ABSTRACT
Contemporary popular culture is engaged in a rich and multi-levelled set of representational relations with austerity. This collection seeks to explore these relations, to ask: how does popular culture give expression to austerity; how are its effects conveyed; how do texts reproduce and expose its mythic qualities? These chapters provide, as an assemblage, a reading of cultural texts in circulation in the present ‘age of austerity’. Through our central focus-popular culture-we consider the impact and inuence of austerity across media and textual categories. The collection presents a theoretical deconstruction of popular culture’s reproduction of, and response to, mythical expressions of ‘austerity’ from political media discourse, music, videogames, social media, lm, television, journalism, folk art, food, protest movements, slow media and the practices of austerity in everyday life.
