Popular Stories and Promised Lands

Popular culture stories - found in comic strips, TV programs, magazines, and movies - gain their popularity by evoking our desires and anxieties. Aden offers a well-constructed argument that creating a sense of place (and with it a sense of personal identity and community) serves as an important enticement for many popular cultures works.... Aden handles contemporary theory deftly [and] does an excellent job of identifying many of the tensions present in 20th-century America. - Quarterly Journal of Speech ""Stories encountered at the movies, on television, and in popular magazines are treated as reflections of the popular culture.... Believing that the American experience has been guided by a 'normative narrative' or 'grand narrative' that constitutes the 'American dream,' Aden holds that stories can be used to extract the 'rules' of a narrative, determine the direction, and identify conceptions of the 'promised lands' for a culture."" - Critical Studies in Mass Communication