This fully revised and updated 4th edition of John Storey's successful reader in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture provides a theoretical, analytical and historical introduction to the study of popular culture, and provides key primary coverage of fundamental issues in cultural studies. Content has been revised and essays have been replaced and updated. The Reader offers students the ...

No one has done more to shape our view of what makes us human than Charles Darwin, whose seismic theory of evolution turned the Victorian world upside down, utterly rewrote our notions of life on earth and is still attacked by religious creationists today.

Swift's exuberant, bawdy fable is a unique satire on politics, religion, fashion, madness and on writing itself - one which can be seen as anticipating the postmodern age with its witty digressions and dissection of the art of fiction.

Schopenhauer's perception of the importance of art, morality and self awareness in a blind struggle against a Godless, meaningless world radically transformed our understanding of the individual and remains a searing vision of the human condition.

Gibbon's subversive and iconoclastic description of the rise of Christianity inspired outrage upon publication and remains one of the most eloquent and damning indictments of the delusory nature of faith.

In 1995 BBC Television's Bookworm programme conducted a poll amongst viewers to determine their favourite poems. The top 100 are presented in this book. They include the winner, Kipling's If , and many other classics, as well as modern verse by writers such as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.