Pop Culture in Context
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Edited by:
Elizabeth Faber
The Pop Culture in Context book series takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach to examine all aspects of popular culture, including mass media, fandom, and ephemera, across all media, platforms, and genres. The series will publish monographs and edited volumes with theoretical lenses and methodologies that push the boundaries of traditional academic research, with emphasis on writing that is accessible across disciplines. The specific aim is to facilitate cross-disciplinary conversations about pop culture and its role in shaping and reflecting global cultures. The target audience is students, scholars and researchers working in a wide range of fields, such as pop culture studies, cultural studies, literature, film, television, new media, sociology, and/or anthropology.
Advisory Board
Peter Cullen Bryan (Clemson University)
Harriet Earle (Sheffield Hallam University)
Rebecca Frost (Northern Michigan University)
Adam Golub (California State University)
Katrin Horn (University of Greifswald)
Bethan Jones (University of South Wales and Cardiff University)
Laura Kitchings (independent scholar)
Peter Kunze (Tulane University)
Stephen Mallory (Lawrence Technological University)
Christina Meyer (University of Hamburg)
Carey Millsap Spears (Moraine Valley Community College)
Lyz Reblin-Renshaw (College of the Holy Cross)
Nele Sawallisch (University of Trier)
Steffi Shook (Manhattanville University)
Maria Sulimma (Freiburg University)
Author / Editor information
Elizabeth Faber, Dean College, Franklin, MA, USA; Emily-Hamilton Honey, SUNY Canton, New York, USA; Judith Rauscher, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Christmas is not just a day or a frame of mind as Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) imparts in Miracle on 34th Street (1947); Christmas is also a vehicle for national mythmaking as an idealising mirror for American cultural and political attitudes of a given moment. Via a case study on Hollywood Christmas films released between 1946 and 1961, A Very Cold War Christmas offers an examination of political pressures on Hollywood in the post-war period and the cultural ramifications of federal involvement in the motion picture industry. As the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings in 1947 and the FBI gathered reports on potential communist subversion in Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Hollywood executives began to bend to the socially conservative pressures of this post-war moment. Using Christmas films as the core of this investigation to identify and analyse changes within the genre as they relate to and reflect changes in the wider cultural and political moment exposes for film scholars, students, and non-specialists how these federal and external pressures on Hollywood moulded these holiday favourites throughout the 1950s and set the social standard for decades of Christmas releases.
