Popular Dramas

This volume fills a gap in the existing literature and proposes an interdisciplinary and multicultural comparative approach to the impact of Hallyu worldwide. The contributors analyze the spread of South Korean popular products from different perspectives (popular culture, sociology, anthropology, linguistics) and from different geographical locations (Asia, Europe, North America, and South America). The contributors come from a variety of countries (UK, Japan, Argentina, Poland, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Indonesia, USA, Romania). The volume is divided into three sections and twelve chapters that each bring a new perspective on the main topic. This emphasizes the impact of Hallyu and draws real and imaginary “maps” of the export of South Korean cultural products. Starting from the theoretical backgrounds offered by the existing literature, each chapter presents the impact of Hallyu in a particular country. This applied character does not exclude transnational comparisons or critical interrogations about the future development of the phenomenon. All authors are speaking about their own, native cultures. This inside perspective adds an important value to the understanding of the impact of a different culture on the “national” culture of each respective country. The contributions to this volume illustrate the “globalization” of the cultural products of Hallyu and show the various faces of Hallyu around the world.

This is the first comprehensive study of popular culture in twentieth-century China, and of its political impact during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (known in China as "The War of Resistance against Japan"). Chang-tai Hung shows in compelling detail how Chinese resisters used a variety of popular cultural forms—especially dramas, cartoons, and newspapers—to reach out to the rural audience and galvanize support for the war cause. While the Nationalists used popular culture as a patriotic tool, the Communists refashioned it into a socialist propaganda instrument, creating lively symbols of peasant heroes and joyful images of village life under their rule. In the end, Hung argues, the Communists' use of popular culture contributed to their victory in revolution.

In recent years numerous films, television series, comic books, graphic novels and video games have featured time travel narratives, with characters jumping backward, forward and laterally through time. No rules govern time travel in these stories. Some characters move by machine, some by magic, others by unexplained means. Sometime travelers can alter the timeline, while others are prevented from causing temporal aberrations. The fluid forms of imagined time travel have fascinated audiences and prompted debate since at least the 19th century. What is behind our fascination with time travel? What does it mean to be out of one's own era? How do different media tell these stories and what does this reveal about the media's relationship to time? This collection of new essays--the first to address time travel across a range of media--answers these questions by locating time travel narratives within their cultural, historical and philosophical contexts. Texts discussed include Doctor Who, The Terminator, The Georgian House, Save the Date, Back to the Future, Inception, Source Code and others.