Elvis Culture
Fans, Faith, and Image
Erika Doss
New in Paperback: March 2004
xiv, 290 pages, 67 photographs, 5-1/2 x 9
CultureAmerica
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-1337-3, $15.95 (t)
Also available in cloth:
ISBN 978-0-7006-0948-2, $29.95
 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.
“An intelligent cultural analysis of one of this century’s
most revered, reviled, and reviewed fan phenomena.”--Publishers
Weekly
“An exuberantly detailed and illustrated study that succeeds
in demonstrating the complexity of Elvis culture and absolutely
compels us to take the fundamental question about popular culture
(‘Why Elvis?’) to heart.”--American Studies
“A welcome addition to the growing body of work that explores
America’s star-saturated culture and its effects. For Doss,
Elvis has become an important catalyst for diverse Americans’
understandings of themselves, their relationships to others, and
their experience of the modern world.”--American Quarterly
“The book itself is a remarkable Presley artifact.”--New
York Times Book Review
"'Elvis lives,' and so does popular culture--ever so vibrantly."--Michael
Kammen in the Chronicle of Higher Education
"A fascinating account of the re-creation of Elvis, before
and after his death, into a multifaceted icon for his thousands
of adoring fans. Doss has delved deep into the meaning of Elvis
and come up with fresh new insights into American dreams and desires.
A great read!"--Elaine Tyler May, author of Homeward
Bound
"As fine a study of fandom as any I've seen, Elvis Culture
offers a lively account of why and how Elvis is still everywhere-as
patron saint and as passion, workingman and wigger, commodity
and goof. A thoroughly knowledgeable and deeply sympathetic book."--Eric
Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and
the American Working Class
"One of the best books on Elvis that I've ever read. A stellar
piece of cultural criticism, Elvis Culture is not only
a very smart book, it's an exceptionally readable one as well:
a difficult feat that Doss pulls off with style and wit."--Gilbert
B. Rodman, author of Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous
Career of a Living Legend
"Doss's memorable book never succumbs to either slavish
admiration or slapdash censure. It adds to our understanding of
how the love we bear our cultural icons is as complex and life
enhancing as those icons themselves."--David Sanjek, Director,
BMI Archives, and coauthor of American Popular Music Business
in the Twentieth Century
"Doss reveals with remarkable clarity the complexities and
contradictions of fandom and the strategies through which a wide
variety of Americans use the stuff of commercial mass culture
to make their lives meaningful. A significant and persuasively
argued book."--Barry Shank, author of Dissonant
Identities: The Rock 'n' Roll Scene in Austin, Texas
"Doss offers rich insights into the culture and logic of
fandom. Asking how fans use the image of Elvis in their own lives,
she unearths the contradictory meanings about sex, race, class,
and religion that Elvis has come to embody after death."--Lynn
Spigel, author of Make Room for TV
ERIKA DOSS is chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and
the author of Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural
Democracy in American Communities.
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