In this book, Michael Cramer views the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), an organization that studies and recreates the middle ages, as a case study for a growing fascination with medieval fantasy in popular culture. He explores the act of medieval re-creation as performance by focusing on the SCA, describing the group's activities, investigating its place in popular culture, and looking at the SCA not so much as a historical society but as an on-going work of performance art; a post...

The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted voca...

Television has long been a symbol of social and cultural decay, yet many in postwar Europe saw it as the medium with the greatest potential to help build a new society and create a new form of audiovisual art. Utopian Television examines works of the great filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom looked to television as a promising new medium even while remaining critical of its existing practices.Utopian Television illustrate...

Yogi Berra once said, You can observe a lot just by watching. Michael Cramer has been a keen observer of everyday life encountered as he was walking or driving around town, while working, or watching children at play. He describes life as it is, surrounded by the lives of thousands of others, including interactions as well as observations and sharing the reality to which he is a witness. Poetry is the art of taking pictures with words, and these poems are the pictures Cramer has taken whil...

The Berlin Wall Today is a richly illustrated full color book that takes the reader on a tour of the last traces and fading memories of the historic symbol of the Iron Curtain - to memorials, parks, hidden back yards, old train tracks, factory buildings, churches, and Prussian cemeteries. The Berlin Wall Today tells stories of struggle, desperation, survival, and rebirth and of a history that shaped the post- war world. It also shows how the people of Berlin are reclaiming and memorializin...

Food safety and quality are primary concerns in the food manufacturing industry. Written by an author with more than 40 years’ experience in the food industry, Food Plant Sanitation: Design, Maintenance, and Good Manufacturing Practices, Third Edition provides completely updated practical advice on all aspects of food plant sanitation and sanitation-related food safety issues. It offers readers the tools to establish a food safety system to help control microbiolo...

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film stud...

Postmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists 'as if they were all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party' - a party which includes such memb...

"The name is Alex van der Mout. Poetry is my passion. Emotions of Pain, Rage & Love can only be truly captured with the written word. Here you will read my journey of emotions in an ever changing world."

An updated edition of the Sunday Times BestsellerBritain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions ...

At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination collects a dozen re-evaluative essays on Marshall McLuhan and his critical and theoretical legacy; from intellectual adventurer creating a complex architecture of ideas to cultural icon standing in line in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Given McLuhan’s prominent status in many academic disciplines, the contributors reflect a multi-disciplinary background. John Moss and Linda Morra chose the essays from a gathering of McLuhan’s academic d...

This Very Short Introduction to Classics links a haunting temple on a lonely mountainside to the glory of ancient Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and to Classics within modern culture-from Jefferson and Byron to Asterix and Ben-Hur.We are all Classicists - we come into touch with the Classics daily: in our culture, politics, medicine, architecture, language, and literature. What are the true roots of these influences, however, and how do our interpretations of these aspects of the Classic...