Libros

Modern views of the First World War have long been shaped by literature, film and television. However, the interactive nature of computer games is changing how such events are portrayed. The First World War in Computer Games examines analyses the world of combat and what it means for a player to be a soldier or a general in the First World War. It also examines the depiction and landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended and what it was for. Most importantly it investigates the different stories that computer games tell about the war, where these stories came from, and how they are shaped by wider social and historical knowledge. This book shows how computer games are at the forefront of new representations of the war.

Melodrama manipulates us to feel deeply about the structures that ground our experience of the world: our bodies, the family, the home, and the nation. For this reason, melodrama is a narrative and aesthetic form employed to sustain the national imagination. Globalization is a phenomenon that has profoundly changed how we live and connect to others, transforming our spatio-temporal parameters. Global Melodrama analyzes the ways in which melodrama addresses this new geopolitical reality and examines how contemporary films ask us to rethink how we organize, and tell stories about, our sense of identity and community. Through case-studies and close readings of films that emerge from different national and aesthetic traditions, Carla Marcantonio demonstrates how global melodramas, far from championing the borderless landscape that the term "global" might index, map new temporal, spatial, and embodied territories.

The 1951s saw perhaps the largest number of American films set on and around the US-Mexico border of any period of the twentieth century. Many of these films engaged with Cold War politics as they explored the relationship between the US and Mexico through ideas of romance, revolution, and regulation. With an analysis of Cold War era films including Border Incident, Where Danger Lives, and Touch of Evil, Stephanie Fuller illustrates how cinema across genres developed an understanding of what the US-Mexico border meant within the American cultural imaginary and the ways in which it worked to produce the border. Fuller illustrates how a particular cinematic location provides a new way of investigating cultural politics.

Media depictions of community are enormously influential on wider popular opinion about how people would like to live. In this study, Stephen Rowley examines depictions of ideal communities in Hollywood films and television and explores the implications of attempts to build real-world counterparts to such imagined places. He focuses on the ideals of small towns and suburbs featured during and shortly after World War II, tracking how these were an inspiration for post-World War II suburban development.

Exploration, intertwined with home-seeking, has always defined America. Geographic variation and a mobile populace have meant that America is always searching for a home, yet in love with travel. Here, Corbin argues that a wide swath of films about significant cultural landscapes in America evoke a sense of travel for their viewers, just by going to the movie theatre. She considers the dialectic between the thrill of seeing an "other" place and the security of being in a "familiar" place. The sum total of these virtual travel experiences from the mid1970s through the 1990s built a societal map of "popular multiculturalism" – of various landscapes in relation to each other – through a movie going experience that combined middlebrow entertainment with moderate-to-liberal politics.