Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture 4 vols

Adopting Popular Culture Association founder Ray B. Browne's definition of popular culture as 'all the experiences in life shared by people in common, generally though not necessarily disseminated by the mass media,' the new version of this encyclopedia covers 58 topics in great detail. Combining the contents of the Handbook of American Popular Literature (Greenwood, 1988) and The Handbook of American Popular Culture (2d ed., Greenwood, 1989), the Guide has eliminated chapters on advertising, detective and mystery fiction, and gender studies as being exhaustively addressed in other works. Chapters have been added on amusement parks, do-it-yourself home improvement, housing, living history and reenactments, museums and collecting, and New Age movements. The introduction has been lifted intact from The Handbook of American Popular Culture, but the front matter includes a lengthy new essay on the study of popular culture by Michael Dunne.