Suchergebnisse

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The study investigates the cultural production of the visual iconography of popular pleasure grounds from the eighteenth century pleasure garden to the contemporary theme park. Deborah Philips identifies the literary genres, including fairy tale, gothic horror, Egyptiana and the Western which are common to carnival sites, tracing their historical transition across a range of media to become familiar icons of popular culture.Though the bricolage of narratives and imagery found in the contemporary leisure zone has been read by many as emblematic of postmodern culture, the author argues that the clash of genres and stories is less a consequence of postmodern pastiche than it is the result of a history and popular tradition of conventionalised iconography.

Main Street, USA is the corridor to the Disneyland parks, whether in Los Angeles, Paris, Florida, or Tokyo. Main Street offers the appearance of a public space, with architectural references to civic institutions, but is a bounded and privatized site, which requires an entrance fee. Main Street offers a nostalgic construction of early twentieth century American small-town life. It is also the space in the theme parks that is most dedicated to consumption. Main Street is an idealized urban landscape that has not stopped at the theme park; the Disney owned town, "Celebration," in Florida is organized around the same nostalgic wish for an urban context that offers itself as both traditional and modern. Main Street offers a version of America frozen at a point of late nineteenth century modernity; it presents a mythical reconciliation of past and future, ecology and consumption, and the local and the global in its simulacrum of a small-town America which could never have existed, but which can be endlessly reproduced across the globe.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors' central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK.