Author: Maggie Parke
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078648912X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Since the publication of Twilight in 2005, Stephenie Meyer's four-book saga about the tortured relationship between human heroine Bella Swan and her vampire love Edward Cullen has become a world-wide sensation--inciting screams of delight, sighs of derision, and fervent pronouncements. Those looking deeper into its pages and on screen can find intriguing subtexts about everything from gender, race, sexuality, and religion. The 15 essays in this book examine the texts, the films, and the fandom, exploring the series' cultural reach and offering one of the first thorough analyses of the saga.
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: 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: Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030717445
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
This book explores the narratives of girlhood in contemporary YA vampire fiction, bringing into the spotlight the genre’s radical, ambivalent, and contradictory visions of young femininity. Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska considers less-explored popular vampire series for girls, particularly those by P.C. and Kristin Cast and Richelle Mead, tracing the ways in which they engage in larger cultural conversations on girlhood in the Western world. Mapping the interactions between girl and vampire corporealities, delving into the unconventional tales of vampire romance and girl sexual expressions, examining the narratives of women and violence, and venturing into the uncanny vampire classroom to unmask its critique of present-day schooling, the volume offers a new perspective on the vampire genre and an engaging insight into the complexities of growing up a girl.
Author: Mary Harrod
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030709949
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Despite the widely publicised prejudice faced by women in Hollywood, since around 1990 a significant minority of female directors have been making commercially and culturally impactful films there across the full range of genres. This book explores movies by filmmakers Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig, including many which are still critically neglected or derided, seeing them as offering a new understanding of genre filmmaking. That is, like many other contemporary films but in a striking proportion within the smaller set of mainstream movies by women, this body of work revels in a heightened genre status that allows its authors to simultaneously address ‘intellectual’ cinephilic pleasures and bodily-emotive ones. Arguing through close analysis that these films demonstrate the inseparability of such strategies of engagement in contemporary genre cinema, Heightened Genre reclaims women’s mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory itself.
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: Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317609026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This book brings together a carefully selected range of contemporary disciplinary approaches to new areas of Gothic inquiry. Moving beyond the representational and historically based aspects of literature and film that have dominated Gothic studies, this volume both acknowledges the contemporary diversification of Gothic scholarship and maps its changing and mutating incarnations. Drawing strength from their fascinating diversity, and points of correlation, the varied perspectives and subject areas cohere around a number of core themes — of re-evaluation, discovery, and convergence — to reveal emerging trends and new directions in Gothic scholarship. Visiting fascinating areas including the Gothic and digital realities, uncanny food experiences, representations of death and the public media, Gothic creatures and their popular legacies, new approaches to contemporary Gothic literature, and re-evaluations of the Gothic mode through regional narratives, essays reveal many patterns and intersecting approaches, forcefully testifying to the multifaceted, although lucidly coherent, nature of Gothic studies in the 21st Century. The multiple disciplines represented — from digital inquiry to food studies, from fine art to dramaturgy — engage with the Gothic in order to offer new definitions and methodological approaches to Gothic scholarship. The interdisciplinary, transnational focus of this volume provides exciting new insights into, and expanded and revitalised definitions of, the Gothic and its related fields.
Author: M. Reimer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137356006
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Seriality and Texts for Young People is a collection of thirteen scholarly essays about series and serial texts directed to children and youth, each of which begins from the premise that a basic principle of seriality is repetition.
Author: Rebekah Fitzsimmons
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Contributions by Megan Brown, Jill Coste, Sara K. Day, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Amber Gray, Roxanne Harde, Tom Jesse, Heidi Jones, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Leah Phillips, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, S. R. Toliver, Jason Vanfosson, Sarah E. Whitney, and Casey Alane Wilson While critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first-century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, classroom materials and scholarship have remained static in focus and slight in scope. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give overwhelm conversations among scholars and critics—but these are far from the only texts in need of analysis. Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limiting perspective, bringing together essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have until now been overlooked. The collection tackles a diverse range of topics—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice. The approaches are united, though, by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting entryway into a field that continues to grow and change even as its works captivate massive audiences. It will prove a crucial addition to the library of any scholar or instructor of young adult literature.
Author: George Ritzer
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761941873
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 570
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Book Description
The Handbook of Social Theory presents an authoritative and panoramic critical survey of the development, achievement and prospects of social theory.
