When you hear a certain song, where does it take you? What is the secret that connects music to our lives? Heart warming, moving and laugh out loud funny, this title is the truest book you will ever read about music and the things that really matter.

As one of the founding figures of cultural studies, Lawrence Grossberg was an early participant in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies' project, one which sought to develop a critical practice adequate to the complexities of contemporary culture. The essays in Bringing It All Back Home bring a sense of history, depth, and contestation to the current success of cultural studies while charting Grossberg's intellectual and theoretical developments from his time at Birmingham to the present day. Written over a twenty-year period, these essays--which helped introduce British cultural studies to the United States--reflect Grossberg's ongoing effort to find a way of theorizing politics and politicizing theory. The essays collected here recognize both the specificity of cultural studies, by locating it in a range of alternative critical perspectives and practices, and its breadth, by mapping the extent of its diversity. By discussing American scholars' initial reception of cultural studies, its relation to communication studies, and its origins in leftist politics, Grossberg grounds the development of cultural studies in the United States in specific historical and theoretical context. His criticism of "easy" identification of cultural studies with the theories, models, and issues of communications and his challenge to some of cultural studies' current directions and preoccupations indicates what may lie ahead for this dynamic field of study. Bringing together the Gramscian tradition of British cultural studies with the antimodernist philosophical positions of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, Grossberg articulates an original and important vision of the role of the political intellectual in the contemporary world and offers an essential overview of the emerging field of cultural studies by one of its leading practitioners and theorists.

A collection of poignant oral histories challenges the myths and prejudices surrounding the veterans of the Vietnam War, surveying the experiences of soldiers who in spite of traumatizing experiences returned home to pursue an understanding of what they endured and serve productive lives of public service.

In the process Varesi unearths new meaning in both Dylan's most famous works and in songs that have received less attention."--BOOK JACKET.

Dorian Lynskey is one of the most prominent music critics writing today. With 33 Revolutions Per Minute, he offers an engrossing, insightful, and wonderfully researched history of protest music in the twentieth century and beyond. From Billie Holiday and Woodie Guthrie to Bob Dylan and the Clash to Green Day and Rage Against the Machine, 33 Revolutions Per Minute is a moving and fascinating portrait of a century of popular music that tried to change the world.

This is a study of the state of research on and history of performances of 40 American playwrights, including major mainstream, ethnic, and regional playwrights. The essays list their published and unpublished plays, as well as their other works; document the performances; identify bibliographies, biographies, critical studies, and analyses of the plays; and discuss the critical reception. The volume deals with production histories, covering critics, actors, directors, and theater companies that have contributed as much to theater as the playwrights themselves. It also discusses original screenplays and identifies writing on younger playwrights on whom research has just begun. ISBN 0-313-25543-1: $66.00 (For use only in the library).

The book challenges the notion that Irish Traditional music expresses an essential Irish identity, arguing that it was an ideological construction of cultural nationalists in the nineteenth century, later commodified by the music and tourism industries. As a social process, musical performance is complicated by the varying experiences of musicians and listeners. The question of an Irish identity expressed musically is further explored through the experiences of both 'local' and 'foreign' musicians, including the author. The conclusion that a radicalised ideal of national culture and an assimilative model of cultural contact are compatible has important implications for Irish society today. Irish traditional music is now performed and consumed world-wide. The Making of Irish Traditional Music considers the implications of this for the way we understand music's relationship to individual and collective identities such as ethnicity and nationality. The core of this book is its analysis of the experiences of 'foreigners' playing Irish music, both in Australia and in the heart of Ireland's traditional music empire, County Clare, as 'pilgrims' to summer schools.