Materiality and Popular Culture : The Popular Life of Things

This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.

Anna Malinowska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures (IECL), University of Silesia, Poland. Her research interests embrace critical theory, popular culture, material culture and love studies. She is particularly interested in the formation of social and cultural norms and social-aesthetic codes of cultural production

Karolina Lebek is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures (IECL), University of Silesia, Poland. She specializes in early modern studies, specifically in the study of objects as well as material cultures, i. e. theorizing and representing things in cultural and literary practices.