Since the late 1980s, when studies of pulp fiction, popular music and Andy Warhol first started to appear, the question of how pop culture might relate to modernity has become pressing. Howard Hampton's Born in Flames and Takayuki Tatsumi's Full Metal Apache, the two most recent books on the subject, explore this issue extensively, while simultaneously wrestling with the precise parameters of the pop aesthetic.

Hampton's Born in Flames is a collection of articles he wrote between 1987 and 2007, which first appeared in outlets such as Artforum, the Village Voice and the New York Times. The author is less concerned with technique and more with a general response to the world around him: late-night shows on television, music videos, films and literature. The aesthetic power of his book lies in the innovative readings of postmodern narrative on offer, ranging from David Lynch's films to teen television drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Embedded in these beautifully written pieces is a valuable investigation of pop culture as art form and critique and as an immediate, nearly uncensored, response to modernity. Several pieces are of great topical value, including both the chapter on “Natural Born Killers versus Forrest Gump,” which discusses these as converging metamovies that meet in their shared “mania for order” (57), and also the piece on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in terms of classic American fiction as laid down by D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature in 1923.

The collected articles are not arranged chronologically; the book's structure is not informed by shifts in the field, as one might expect, but is designed to communicate Hampton's personal history of reading pop culture. He claims that

He gives one significant reason for this decision. He argues that the pop aesthetic does not need a timeline because it is informed by, and by extension is a representation of, “a timeless modernity” (18) that constructs its own present. This seems unconvincing. Pop culture is in itself a historical phenomenon framed by specific timelines and sociohistorical shifts. The multifaceted pop aesthetic that Hampton recognizes and celebrates is a response to constant changes in cultural attitudes, and it would be a great pity to ignore this in favour of an overarching, continuous and timeless genre.

The importance of a link between history and pop culture is stressed by Tatsumi in Full Metal Apache. On the first page of the book, before the list of contents, Tatsumi inserts an extract from T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), which talks of the “historical sense” as a combination of “the timeless” and “the temporal” and as that which makes “a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.” Now the decision to frame a book on avant-pop America, cyberpunk Japan, magic realist Tokyo and Godzilla with Eliot's conception of the modern as constructed by a perpetual relationship with the past is an interesting one. Alongside Tatsumi's analysis, it helps to locate the pop aesthetic at the centre of a wider and ongoing critical enquiry which tries to explicate the arts' relation to past, present and future, and to notions of imagination, truth and historical validity. Tatsumi shows in this book that cyberpunk and avant-pop are concerned with what constitutes the contemporaneous aesthetic and how that feeds into our construction of reality and our future.

Tatsumi's book is a brilliant contribution to the field of pop culture, containing chapters on not only all the usual suspects (Shinya Tsukamoto, J. G. Ballard, William Gibson) but also on the potential of literary theory in a global context, on the relationship between history and aesthetics and on the link between geography and artistic production. Although Hampton's book does not directly address the theoretical issues above, it has a similar effect. Both stand as refreshing takes on a field that has struggled to define itself and its own validity for such a long time.