European readings of American popular culture
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
European readings of American popular culture
(Contributions to the study of popular culture, no. 50)
Greenwood Press, 1996
Available at / 24 libraries
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Kobe Shoin Women's University Library / Kobe Shoin Women's College Library
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Since the Second World War, Europe has undergone a continual invasion: wave after wave of American popular culture. The diffusion of American culture in Europe is both a European story about America and an American story about Europe. This work examines this cross-cultural phenomenon from the European viewpoint. Nearly two dozen European experts in their respective fields offer an invigorating, engaging, and open-minded examination of America as perceived with the acute insight of the interested European outsider—a fruitful tradition that stretches back to Lafayette, de Tocqueville, and Goethe, to name three. Of interest to scholars, students, and general readers alike.
The book's focus is both sensuous and intellectual: how America is seen (The Image); heard (Popular Music); perused (The Written Word); digested (Food); learned from its common ways (Social Customs); perceived by minorities (Ethnic Cultures); and taken as an instrument of change (Americanization). It is the first book of its kind published in the United States. It is rich with selected, up-to-date critical bibliographies in areas for which very little information is otherwise available. In sum: a cogent, cross-cultural analysis of how U.S. popular culture exposes both European dreams of well-being and nightmares of discontent. These are insights which deserve to be savored.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Ever the Twain Shall Meet by John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet
Introduction: America and Europe: A Clash of Imagined Communities by Rob Kroes
The Image
Blackface Minstrels and Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Nineteenth-Century Entertainment Forms as Cultural Exports by John G. Blair
Creative Chiasmus: Comparative Evolution of U.S. Television and Cinema Products in the 1980s by Francis Bordat
A Comics Interlude by Jean-Paul Gabilliet
My Very Own America by Jean-Claude Mézières
Popular Music
Rocking and Rapping in the Dutch Welfare State by Mel van Elteren
Here, There, and Everywhere: Rock Music, Mass Culture, and the Counterculture by Claude Chastagner
Negotiations and Love Songs: Towards a Verifiable Interpretation of Popular Music by Karl Adams, Henri Drost and Eugéne van Erven
The Written Word
Harlequin Romances in Western Europe: The Cultural Interactions of Romantic Literature by Annick Capelle
Reader's Digest: A Rosy World for Both Sides of the Atlantic by Daniel Baylon
"Seriously Lurid": The Pitfalls of Publishing American Crime Fiction in Britain by Andrew Pepper
Food
Pride and Prejudice: American Cuisine, the French, and Godliness by Mireille Favier
"Wash Your Hands with Coca-Cola": Coca-Cola's European Tribulations by Laurent Ditmann
Social Customs
The Barbie Doll by Marianne Debouzy
Serial Heroes: A Sociocultural Probing into Excessive Consumption by Robert Conrath
The Mayflower Need Not Sail Back: The US of A is Going European by Claude-Jean Bertrand
Ethnic Cultures
"America" in Popular Irish Fiction and Drama: Elements of a Transcultural Discourse by Ciáran Ross
Minorities in US Films: The New Wave 60s-70s by Penny Starfield
America on My Mind by Lazare Bitoun
Americanization
A Taste of Honey: Adorno's Reading of American Mass Culture by Kaspar Maase
The Experience of Freedom and Vacuum: An Anthropologist at Euro Disney by Marc Augé
Popular Culture and Mass Culture: A Franco-European Dilemma by Jean-Marie Domenach (translated by Jean-Paul Gabilliet)
Selected Bibiography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"