Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of children’s and youth’s agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children’s lives, this book places popular culture and representation as central to this endeavor. Core themes of family, gender, temporality, politics, education, technology, disability, conflict, identity, ethnicity,...

A Companion to the War Film contains 27 original essays that examine all aspects of the genre, from the traditional war film, to the new global nature of conflicts, and the diverse formats that war stories assume in today’s digital culture.Includes new works from experienced and emerging scholars that expand the scope of the genre by applying fresh theoretical approaches and archival resources to the study of the war filmMoves beyond the limited confines of...

Militainment, Inc. offers provocative, sometimes disturbing insight into the ways that war is presented and viewed as entertainment—or "militainment"—in contemporary American popular culture. War has been the subject of entertainment for centuries, but Roger Stahl argues that a new interactive mode of militarized entertainment is recruiting its audience as virtual-citizen soldiers. The author examines a wide range of historical and contemporary media examples to demonstrate the wa...

The Gulf War and its aftermath have testified once again to the significance placed on the meanings and images of Vietnam by US media and culture. Almost two decades after the end of hostilities, the Vietnam War remains a dominant moral, political and military touchstone in American cultural consciousness. Vietnam War Stories provides a comprehensi

Contributions by Derek T. Buescher, Travis L. Cox, Trischa Goodnow, Jon Judy, John R. Katsion, James J. Kimble, Christina M. Knopf, Steven E. Martin, Brad Palmer, Elliott Sawyer, Deborah Clark Vance, David E. Wilt, and Zou YizhengOne of the most overlooked aspects of the Allied war effort involved a surprising initiative--comic book propaganda. Even before Pearl Harbor, the comic book industry enlisted its formidable army of artists, writers, and editors to dramatize the conflict f...

In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics display a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Investigating how hand-drawn comics has come of age as a serious medium for engaging history, Disaster Drawn explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.Hillary L. Chute traces how comics inherite...

Cinema's most successful director is a commercial and cultural force demanding serious consideration. Not just triumphant marketing, this international popularity is partly a function of the movies themselves. Polarised critical attitudes largely overlook this, and evidence either unquestioning adulation or vilification-often vitriolic-for epitomising contemporary Hollywood. Detailed textual analyses reveal that alongside conventional commercial appeal, Spielberg's movies function consiste...

A "wide-ranging and sophisticated anthology" comparing theaters of war to wars in the movie theater (Dennis Showalter, author of Patton and Rommel).Why We Fought makes a powerful case that film can be as valuable a tool as primary documents for improving our understanding of the causes and consequences of war.A comprehensive look at war films, from depictions of the American Revolution to portrayals of September 11 and its aftermath, this v...

Cinema has long shaped not only how mass violence is perceived but also how it is performed. Today, when media coverage is central to the execution of terror campaigns and news anchormen serve as embedded journalists, a critical understanding of how the moving image is implicated in the imaginations and actions of perpetrators and survivors of violence is all the more urgent. If the cinematic image and mass violence are among the defining features of modernity, the former is significantly ...

From the onset of the film medium, directors have found war an endlessly compelling and fruitful subject for their art. In War and Film, Chapman explores their fascination as well as the audience's enduring need to examine and experience the vicissitudes of war.Chapman examines the issues of truthfulness and realism that arise in depictions of war, whether in the supposed truth telling of war documentaries or Hollywood battle scenes that are ‘more realistic than the real t...

Illustration has been an integral part of human history. Particularly before the advent of media such as photography, film, television, and now the Internet, illustrations in all their variety had been the primary visual way to convey history. The comic book, which emerged in its modern form in the 1930s, was another form of visual entertainment that gave readers, especially children, a form of escape.As World War II began, however, comic books became a part of propaganda as well, ...

Virtuous War is the first book to map the emergence and judge the consequences of a new military-industrial-media-entertainment network. James Der Derian takes the reader from a family history of war and genocide to new virtual battlespaces in the Mojave Desert, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and American universities. He tracks the convergence of cyborg technologies, video games, media spectacles, war movies, and do-good ideologies that produced a chimera of high-tech, low-risk ‘virtu...