Everyday Culture examines the confluence of cultural and material possibility--the bringing together of thought and action in daily life. David Trend argues that an informed and invigorated citizenry can help reverse patterns of dehumanization and social control. The impetus for Everyday Culture can be described in the observation by Raymond Williams that the "culture is ordinary," and that the fabric of meanings that inform and organize everyday life often go undervalued and unexamined. Everyday Culture shares with thinkers like Williams the conviction that it is precisely the ordinariness of culture that makes it extraordinarily important. The ubiquity of everyday culture means that it affects all aspects of contemporary economic, social, and political life.

This lively and accessible new book reconsiders the different views as to what 'culture' is, how it operates, and how it relates to other aspects of the human (and non-human) world.

This title combines a number of different academic approaches in order to better understand the complex nature of readers' everyday encounters with their books.

In Popular Culture and Everyday Life Phillip Vannini and Dennis Waskul have brought together a variety of short essays that illustrate the many ways that popular culture intersects with mundane experiences of everyday life. Most essays are written in a reflexive ethnographic style, primarily through observation and personal narrative, to convey insights at an intimate level that will resonate with most readers. Some of the topics are so mundane they are legitimately universal (sleeping, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, etc.), others are common enough that most readers will directly identify in some way (watching television, using mobile phones, playing video games, etc.), while some topics will appeal more-or-less depending on a reader’s gender, interests, and recreational pastimes (putting on makeup, watching the Super Bowl, homemaking, etc.). This book will remind readers of their own similar experiences, provide opportunities to reflect upon them in new ways, as well as compare and contrast how experiences relayed in these pages relate to lived experiences. The essays will easily translate into rich and lively classroom discussions that shed new light on a familiar, taken-for-granted everyday life—both individually and collectively. At the beginning of the book, the authors have provided a grid that shows the topics and themes that each article touches on. This book is for popular culture classes, and will also be an asset in courses on the sociology of everyday life, ethnography, and social psychology.

This interdisciplinary anthology explores the representation of everyday life across several disciplines in a century known for its interest in individual experience of the mundane as well as the heroic. Comprised of essays by established and emerging scholars of literature, art, and music history, the volume explores not merely the range of performances under the banner of the everyday, but also the meanings inherent in these attempts to create art out of the experience of the real. In this collection, the authors attempt to provide a wide-ranging picture of the many ways in which the notion of the everyday is a valuable conceptual frame through which the eighteenth century may be apprehended, as this critical term allows for issues of gender, race, and class to come into focus. Alden Cavanaugh is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana State University.

This book explores how the comparative analysis of visual cultural artefacts, from objects to architecture and fiction films, can contribute to our understanding of everyday life in homes and cities around the globe. Investigating the multiple facets of the everyday, this interdisciplinary collection generates a new awareness of everyday lives across cultures and challenges our traditional understanding of the everyday by interweaving new thematic connections. It brings together debates around the analysis of the everyday in visual culture more broadly and explores the creation of innovative technological methods for comparative approaches to the study of the everyday, such as film databases, as well as the celebration of the everyday in museums. The volume is organized around four key themes. It explores the slices of everyday lives found in Visual Culture (Part I), Museums (Part II), the City (Part III) and the Home (Part IV). The book explores the growing area of the analysis of everyday life through visual culture both broadly and in depth. By building interdisciplinary connections, this book is ideal for the emerging community of scholars and students stemming from Visual Culture, Film and Media Studies, Architecture Studies and practice, Museum Studies, and scholars of Sociology and Anthropology as well as offering fresh insights into cutting-edge tools and practices for the rapidly growing field of Digital Humanities.

Here, the author assesses our modern book culture by focusing on five key elements including the explosion of retail bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and the formation of the Oprah Book Club.