This is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. Barbara Ching begins by defining the features that make certain country songs and artists "hard." She compares hard country music to "high" American culture, arguing that hard country deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierarchy, comically singing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence, while mains...

The world has been witnessing a long unfolding process of urbanization that not only has altered the structural basis of society in terms of political economy, but has also symbolically relegated rural people and life to a secondary or deviant status through an ideology of urbanormativity. Both structural and cultural changes rooted in urbanization are connected in complex ways to spatial arrangements that can be described in terms of inequality and uneven development. Through a focus on l...

Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people ...

Old Roots, New Routes takes an in-depth look at the many influences, meanings, and identities of this contemporary music form. Because the definition of the term alt.country changes continually, even the genre's own mouthpiece, the Web site nodepression.com, declared its terrain to be "alternative country (whatever that is)." Despite alt.country's murky parameters, its origins, indeed, its patron saints, are generally acknowledged to range from the Carter Family and Hank Williams---as inte...

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) spoke of the promiscuity of art and literature-the willingness of great artists and writers to scandalize their spectators through critical frankness, complexity, and beauty. Sontag's life and thought were no less promiscuous. She wrote deeply and engagingly about a range of subjects-theater, sex, politics, novels, torture, and illness-and courted celebrity and controversy both publicly and privately. Throughout her career, she not only earned adulation but also pr...

Knowing Your Place directs groundbreaking attention to the role of rural and urban places in identity construction. Written to redress the longstanding neglect and denigration of the rural, this book argues that the cultural dominance of the city has been reinforced by postmodern theory's near fixation on the urban and the sophisticated.The essays explore rural identity in a number of cultures and situations, and look at issues of contemporary interest. To...