Author: Amy M. Clarke
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786462043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
The 13 essays in this volume explore Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular Twilight series in the contexts of literature, religion, fairy tales, film, and the gothic. Several examine Meyer's emphasis on abstinence, considering how, why, and if the author's Mormon faith has influenced the series' worldview. Others look at fan involvement in the Twilight world, focusing on how the series' avid following has led to an economic transformation in Forks, Washington, the real town where the fictional series is set. Other topics include Meyer's use of Quileute shape-shifting legends, Twilight's literary heritage and its frequent references to classic works of literature, and the series' controversial depictions of femininity.
Author:
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476620830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
This comprehensive bibliography covers writings about vampires and related creatures from the 19th century to the present. More than 6,000 entries document the vampire's penetration of Western culture, from scholarly discourse, to popular culture, politics and cook books. Sections by topic list works covering various aspects, including general sources, folklore and history, vampires in literature, music and art, metaphorical vampires and the contemporary vampire community. Vampires from film and television--from Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and the Twilight Saga--are well represented.
Author: Claudia Bucciferro
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810892863
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
When Stephenie Meyer’s first novel, Twilight, was published in 2005, it had an astounding reception, selling millions of copies. The three sequels that followed—New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn—became international bestsellers as well. The worldwide success of the movie adaptations further cemented the series as a cultural force on par with other popular franchises such as Harry Potter. But why is this? What is it about Twilight that makes it so appealing to people? And what does Twilight’s success reveal about transnational cultural trends? In The Twilight Saga: Exploring the Global Phenomenon, Claudia Bucciferro has assembled a collection of essays that examine the series from a variety of perspectives. The essays in this volume consider both the books and the movies, emphasizing the relationships among the texts, the audience, the entertainment industry, and other aspects of the multimillion-dollar franchise. Organized into five sections, the chapters offer a contextualization of the series’ appeal, explore different types of Twilight audiences, analyze the cultural referents associated with the main characters, and present new ideas regarding representations of gender, sex, class, and race. Concluding essays examine the saga’s influence, unveiling its links to newer workssuch as The Hunger Games, True Blood, and Fifty Shades of Grey. Making sense of how the popular franchise fits within larger contexts, this collection addresses Twilight from an interdisciplinary framework, including insights from history, philosophy, literature, sociology, fan studies, intercultural communication, film studies, and more. Featuring contributions by scholars from the United States, France, Spain, Chile, and Australia, this book emphasizes the international and intercultural relevance of the Twilight phenomenon. The collection is aimed at scholars and students of media and popular culture, but it will also appeal to general readers who are familiar with the series.
Author: Amy Billone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317381920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
This book investigates the reappearance of the 19th-century dream-child from the Golden Age of Children's Literature, both in the Harry Potter series and in other works that have reached unprecedented levels of popular success today. Discussing Harry Potter as a reincarnation of Lewis Carroll's Alice and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Billone goes on to examine the recent resurrection of Alice in Tim Burton's Alice, and of Peter Pan in Michael Jackson and in James Bond. Visiting trends that have emerged since the Harry Potter series ended, the book studies revisions of the dream-child in texts and films that have inspired mass fandom in the twenty-first century: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, E.L. James's 50 Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. The volume argues that the 21st-century desire to achieve dream-states in relationship to eternal youth results from the way that dreams provide a means of realizing the fantastic yet alarming possibility of escaping from time. This current identification with the dream-child stems from the threat of political unrest and economic and environmental collapse as well as from the simultaneous technophilia and technophobia of a culture immersed in the breathless revolution of the digital age. This book not only explores how the dream-child from the past has returned to reflect misgivings about imagined dystopian futures but also reveals how the rebirth of the dream-child opens up possibilities for new narratives where happy endings remain viable against all odds. It will appeal to scholars in a wide variety of fields including Childhood Studies, Children's/YA Literature, Cinema Studies, Cultural Studies, Cyberculture, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Gothic Studies, New Media, and Popular Culture.
Author: Joseph Crawford
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783161760
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
This book explores the history of the paranormal romance genre; from its origins in the revisionist horror fiction of the 1970s, via its emergence as a minor sub-genre of romantic fiction in the early 1990s, to its contemporary expansion in recent years into an often-controversial genre of mainstream fiction. Tracing the genre from its roots in older Gothic fiction written by and for women, it explores the interconnected histories of Gothic and romantic fiction, from Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen in the eighteenth century to Buffy, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries in the present day. In doing so, it investigates the extent to which the post-Twilight paranormal romance really does represent a break from older traditions of Gothic fiction – and just what it is about the genre that has made it so extraordinarily divisive, captivating millions of readers whilst simultaneously infuriating and repelling so many others.
Author: Matti Savolainen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317126041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
In demonstrating the global reach of Gothic literatures, this collection takes up the influence of the Gothic mode in literatures that may be geographically remote from one another but still share related issues of minor languages, nation building, place and race. Suggesting that there is a parallel between certain motifs and themes found in the Gothic of the North (Scandinavia, Northern Europe and Canada) and South (Australia, South Africa and the US South), the essays explore the transgressions and confusion of borders and limits, whether they be linguistic, literary, generic, class-based, gendered or sexual. The volume includes essays on a wide diversity of authors and topics: Jan Potocki, Gustav Meyrink, William Godwin, Alan Hollinghurst, Marlene van Niekerk, John Richardson, antislavery discourse and the Gothic imagination, the Australian aboriginal Gothic, vampires of Post-Soviet Gothic society, Danish, Swedish and Finnish fiction and film, and the Canadian female Gothic and the death drive. What distinguishes this book from other collections on the Gothic is the coverage of themes and literatures that are either lacking in the mainstream research on the Gothic or are referred to only briefly in other book-length studies. Experts in the Gothic and those new to the field will appreciate the book's commitment to situating Gothic sensibilities in an international context.
Author:
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 178683104X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic. This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.
Author: Carys Crossen
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786834588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
The werewolf is an increasingly popular subject of academic study, and several monographs have been published in recent years. Of these, the closest in format and subject matter (e.g. the contemporary werewolf in popular fiction) are as follows: Chantal Bourgault Du Coudray, The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror, and the Beast Within (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006) Brent A. Stypczynski, The Modern Literary Werewolf: A Critical Study of the Mutable Motif (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2013) Kimberly McMahon-Coleman and Rosalyn Weaver, Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2012)
Author: Sam George
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526102161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, race, genre, technology, consumption and social change. A coherent narrative follows Enlightenment studies of the vampire's origins in folklore and folk panics, the sources of vampire fiction, through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to Le Fanu's Carmilla. Further essays discuss the Undead in the context of Dracula, fin-de-siècle decadence, Nazi Germany and early cinematic treatments. The rise of the sympathetic vampire is charted from Coppola's film, Bram Stoker's Dracula, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. More recent manifestations in novels, TV, Goth subculture, young adult fiction and cinema are dealt with in discussions of True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and much more. Featuring distinguished contributors, including a prominent novelist, and aimed at interdisciplinary scholars or postgraduate students, it will also appeal to aficionados of creative writing and Undead enthusiasts. www.opengravesopenminds.com
Author: Jonathan A. Allan
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1786990377
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Virginity is of concern here, that is its utter messiness. At once valuable and detrimental, normative and deviant, undesirable and enviable. Virginity and its loss hold tremendous cultural significance. For many, female virginity is still a universally accepted condition, something that is somehow bound to the hymen, whereas male virginity is almost as elusive as the G-spot: we know it's there, it’s just we have a harder time finding it. Of course boys are virgins, queers are virgins, some people reclaim their virginities, and others reject virginity from the get go. So what if we agree to forget the hymen all together? Might we start to see the instability of terms like untouched, pure, or innocent? Might we question the act of sex, the very notion of relational sexuality? After all, for many people it is the sexual acts they don’t do, or don’t want to do, that carry the most abundant emotional clout. Virgin Envy is a collection of essays that look past the vestal virgins and beyond Joan of Arc. From medieval to present-day literature, the output of HBO, Bollywood, and the films of Abdellah Taïa or Derek Jarman to the virginity testing of politically active women in Tahrir Square, the writers here explore the concept of virginity in today’s world to show that ultimately virginity is a site around which our most basic beliefs about sexuality are confronted, and from which we can come to understand some of our most basic anxieties, paranoias, fears, and desires.
