The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture

The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture PDF Author: B. Murphy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137353724
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture argues that complex and often negative initial responses of early European settlers continue to influence American horror and gothic narratives to this day. The book undertakes a detailed analysis of key literary and filmic texts situated within consideration of specific contexts.

The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture

The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture PDF Author: B. Murphy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137353724
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture argues that complex and often negative initial responses of early European settlers continue to influence American horror and gothic narratives to this day. The book undertakes a detailed analysis of key literary and filmic texts situated within consideration of specific contexts.

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture

The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture PDF Author: B. Murphy
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230244750
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The first sustained examination of the depiction of American suburbia in gothic and horror films, television and literature from 1948 to the present day. Beginning with Shirley Jackson's The Road Through the Wall , Murphy discusses representative texts from each decade, including I Am Legend , Bewitched , Halloween and Desperate Housewives .

Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism

Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism PDF Author: Alex Bevan
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786839954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Gothic tourism is a growing phenomenon and a medium through which Gothic fictions and folkloric tales are re-imagined and generated. This book examines the complex relationship between contemporary English Gothic attractions and storytelling, uncovering how works of Gothic fiction can both inspire Gothic tourism and emerge from the spaces of Gothic tourism, contending that Gothic tourist attractions are multi-layered storytelling experiences. Contributing to the study of literature and place, Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism draws together the study of literary Gothic tourism and spatial philosophy, offering interdisciplinary analysis into the interface between Gothic narrative(s) and the spaces in which the tourist navigates. The storytelling practices taking place in Gothic caves, theme parks, ghost tours and rural walks serve to reflect contemporary fears and anxieties. This book situates the act of touring a Gothic site as a process of literary and social discovery.

Consuming Gothic

Consuming Gothic PDF Author: Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137450517
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book offers a critical analysis of the relationship between food and horror in post-1980 cinema. Evaluating the place of consumption within cinematic structures, Piatti-Farnell analyses how seemingly ordinary foods are re-evaluated in the Gothic framework of irrationality and desire. The complicated and often ambiguous relationship between food and horror draws important and inescapable connections to matters of disgust, hunger, abjection, violence, as well as the sensationalisation of transgressive corporeality and monstrous pleasures. By looking at food consumption within Gothic cinema, the book uncovers eating as a metaphorical activity of the self, where the haunting psychology of the everyday, the porous boundaries of the body, and the uncanny limits of consumer identity collide. Aimed at scholars, researchers, and students of the field, Consuming Gothic charts different manifestations of food and horror in film while identifying specific socio-political and cultural anxieties of contemporary life.

The American Villain

The American Villain PDF Author: Richard A. Hall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
The American Villain: Encyclopedia of Bad Guys in Comics, Film, and Television seeks to provide one go-to reference for the study of the most popular and iconic villains in American popular culture. Since the 1980s, pop culture has focused on what makes a villain a villain. The Joker, Darth Vader, and Hannibal Lecter have all been placed under the microscope to get to the origins of their villainy. Additionally, such bad guys as Angelus from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows have emphasized the desire for redemption—in even the darkest of villains. Various incarnations of Lucifer/Satan have even gone so far as to explore the very foundations of what we consider "evil." The American Villain: Encyclopedia of Bad Guys in Comics, Film, and Television seeks to collect all of those stories into one comprehensive volume. The volume opens with essays about villains in popular culture, followed by 100 A–Z entries on the most notorious bad guys in film, comics, and more. Sidebars highlight ancillary points of interest, such as authors, creators, and tropes that illuminate the motives of various villains. A glossary of key terms and a bibliography provide students with resources to continue their study of what makes the "baddest" among us so bad.

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic PDF Author: Clive Bloom
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030331369
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1216

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Book Description
“Simply put, there is absolutely nothing on the market with the range of ambition of this strikingly eclectic collection of essays. Not only is it impossible to imagine a more comprehensive view of the subject, most readers – even specialists in the subject – will find that there are elements of the Gothic genre here of which they were previously unaware.” - Barry Forshaw, Author of British Gothic Cinema and Sex and Film The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic is the most comprehensive compendium of analytic essays on the modern Gothic now available, covering the vast and highly significant period from 1918 to 2019. The Gothic sensibility, over 200 years old, embraces its dark past whilst anticipating the future. From demons and monsters to post- apocalyptic fears and ecological fantasies, Gothic is thriving as never before in the arts and in popular culture. This volume is made up of 62 comprehensive chapters with notes and extended bibliographies contributed by scholars from around the world. The chapters are written not only for those engaged in academic research but also to be accessible to students and dedicated followers of the genre. Each chapter is packed with analysis of the Gothic in both theory and practice, as the genre has mutated and spread over the last hundred years. Starting in 1918 with the impact of film on the genre's development, and moving through its many and varied international incarnations, each chapter chronicles the history of the gothic milieu from the movies to gaming platforms and internet memes, television and theatre. The volume also looks at how Gothic intersects with fashion, music and popular culture: a multi-layered, multi-ethnic, even a trans-gendered experience as we move into the twenty first century.

Dining with Madmen

Dining with Madmen PDF Author: Thomas Fahy
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496821556
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In Dining with Madmen: Fat, Food, and the Environment in 1980s Horror, author Thomas Fahy explores America’s preoccupation with body weight, processed foods, and pollution through the lens of horror. Conspicuous consumption may have communicated success in the eighties, but only if it did not become visible on the body. American society had come to view fatness as a horrifying transformation—it exposed the potential harm of junk food, gave life to the promises of workout and diet culture, and represented the country’s worst consumer impulses, inviting questions about the personal and environmental consequences of excess. While changing into a vampire or a zombie often represented widespread fears about addiction and overeating, it also played into concerns about pollution. Ozone depletion, acid rain, and toxic waste already demonstrated the irrevocable harm being done to the planet. The horror genre—from A Nightmare on Elm Street to American Psycho—responded by presenting this damage as an urgent problem, and, through the sudden violence of killers, vampires, and zombies, it depicted the consequences of inaction as terrifying. Whether through Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, a vampire’s thirst for blood in The Queen of the Damned and The Lost Boys, or an overwhelming number of zombies in George Romero’s Day of the Dead, 1980s horror uses out-of-control hunger to capture deep-seated concerns about the physical and material consequences of unchecked consumption. Its presentation of American appetites resonated powerfully for audiences preoccupied with body size, food choices, and pollution. And its use of bodily change, alongside the bloodlust of killers and the desolate landscapes of apocalyptic fiction, demanded a recognition of the potentially horrifying impact of consumerism on nature, society, and the self.

Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts

Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts PDF Author: Amanda Howell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501394428
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts speaks to how a transnational array of recent screen entertainments participate, through horror, in public discourses of history, the social and creative work of reshaping popular understanding of our world through the lens of the past. Contemporary film and television – and popular screen cultures more generally – are distinguished by their many and varied engagements with history, including participation in worldwide movements to reconcile past losses and injuries with present legacies. The chapters in this collection address themselves to 21st-century screen horror's participation in this widespread fascination with and concern for the historical - its recurrent reimagining of the relation between the past and present, which is part of its inheritance from the Gothic. They are concerned with the historical work of horror's spectral occupations, its visceral threats of violence and its capacity for exploring repressed social identities, as well as the ruptures and impositions of colonization and nationhood. Trauma is a key theme in this book, examined through themes of war and genocide, ghostly invasions, institutionalized abuse, apocalyptic threat and environmental destruction. These persistent, fearful reimaginings of the past can take many lurid – sometimes tritely generic – forms. Together, these chapters explore and reflect upon horror's ability to speak through them to the unspoken of history, to push the boundaries and probe the fault-lines and ideological impositions of received historical narratives – while reminding us that history and the historical imagination persist as sites of contention.

Future Folk Horror

Future Folk Horror PDF Author: Simon Bacon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666921246
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes folk horror by looking at its recent popularity in novels and films such as The Ritual (2011), The Witch (2015), and Candyman (2021). Countering traditional views of the genre as depictions of the monstrous, rural, and pagan past trying to consume the present, the contributors to this collection posit folk horror as being able to uniquely capture the anxieties of the twenty-first century, caused by an ongoing pandemic and the divisive populist politics that have arisen around it. Further, this book shows how, through its increasing intersections with other genres such as science fiction, the weird, and eco-criticism as seen in films and texts like The Zero Theorum (2013), The Witcher (2007–2021), and Annihilation (2018) as well as through its engagement with topics around climate change, racism, and identity politics, folk horror can point to other ways of being in the world and visions of possible futures.

A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English

A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English PDF Author: Sherri L. Brown
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442277483
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
The Gothic began as a designation for barbarian tribes, was associated with the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, was used to describe a marginalized literature in the late eighteenth century, and continues today in a variety of forms (literature, film, graphic novel, video games, and other narrative and artistic forms). Unlike other recent books in the field that focus on certain aspects of the Gothic, this work directs researchers to seminal and significant resources on all of its aspects. Annotations will help researchers determine what materials best suit their needs. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English covers Gothic cultural artifacts such as literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames. This authoritative guide equips researchers with valuable recent information about noteworthy resources that they can use to study the Gothic effectively and thoroughly.