James Bond is one of the best-known cultural icons of the global entertainment industry. A sizable share of the world's population has seen at least one Bond film, and the products of the Bond franchise have become ubiquitous in popular culture. This success is partly due to the fact that Bond has developed nothing short of his own cultural mythology. Its name is also Bond: 'James Bond', in inverted commas. The collection of essays in this volume investigate into the cultural, historical, political and economic aspects of that mythology. Bond's iconic status today may well hide the fact that over the years, 'James Bond' has acquired very different meanings in a variety of contexts and in different cultures. Since his first appearance in 1953, Bond has developed into a protean cultural phenomenon entangled in the histories of Western cultures, and he has provided a screen onto which the heterogeneous desires of nationally, culturally and socially diverse readers, viewers, users and consumers have been projected. The book approaches the Bond phenomenon as a contested element of the cultures that both created him and that he helped to create. The contributors discuss James Bond's multiple meanings from a historicizing cultural studies perspective in six key areas of Bond scholarship: (inter)medialities, narrative and genres, identities, gender, space and tourism, and intertexts.weiterlesen