Product Description

It doesn't matter how you remember him--rockabilly rebel, all-American boy, B-movie idol, patriotic G.I., or Las Vegas superstar. Elvis Presley is the most enduring image in American popular culture. This book explains why.

Other authors have explored Elvis's life and music, but Erika Doss now examines his multifaceted image as the key to understanding the adulation that has survived his death. She has talked with fans and joined their clubs, studied their creations and made pilgrimages to Graceland, all to explore what these images mean to those who gaze upon them, make them, and collect them.

In researching Elvis Culture, Doss discovered that the visual image of Elvis endures because it was so carefully constructed from the start. Sifting through the visual glut of Elvisiana, she looks at how fans collect, arrange, and display Elvis paraphernalia, make Elvis artwork, and participate in the annual August rituals of Elvis Week. By engaging in these acts, she explains, they continually reinvent Elvis to mesh with their own personal and social preferences and to keep his memory alive.

Doss examines Elvis in specific contexts: as a religious icon honored in household shrines, as a focus of sexual fantasy for women and men (both straight and gay), as an inspiration for countless impersonators, and as an emblem of whiteness held in disdain by many blacks--despite his having crossed racial lines with his music. She also looks at how Elvis has become a sanitized, legally protected image controlled by Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., which bans the sale of black velvet paintings and licenses his likeness around the world.

As engrossing as it is informative, Elvis Culture strikingly demonstrates the power of the visual image in our culture and reveals much about American attitudes toward religion, sex, race, and celebrity-as well as about the construction of American identity in the late twentieth century.

This book is part of the CultureAmerica series.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1871209 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
If Elvis is dead, why does his image still permeate American culture, from postage stamps to Vegas stage shows? In her intelligent cultural analysis of one of this century's most revered, reviled and reviewed fan phenomena, Doss (Director of the University of Colorado at Boulder American Studies program) examines Elvis's enduring posthumous presence, among his unprecedented legions of fans as well as in the larger society that often looks askance at their fervent devotion. Exploring Elvis's multifaceted appeal, Doss argues convincingly that he crossed more than just musical boundaries, embodying the heady dangers of sexual ambiguity, racial transgression and even tackiness. Today, Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc. owns and guards Elvis's "official" image, policing illicit and improper usage: the group outlawed black velvet paintings in 1995 and obtained a cease-and-desist order to prevent artist and devotee Joni Mabe from making buttons featuring "Elvis's Hair." Doss evinces an anthropologist's detailed interest in the permutations of Elvis culture, from the MacLeod family's cheerful GracelandToo, a two-story tribute to Elvis paraphernalia, to Kiki Apostolakos's shrine to her spiritual relationship with the KingAbut the author is intrigued by more than just the artifacts and rituals. Her most striking insight is that Elvis's embodiment of contradictions allows aficionados and acolytes to engage in the ongoing process of creating Elvis's image, whatever Elvis Inc. may have to say. Doss's work is equally enjoyable for its considered analysis of fandom as for its vast catalogue of ways that fans honor their hero. The King may be dead, but his image is alive and well.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Twenty years after his death, Elvis Presley is still an American icon and shows no signs of flagging. Over a dozen new books about the King were published in 1998, and 60,000 fans show up at Graceland during Elvis week. Doss (Spirit Poles & Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities, Smithsonian, 1995) reveals the forces behind this obsession with the singer/actor whose image graces everything from stamps to car deodorizers. Through interviews with fans worldwide, Doss answers the question, Why Elvis? and examines the contradictory images of Elvis as idealized, rags-to-riches saint and transgendered erotic idol. Concluding that the phenomenon is a result both of the giant corporation that controls Elviss legacy and the fans who remake it to suit their own fantasies, Doss creates a very readable discussion of the origins and purposes of the popular image in society. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.Kelli N. Perkins, Herrick P.L., Holland,
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"'Elvis lives,' and so does popular culture--ever so vibrantly." -- Chronicle of Higher Education

A welcome addition to the growing body of work that explores America's star-saturated culture and its effects. -- American Quarterly

An exuberantly detailed study that compels us to take the fundamental question about popular culture--‘Why Elvis?'--to heart. -- American Studies

An intelligent cultural analysis of one of this century's most revered, reviled, and reviewed fan phenomena. -- Publishers Weekly

The book itself is a remarkable Presley artifact. -- New York Times Book Review

Customer Reviews

Iconic Status
The cover of Erika Doss's invaluable guide to how one itty bitty rock legend became the inimitable, unquestionable image he is today tells it all. Elvis on a stamp, on envelopes and mail sent daily throughout the United States? Yep, he's not just a singer anymore, as Doss points out in her exhaustive search for the how's and why's of Elvis's rise to status of cultural icon, to the imagistic equivalent of Jesus on the cross. Elvis is, in fact, more than just an image too, she points out; he's a corporation.

Doss's book was a revelation of sorts, close to the epiphany she recounts earlier on, realizing that people have come to worship Elvis as wholeheartedly as they do any god or cult leader. Doss also examines the elements of our own culture, which pave the way for such a dramatic recreation of image in this age of media saturation. She talks about the tight rein Priscilla Presley and Elvis Presley Enterprises have kept on what they will allow his image and name to grace. Also outlining the myths involved in such a recreation, Doss shows us just how much we can trust the products and decisions of corporations whose inherent goal is pretty apparent: more and more profit.

_Elvis Culture_ also acknowledges the fans, perhaps the true creators of the Elvis image. Doss tells us about "Graceland Too" whose owner is devoted to the collecting of "Elvis stuff." She profiles an artist who channels her love for Elvis into sometimes room-size installations of kitschy devotion to the King, and another woman who has made (and charges no admission to see) a very miniature version of Presley's Memphis mansion.

Nowhere in the book, however, does Erika Doss ignore what such behavior suggests about us as a society. Whether we take the Graceland tour and support a multi-million dollar company committed to supposedly "preserving" the Presley name, or trust the fans to the more pure, downhome maintenance of Elvis's image,we must acknowledge that all of these people involved in Elvis culture are products of American society. Submission to the corporation exemplifies our culture's handing itself over to the Starbuck's and Wal-marts of the world, and the fans' collection perhaps even further shows America's servitude to a relentless materialism. Doss knows this, and she does a great job examining all of the different aspects of culture Elvis Presley and his image have invaded, and even more importantly perhaps, why we have let them.

Good Research
All,

I am an American Studies major at the University of Notre Dame and have had the most unpleasant experience with Professor Doss as an inapt professor and writer. The class that I have completed was Introduction to American Studies and one of the assigned readings was her own book "Elvis Culture." It stands testament to her inability to formulate cohesive arguments which tend to tangent off on to mildly relevant topics, which she animatedly views as the only logical way to make sense of topics which truly have no correct solution. This often leaves one with the sense that she must have done extensive research on American pop culture, and that she now loves her own opinions on subjective topics. This is a bad buy / author / class, and she has single handedly made me want to change my major.

The definitive word on Elvis fan-dom
Doss's book is full of pleasure even as it takes on the question of Elvis's significance as a sort of secular religious figure. Doss interviewed and questionnaired hundreds or maybe thousands of hardcore fans, and she's listened carefully to them. The result is a work that's a pleasure to read and revelatory of contemporary life at the same time. If you wonder what's going on with American culture at the end of the millennium, Doss will give you some real insights.