and decline, David Monod looks through the apparent carnival of vaudeville performance and asks: what made the theater so popular and transformative? Although he acknowledges its quirkiness, Monod makes the case that vaudeville became so popular because it offered audiences a guide to a modern urban lifestyle. Vaudeville acts celebrated sharp city styles and denigrated old-fashioned habits, showcased new music and dance moves, and promulgated a deeply influential vernacular modernism. The variety show's off-the-rack trendiness perfectly suited an era when goods and services were becoming more affordable and the mass market promised to democratize style, offering a clear vision of how the quintessential twentieth-century citizen should look, talk, move, feel, and act.

Everything Bad is Good for You

Everything Bad is Good for You PDF Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101158018
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.

Authorizing Superhero Comics

Authorizing Superhero Comics PDF Author: Daniel Stein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814214763
Category : Comic books, strips, etc
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Authorizing Superhero Comics examines the comic book superhero as a lasting phenomenon of US popular serial storytelling. Moving beyond linear- or creator-centered models of genre development, Daniel Stein identifies authorization conflicts that have driven the genre's evolution from the late 1930s to the present. These conflicts include paratextually mediated exchanges between officially authorized comic book producers and, alternatively, authorized fans that trouble the distinction between production and its reception; storyworld-building processes that subsume producers and fans into a collective rooted in a common style; parodies that ensure the genre's longevity by deflating criticism through self-reflexive humor; and collecting and archiving as forms of memory management that align the genre's past with the demands of the present. Taking seriously the serial agencies of the superhero comic book as a material artifact with a particular mediality, the study analyzes letter columns, editorial commentary, fanzines, encyclopedias, and other forms of comic book communication as critical frameworks for understanding the evolution of the genre--assessing rarely covered archival sources alongside some of the most treasured figures from the superhero's multi-decade history, from Batman and Spider-Man to Wonder Woman and Captain America.

The Market Makers

The Market Makers PDF Author: Peter Scott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191086355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
During the twentieth century 'affluence' (both at the level of the individual household and that of society as a whole) became intimately linked with access to a range of prestige consumer durables. The Market Makers charts the inter-war origins of a process that would eventually transform these features of modern life from being 'luxuries' to 'necessities' for most British families. Peter Scott examines how producers and retailers succeeded in creating 'mass' (though not universal) market for new suites of furniture, radios, modern housing, and some electrical and gas appliances, while also exploring why some other goods, such as refrigerators, telephones, and automobiles, failed to reach the mass market in Britain before the 1950s. Creating mass markets presented a formidable challenge for manufacturers and retailers. Consumer durables required large markets. Most involved significant research and development costs. Some, such as the telephone, radio, and car, were dependent on complementary investments in infrastructure. All required intensive marketing - usually including expensive advertising in national newspapers and magazines, while some also needed mass production methods (and output volumes) to make them affordable to a mass market. This study charts the pioneering efforts of entrepreneurs (many of whom, though once household names, are now largely forgotten) to provide consumer durables at a price affordable to a mass market and to persuade a sometimes reluctant public to embrace the new products and the consumer credit that their purchase required. In doing so, Scott shows that, contrary to much received wisdom, there was a 'consumer durables revolution' in inter-war Britain - at least for certain highly prioritised goods.

The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States

The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States PDF Author: Fritz Machlup
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691003566
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States marked the beginning of the study of our postindustrial information society. Austrian-born economist Fritz Machlup had focused his research on the patent system, but he came to realize that patents were simply one part of a much bigger "knowledge economy." He then expanded the scope of his work to evaluate everything from stationery and typewriters to advertising to presidential addresses--anything that involved the activity of telling anyone anything. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States then revealed the new and startling shape of the U.S. economy. Machlup's cool appraisal of the data showed that the knowledge industry accounted for nearly 29 percent of the U.S. gross national product, and that 43 percent of the civilian labor force consisted of knowledge transmitters or full-time knowledge receivers. Indeed, the proportion of the labor force involved in the knowledge economy increased from 11 to 32 percent between 1900 and 1959--a monumental shift. Beyond documenting this revolution, Machlup founded the wholly new field of information economics. The transformation to a knowledge economy has resonated throughout the rest of the century, especially with the rise of the Internet. As two recent observers noted, "Information goods--from movies and music to software code and stock quotes--have supplanted industrial goods as the key drivers of world markets." Continued study of this change and its effects is testament to Fritz Machlup's pioneering work.

Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century

Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Christina Meyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000542882
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This volume provides engaging accounts with transmedia practices in the long nineteenth century and offers model analyses of Victorian media (e.g., theater, advertising, books, games, newspapers) alongside the technological, economic, and cultural conditions under which they emerged in the Anglophone world. By exploring engagement tactics and forms of audience participation, the book affords insight into the role that social agents – e.g., individual authors, publishing houses, theatre show producers, lithograph companies, toy manufacturers, newspaper syndicates, or advertisers – played in the production, distribution, and consumption of Victorian media. It considers such examples as Sherlock Holmes, Kewpie Dolls, media forms and practices such as cut-outs, popular lectures, telephone conversations or early theater broadcasting, and such authors as Nellie Bly, Mark Twain, and Walter Besant, offering insight into the variety of transmedia practices present in the long nineteenth century. The book brings together methods and theories from comics studies, communication and media studies, English and American studies, narratology and more, and proposes fresh ways to think about transmediality. Though the target audiences are students, teachers, and scholars in the humanities, the book will also resonate with non-academic readers interested in how media contents are produced, disseminated, and consumed, and with what implications.

Over the Rainbow

Over the Rainbow PDF Author: Paul Nathanson
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791407097
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Over the Rainbow shows how Dorothy's passage from Kansas to Oz and back again recapitulates paradigmatic stories of both America and Christianity. Defining human identity on three symbolic levels (individual, collective, and cosmic), Nathanson shows that The Wizard of Oz has come to be a "secular myth."

Singular Sensations

Singular Sensations PDF Author: Michelle Ann Abate
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978840705
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
What do The Family Circus, Ziggy, and The Far Side have in common? They are all single-panel comics, a seemingly simple form that cartoonists have used in vastly different ways. Singular Sensations is the first book-length critical study to examine this important but long neglected mode of cartoon art. Michelle Ann Abate provides an overview of how the American single-panel comic evolved, starting with Thomas Nast’s political cartoons and R.F. Outcault’s ground-breaking Yellow Kid series in the nineteenth century. In subsequent chapters, she explores everything from wry New Yorker cartoons to zany twenty-first-century comics like Bizarro. Offering an important corrective to the canonical definition of comics as “sequential art,” Abate reveals the complexity, artistry, and influence of the single panel art form. Engaging with a wide range of historical time periods, socio-political subjects, and aesthetic styles, Singular Sensations demonstrates how comics as we know and love them would not be the same without single-panel titles. Abate’s book brings the single-panel comic out of the margins and into the foreground.