Understanding popular culture

What is popular culture? How does it differ from mass culture? What do popular texts reveal about class, race, and gender dynamics in a society? This book takes a new approach to the study of such cultural artifacts as jeans, tabloid newspapers and TV game shows. Fiske differentiates between mass culture - the cultural products put out by an industrialized, capitalist society, and popular culture - the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and message. Companion volume to Reading the Popular, this book presents a radically different theory of what it means for culture to be popular: that is, literally, of the people.