In recent years, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan's major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. This timely volume investigates how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan's ident...

Cuba, an island 750 miles long, with a population of about 11 million, lies less than 100 miles off the U. S. coast. Yet the island's influences on America's cultural imagination are extensive and deeply ingrained. In the engaging and wide-ranging "H...

London's Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: its fin-de-siecle buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became...

Hollywood's famous sign, constructed of massive white block letters set into a steep hillside, is an emblem of the movie capital it looms over and an international symbol of glamour and star power. To so many who see its image, the sign represents th...

The fascinus, or phallus, was at the heart of classical Roman art and life. No god was more represented in ancient Rome than the phallic deity Priapus, and the fescennine verses, one of the earliest forms of Roman poetry, accompanied the celebrations...

Images of suffering male bodies permeate Western culture, from Francis Bacon's paintings and Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs to the battered heroes of action movies. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines – including religious studies,...

Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With "Cosmos", the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of...