Introduction: Popular Culture — The Conditions of Control?

Abstract

Popular culture is a notoriously difficult term to define particularly as definitions of an object of study largely depend on the method of study. There is, in other words, no objective reality whose nature would always be the same no matter from which angle it was approached. Many different approaches to popular culture — historical, linguistic, Marxist, feminist, structuralist and post structuralist — will be found in this volume and it is not the intention of this introduction to try and unify them into a single definition of the same. Indeed to do so would be to ignore that different aspects of popular culture work in different ways to produce different effects.