Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 163

Introduction
As with every issue of PCR, diversity dominates Volume 10, #2. In this
issue, we continue our practice of presenting cutting edge scholarship on Popular
and American Culture in words and format that can be understood by scholars
across the disciplines whether the authors are discussing opera or architecture,
film or folk music, religion or politics, all of which are included in this issue.
On one end of the musical spectrum, Wheeler Winston Dixon, who will
be the keynote speaker at our year 2000 conference, provides cutting edge criticism
of Philip Glass’ contemporary opera Monsters o f Grace, and at the other, William
Thompson examines the contributions of Tom T. Hall. Three articles deal with
translations of literature to film. Tina Harris’ “Interrogating the Representation of
African American Female Identity in the Films Waiting to Exhale and Set It O ff
provides an interesting counterpoint to Qun Wang’s “Positionality, Film and Asian
American Literature,” while Craig Frischkom does his own interrogation of the
first filmic translation of a Henry James work. Gwenda Young’s study of Jacques
Tourneur’s war films provides yet another commentary on the popular culture of
Hollywood.
The influence of Popular Culture on children comes under scrutiny in
Earnest N. Bracey’s “American Popular Culture and the Politics of Race in Dr.
Seuss’ The Sneetches" and in Becky L. Smith’s “What Disney Teaches Our Children
about Leadership” and Ronald R. Roach takes us to an earlier time in his examination
of archetypal metaphors in The Shadow radio show. Liza Hansen explores the
imaginative possibilities in architecture in “Spaces of Seduction and Desire: Temples
of Pleasure.” Satish Sharma studies the merging of religion and popular culture in
“Bhakti as a Popular Religious and Cultural Movement,” while on a very different
note, William Petty discusses the prurient (verging on perverse) possibilities in the
reading of popular fiction in his analysis of Nicholson Baker’s novels Vox and The
Fermata. Finally, rounding out the issue, the new faces and ethics of tourism are
examined in Jeffrey Alan Melton’s “The Trouble with Tourists,” and Jon Trombold’s
“High and Low in the Himalayas: John Krakauer’s Into Thin A ir f Remember that
our Milleniel Conference will be held February 4 through 6,2000. See the Call for
Papers included or visit our website.

Felicia Campbell