The decline of the soap opera as a major form of popular culture highlights the importance of that form in creating and maintaining a shared subculture for women. Soap operas are contrasted with recent television and film works that present the struggles of women in a different way, highlighting the distinctive features of soap operas as women's…

Each of the world's major cities is known in the movie world as the exemplar of a specific mood, atmosphere, or spirit and the natural setting for particular kinds of movie stories. Paris, London, New York, and Chicago have their respective types of picture. Los Angeles has such an urban personality in imagination. Those distinctive story lines…

A new movie version of Shakespeare's classic troubling comedy, "The Merchant of Venice" (Brokaw, Cowan, Navidi, Piette, & Radford, 2004), has appeared, bringing up an ancient issue of the possible bigotry of the greatest writer in the English language. Shakespeare's plays about minority characters in the Venetian Republic have caused more and more…