AustLit

'As it approaches its fifty-fifth year of publication, The Journal of Popular Culture provides a history of cultural forms and of thoughtful, changing attitudes towards them. To test out the value of tracing a popular form over these many decades of the journal, I recently did a survey of essays that mentioned the computer. The journal witnessed the arrival of the computer and often commented on its representation in mass media and its wholesale transformation of everyday life, including creative and scholarly activity.' (Editorial introduction)

'The Popular Culture Association (PCA) has such a distinctive personality and devotion to long‐lasting friendships that its losses are keenly felt. Early members in the heady days of revolutionizing an entirely new field of study have been the memory of the organization, reminding us of our mission and purpose. It may be hard to imagine a time when the study of popular culture was relatively unknown and even despised, when faculty members could not get funding from their institutions to attend the annual PCA meeting, when the national press ridiculed the field for leading to classes on roller coasters, and when PCA members understood themselves as a Midwestern vanguard for the people’s culture, positioned outside what Ray Browne considered the east coast world of the elites. With a fifty‐year history, the PCA has now seen several generations of scholars in its conference halls, bringing new energy to the field while preserving the legacy from the days when color television was still rather new.' (Editorial introduction)

'This special issue is the first sustained academic exploration of the contemporary adventure narrative across a wide range of media. While many other types of texts that emerged during the late‐eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including gothic horror, romance, travel narrative, and melodrama, have received considerable attention, the contemporary adventure narrative has been left out of or taken for granted by recent popular culture studies. The absence of adventure in recent scholarship may, paradoxically, have to do with the ubiquitous presence of the form. Like many other genres, adventure has invaded and merged with a host of other modes and genres, from television reality game shows, such as Survivor, to gritty war films, such as Black Hawk Down. Indeed, as several of the contributions to this issue demonstrate, the contemporary adventure form often appears in trans‐genre texts where the adventure component is perceived as secondary.' (Johan Höglund and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet : Revisiting Adventure: Special Issue Introduction )

'What are students of popular culture to do with the term “neoliberalism?” From one perspective, the term is already exhausted. Critics attack writing about neoliberalism for being reductive, for pursuing a critical “buzz‐word” that tends to oversimplify a complex set of economic and political processes. Fashionable terminology circulates with ever greater speed and intensity in academic discourse. Why cling to the outmoded? But, before shelving the topic, we must recognize that the tendency to seek new critical terms rapidly is itself informed by the dynamics of the neoliberal era. We should be wary of moving on a bit too quickly in pursuit of greener pastures. Even cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who admits the limitations of the catch‐all term, insists that the frame of neoliberalism serves a vital purpose by making visible a dense network of interrelated cultural changes over the past fifty years. For Hall, the term does not put a period at the end of the sentence. Instead, it offers common ground from which to begin further exploration. This special issue on neoliberalism in popular culture continues that exploration, showing how the concept still offers numerous avenues for productive inquiry.' (Introduction)