Something for the high-bandwidth student of cultural criticism and the neo-Luddite as well. Collins follows postmodernism to the next level, charting its evolution from the “terror of pure excess to the manipulation of available information” to its domestication into popular, functional, “safe” forms such as television, film, architecture, design and fiction. What’s interesting is that to do this, the author conducts a parallel study: To understand how the technological overload has really affected the cultural landscape he extends the current discussion on techno-textuality which includes “cyberpunk science fiction, digital sampling, hypertext, virtual reality,” and he traces their effect on the ponderous traditional process-oriented, low-tech forms of production favored by purists. CP

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 256 pages

A guide to those who seek exile from a mundane lifestyle and how people have managed to deal with living. Answers the questions one might have about why escapism has become a human pastime. TD

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 256 pages

Imagine a daily diet of bone-crunching slaughter, provided for your amusement, and free to all. “In the Arena,” “The Hunts of the Amphitheater,” “Purveyors to the Carnage” and “The Reign of the Star” are chapters in the cruel story of ancient Roman entertainment. Colorful, exciting and violent shows that grew more exotic over the years—Elephants! Tigers! Alligators! Bears! A re-creation of the fall of Icarus!—but never lost their sadistic appeal. Stardom could come to anyone: “‘I was no longer thin and disfigured,’ says a young man of good family captured at sea and sold to a lanista, ‘as I was when in the hands of the pirates; the good cheer that I found there was more intolerable to me than hunger; I was being fattened up like a sacrificial victim; and, scum among condemned slaves, I was a raw gladiator learning every day how to commit murder.’” GR

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 222 pages
Illustrated

“Looks at the biochemical, psychological, aesthetic, religious and sociocultural aspects of possession in African shamanism, the classical shamanistic religions of arctic Asia and South America, Haitian voodoo, the cult of Dionysus, Christian mysticism and other manifestations of spiritual ecstasy.”

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 224 pages

You know, when you know you know it's a dream? “Lucid dreams are those in which a person becomes aware that they are dreaming. They are different from ordinary dreams because they are often strikingly realistic and may be emotionally charged to the point of elation.” You can induce them with training, and you can control them once you're there. They're often erotic, mystical puzzle/paradoxes, and loads of fun. A great hobby for narcoleptics. GR

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 192 pages

“There was a time when this was a nation of Ernest Hemingways. Real Men. The kind of guys who could defoliate an entire forest to make a breakfast fire—and then go on to wipe out an endangered species hunting for lunch. But not anymore. We’ve become a nation of wimps. Pansies. Quiche eaters.”
As the epitome of meat, a beef steak can send powerful sexual symbols. The larger and juicier the piece of meat, the more red-blooded and virile the consumer is supposed to be, and a steak by candlelight is a common prelude to seduction. Meat is widely reputed to inflame the lustful passions, particularly in men, the stimulation being generally of an animal rather than of an erotic kind. It is reported, for example, that the captain of a slave ship, in the throes of evangelical conversion, stopped eating meat to prevent his lusting after female slaves. “Conversely, a male vegetarian can be a suspect figure, as a student recalls… “It was really odd, they seemed to automatically assume that because I was a vegetarian then I must be gay.”’ GR

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 200 pages
Illustrated

“We can, also in passing, note some forms of Victorian pedophilia that seem especially marked, perhaps specific to the period. The particular attractions of the sick or dying child seem to have figured importantly for the culture generally, and certainly for pedophiles. The surviving pedophile poetry and what we know of public activity suggests that, next to dying and the even-more-popular flogging, bathing may have provided the most popular subject: ‘Breasting the wavelets, and diving there/white boys, ruddy, and tanned and bare.’ Francis William Bouidillion’s ‘The Legend of the Water Lilies’ (1878) is one of several poems of this sort that combine naked bathing with death: When one of the group swims out too far, the others, all of them, try to save their comrade and drown in the attempt. Some water lilies… grow there to mark the grave and preserve the erotic image of the bonanza of naked, dying bodies.”

Publisher: Routledge
Hardback: 416 pages
Illustrated

A social history of how the Irish strategically assimilated themselves as “whites” in America. Through examining the connections between concepts of race, acts of oppression and social position, Ignatiev traces the violent history of Irish-American and African-American relations in the 19th century and the ways in which the Irish used labor unions, the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party to help gain themselves a secure place in the “White Republic.” Further, he examines and challenges both the Irish tradition of labor protest and the Irish role in the wave of anti-Negro violence that swept the country in the 1830s and 1840s. The study concludes with a compelling recounting of the roles of northeastern urban politicians in the Irish triumph over nativism, a victory which allowed them entry into the “white race.” A highly readable and scholarly polemic against traditional conceptions of race as well as a compelling meditation on the sources of racial antipathy, How the Irish Became White is necessary reading for anyone interested in the American history of race and class. MDG

Publisher: Routledge
Hardback: 256 pages
Illustrated

Besides being one of the first books to undertake a comprehensive analysis of subcultural style in postwar Britain, it remains by far one of the most insightful. Subculture opens and closes on the figure of Jean Genet, imprisoned, as he fashions a shrine to the criminal element from contraband photos mounted on cardboard regulation sheets and adorned with wire and beads originally meant for the decoration of funeral wreaths. His particular aptitude for subversion—turning the scavenged bric-a-brac of an authoritarian culture against itself, rerouting its semiotic apparatus to suit some fringe cause or desire—is paradigmatic of subcultural strategy in general, according to Hebdige. In Genet’s work, the author also discovers all the key themes of working-class youth culture: “The status and meaning of revolt, the idea of style as a form of Refusal, [and] the elevation of crime into art.” It’s what they all hold in common, the hipsters, Beats and Teddy Boys, the Mods and skinheads, the glitter and glam rockers, the punks and the Rastafarians. Hebdige proposes style as a Freudian dream-work, rife with elements of condensation and displacement; or a bricolage reworking the anarchic compositional techniques of the Dadaists and Surrealists. No longer new ideas, admittedly, although they were when he first wrote them down. JT

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 195 pages

The art and science of car design is a cynical crock of sheet metal, a sucker’s game of chrome, a stylist’s laughing deceit, a jellybean for the sweet tooth of America’s auto-buying public. Eighty years of designers and their model trends are explored here, from the clay-model magic of Harley Earl (at GM in the ‘20s), to the customizers’ tricks appropriated by John DeLorean (with GM in the early ‘60s). Example: A new form of technological expressionism was advanced by designer Bill Porter (GM, late ‘60s): “I was interested in exploring more profound fusions of technology and design.” This idea found expression in the ‘68 GTO, which was “free of chrome clichés but nonetheless bore the look of advanced jet aircraft in its subtly sculpted forms.” The look was developed further in the 1970 Pontiac Firebird, to which Porter gave “not only an aircraft feel but also a ‘muscular look,’ as if the skin of the car were forced out by the mechanical strength underneath.” Auto styling is all looks and sex-fantasy—but we love it. Detroit’s pencilpushers give us a rolling chance at the American Dream. GR

Publisher: Routledge
Paperback: 264 pages
Illustrated