How can we study popular culture? What makes 'popular culture' popular? Is popular culture important? What influence does it have?An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture provides a clear and comprehensive answer to these questions. It presents a critical assessment of the major ways in which popular culture has been interpreted, and suggests how it may be more usefully studied.Dominic Strinati uses the examples of cinema and television to show how we can understand popular culture from sociological and historical perspectives.