Abstract
It is now possible to specify more precisely the conditions of existence of Bond as a popular hero. In functioning as a moving point of reference within post-war popular culture, the figure of Bond has been constructed and been operative in the relations between a considerable and accumulating set of texts, different in its total size and composition as well as in its internal configuration at different moments in Bond’s career as a popular hero. These texts have included the films and novels in which Bond has functioned as the central protagonist, the serialisations of the novels in, for example, the Daily Express and Playboy interviews with Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Ian Fleming, photo-features on ‘the girls of James Bond’ and many more: John Barry’s 007 theme music; the impressive list of hit singles derived from the films — Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger for example — and so on. Added to these have been the sedimentations of Bond in the world of objects. Through its use in advertising and commodity design, the figure of Bond has become tangled up in the world of things resulting in a series of coded objects (lipstick, lingerie, Action Man type dolls), functioning like textual meteorites, highly condensed and materialised chunks of meaning.
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Notes and References
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© 1987 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott
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Bennett, T., Woollacott, J. (1987). Reading Bond. In: Bond and Beyond. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18610-5_4
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