New expanded edition of a classic anthropology title that examines ethnicity as a dynamic and shifting aspect of social relations.

Sisterhoods concentrates on portrayals of female relationships - communities, friends, lovers, sisters, daughters, mothers and enemies - and examines the positioning of the subject in different media for both male and female consumption.

Pulp Fiction was one of the films that defined American cinema of the 1990s, and remains one of the stand-out movies of its director Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino's style - violent, fast, funny and full of knowing pop culture references - epitomises 90s post-modernism. Pulp Fiction was a phenomenal cult success and one of the first films to generate hot debate in internet chatrooms and on fan websites. Dana Polan's compelling analysis sets out to uncover the style and technique of Pulp Fiction. He shows how broad Tarantino's points of reference are, and analyzes the film's narrative accomplishment and complexity. Where some critics dismissed Pulp Fiction for its violence and its worship of a certain brand of cool, Polan shows how the film exemplifies new kinds of engagement with cultural and social codes, such as those around racial identity. In addition, Polan argues that the film's celebration of macho attitudes is more nuanced than might first appear. In a new afterword to this new edition, Polan looks back on Pulp Fiction 30 years after its first release.

From intertextuality to postmodern cultural studies, narratology to affect theory, poststructuralism to metamodernism, and postcolonialism to ecocriticism, humanities adaptation studies has engaged with a host of contemporary theories. Yet theorizing adaptation has been declared behind the theoretical times compared to other fields and charged with theoretical incorrectness by scholars from all theoretical camps. In this thorough and groundbreaking study, author Kamilla Elliott works to explain and redress the problem of theorizing adaptation. She offers the first cross-disciplinary history of theorizing adaptation in the humanities, extending back to the sixteenth century, revealing that until the late eighteenth century, adaptation was valued for its contributions to cultural progress, before its eventual and ongoing marginalization by humanities theories. The second half of the book offers ways to redress the troubled relationship between theorization and adaptation. Ultimately, Theorizing Adaptation proffers shared ground upon which adaptation scholars can debate productively across disciplinary, cultural, and theoretical borders.

In this important book, Ken Gelder offers a lively and comprehensive account of popular fiction as a distinctive literary and cultural field, tied directly to the logics and practices of entertainment and industry.

Tracing the publishing history of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford from its initial 1851-53 serialization in Dickens's Household Words through its numerous editions and adaptations, Thomas Recchio focuses especially on how the text has been deployed to support ideas related to nation and national identity. Recchio maps Cranford's nineteenth-century reception in Britain and the United States through illustrated editions in England dating from 1864 and their subsequent re-publication in the United States, US school editions in the first two decades of the twentieth century, dramatic adaptations from 1899 to 2007, and Anglo-American literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Making extensive use of primary materials, Recchio considers Cranford within the context of the Victorian periodical press, contemporary reviews, theories of text and word relationships in illustrated books, community theater, and digital media. In addition to being a detailed publishing history that emphasizes the material forms of the book and its adaptations, Recchio's book is a narrative of Cranford's evolution from an auto-ethnography of a receding mid-Victorian English way of life to a novel that was deployed as a maternal model to define an American sensibility for early twentieth-century Mediterranean and Eastern European immigrants. While focusing on one novel, Recchio offers a convincing micro-history of the way English literature was positioned in England and the United States to support an Anglo-centric cultural project, to resist the emergence of multicultural societies, and to ensure an unchanging notion of a stable English culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pleasures of Horror is a stimulating and insightful exploration of horror fictions—literary, cinematic and televisual—and the emotions they engender in their audiences. The text is divided into three sections. The first examines how horror is valued and devalued in different cultural fields; the second investigates the cultural politics of the contemporary horror film; while the final part considers horror fandom in relation to its embodied practices (film festivals), its "reading formations" (commercial fan magazines and fanzines) and the role of special effects. Pleasures of Horror combines a wide range of media and textual examples with highly detailed and closely focused exposition of theory. It is a fascinating and engaging look at responses to a hugely popular genre and an invaluable resource for students of media, cultural and film studies and fans of horror.