A Gift from the Culture
"A Gift from the Culture", published in 1987, is a short work of space opera, by the Scottish science fiction author Iain M. Banks. The story is an early venture into the "complex and unusual and very distant" setting of the Culture, which Banks would further develop through various of full length novels, stories, and his essay "A Few Notes on the Culture".
Ray B. Browne
Ray Browne's works through the years laid the conceptual foundations for the study of popular culture. Among his key foundational works are his essay "Popular Culture: Notes Toward a Definition", which first appeared in the book Popular Culture and Curricula (1972, edited by Ray Browne and Ronald Ambrosetti), and books such as "Popular Culture and the Expanding Consciousness" (1973), "Challenges in American Culture" (1970, with Larry Landrum and W.K. Bottorff), "The Popular Culture Explosion" (1972, with David Madden), "Heroes of Popular Culture" (1972, with Marshall Fishwick and Michael Marsden), "Icons of Popular Culture" (1970, with Marshall Fishwick), "Icons of America" (1978, with Marshall Fishwick), "Rituals and Ceremonies in Popular Culture" (1980), "Objects of Special Devotion: Fetishism in Popular Culture" (1982), "Against Academia" (Popular Press, 1989; a semi-autobiographical book), "Dominant Symbols in Popular Culture" (1990, with Marshall Fishwick and Kevin O. Browne), "Continuities in Popular Culture: The Present in the Past & the Past in the Present and Future" (1993, with Ronald Ambrosetti), "Popular Culture Studies Across the Curriculum" (2005), "Profiles of Popular Culture: A Reader" (2005), and "Mission Underway: The History of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Movement 1967–2001" (2002).