In an unusual approach to cultural studies, John Maier examines a wide variety of modern Western and Eastern texts. He brings together very different forms of cultural production: modern and postmodern fiction and folktales, advertising copy and oral histories, travel literature, and ethnographic studies. Many academic disciplines are also juxtaposed literature and literary theory, linguistics, history, psychoanalysis, sociology, film studies, women s studies, and anthropology largely because they have themselves been transformed by the cultural questions raised here."