The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1622736656 ISBN 13: 9781622736652

Publisher: Vernon Press, 2019

Synopsis

Artertainment is more than a novel aesthetic term reflecting the fact that art and entertainment have cross-pollinated each other throughout history. It is a creative strategy that purposely intertwines highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics in the name of reaching the connoisseurs and the masses.
The Art of Artertainment sets out to unravel the jumble of aesthetic faultlines and prejudices found wherever we find artistic crossovers—which is to say, everywhere. Revisionist, iconoclastic, and artertaining in its own right, it provides a new framework for the analysis of American nobrow culture from the Colonial times to the digitally turbocharged present.
 

About this title

About the Author

Peter Swirski is a Canadian literary and cultural critic featured in Canadian Who's Who. Currently Senior Research Associate at the Wirth Institute at the University of Alberta, Canada, and Honorary Professor of American Literature and Culture at Jinan University, China, he was formerly Distinguished Professor of American Studies and American Literature at SYSU in China, and Professor and Research Director at Europe's elite Helsinki Institute for Advanced Studies in Finland. He has published extensively on contemporary American literature and culture, including popular fiction and popular culture, winning critical awards and attracting praise ranging from the Financial Times to the TLS. Among his nineteen books, the groundbreaking From Lowbrow to Nobrowis a staple of popular culture studies, joined more recently by American Crime Fiction: A Cultural History of Genre Literature as Art and When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow: Popular Culture and the Rise of Nobrow. He has given keynotes and lectures on all continents of the world save Africa, in 2012 delivering a plenary at UNE's Institute for Global Humanities alongside Noam Chomsky. He has also made multiple television appearances in Europe, Russia, the United States, and Hong Kong, as well as on the BBC World Service with audiences of 200 million worldwide.

Review

This anthology of pioneering, highly readable essays on American popular culture focuses on how highbrow art and lowbrow entertainment have always dynamically and fruitfully interpenetrated one other in the USA. That openness to crossover is why American popular culture has come to dominate the globe. The proof that we live in a Nobrow Age? What more is needed than the award of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan! And who best to map out the larger cultural context than the contributors to this lively volume, whose coeditor and star contributor is the redoubtable Peter “Nobrow” Swirski?

Prof. Dr. Nicholas Ruddick
University of Regina, Canada

Edition details

• Publisher: Vernon Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1622736656
• ISBN 13: 9781622736652
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Swirski Peter, Vanhanen Tero Eljas