Arts

Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood

by Alison Trope

Hollywood is placeless, timeless, and iconic, a key fabricator and forger of American cultural myths and stories. How, then, will the history of Hollywood be written?

The Wisdom of Big Bird (and the Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch): Lessons from a Life in Feathers

by Caroll Spinney & Jason Milligan

An inspiring message for all ages: Find your inner bird.

If you’re looking for wisdom and joy in your life, go straight to Sesame Street and heed the words of its most beloved and profound resident, Caroll...

The Politics of American Actor Training

by Ellen Margolis & Lissa Tyler Renaud

This book addresses the historical, social, colonial, and administrative contexts that determine today's U.S. actor training, as well as matters of identity politics, access, and marginalization as they emerge...

The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies

by David Bordwell

Hollywood moviemaking is one of the constants of American life, but how much has it changed since the glory days of the big studios? David Bordwell argues that the principles of visual storytelling created in...

Adele: An Unauthorized Biography

by Belmont and Belcourt Biographies

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins is at the top of her game in both the US and the UK, breaking records for sales and number one status on all the major charts. Her performances are refreshingly authentic and she is...

Whitney Houston: An Unauthorized Biography

by Belmont and Belcourt Biographies

She still wondered, "Am I good enough? Am I pretty enough? Will they like me?" It was the burden that made her great and the part that caused her to stumble in the end. If you could hear me, no I would tell...

Motherhood and Hollywood: How To Get a Job Like Mine

by Patricia Heaton

“The really important things in life are your family and friends. And what will people say about you at your funeral—that you won an Emmy once, or that you were a good person, kind and generous? Well, as...

The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood

by Edward Jay Epstein

During the heyday of the studio system spanning the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, virtually all the American motion picture industry’s money, power, and prestige came from a single activity: selling tickets at...

RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan Is Born

by Richard B. Jewell

One of the "Big Five" studios of Hollywood's golden age, RKO is remembered today primarily for the famous films it produced, from King Kong and Citizen Kane to the Astaire-Rogers musicals. But its own story...

Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878-1943

by Lawrence Schenbeck

Racial Uplift and American Music 1878-1943 traces the career of racial uplift ideology as a factor in elite African Americans' embrace of classical music around the turn of the previous century, from the collapse...

Born in the U. S. A.

by Timothy E. Scheurer

This is the first study to explore fully the myth of America as reflected in the nation's popular music. Beginning with the songs of the Pilgrims and continuing through more than two centuries of history and...

What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting

by Marc Norman

Screenwriters have always been viewed as Hollywood’s stepchildren. Silent-film comedy pioneer Mack Sennett forbade his screenwriters from writing anything down, for fear they’d get inflated ideas about themselves...

Introduction to Film Studies

by Jill Nelmes

Introduction to Film Studies is a comprehensive textbook for students of cinema.

This completely revised and updated fifth edition guides students through the key issues and concepts in film studies, traces...

Traversing Tradition: Celebrating Dance in India

by Urmimala Sarkar Munsi & Stephanie Burridge

Dance occupies a prestigious place in Indian performing arts, yet it curiously, to a large extent, has remained outside the arena of academic discourse. This book documents and celebrates the emergence of contemporary...

The Adaptation Industry

by Simone Murray

Adaptation constitutes the driving force of contemporary culture, with stories adapted across an array of media formats. However, adaptation studies has been concerned almost exclusively with textual analysis,...

Beyond Words

by Carol-Lynne Moore & Kaoru Yamamoto

Beyond Words presents a range of illuminating approaches to examining every day social interactions, to help the reader understand human movement in new ways.

Carol-Lynne Moore and Kaoru Yamamoto build on the...

Branding Television

by Catherine Johnson

Branding Television examines why and how the UK and US television industries have turned towards branding as a strategy in response to the rise of satellite, cable and digital television, and new media, such...

Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia

by David C. L. Lim & Hiroyuki Yamamoto

This book discusses contemporary film in all the main countries of Southeast Asia, and the social practices and ideologies which films either represent or oppose. It shows how film acquires signification through...

Postcolonial Cinema Studies

by Sandra Ponzanesi & Marguerite Waller

This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented,...

Rural Design

by Dewey Thorbeck

Rural areas worldwide are undergoing profound change creating considerable challenges and stress for its residents and on the ecosystems upon which they depend. Rural design brings design thinking and the problem-solving...