Download or read book American Zombie Gothic written by Kyle William Bishop and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zombie stories are peculiarly American, as the creature was born in the New World and functions as a reminder of the atrocities of colonialism and slavery. The voodoo-based zombie films of the 1930s and '40s reveal deep-seated racist attitudes and imperialist paranoia, but the contagious, cannibalistic zombie horde invasion narrative established by George A. Romero has even greater singularity. This book provides a cultural and critical analysis of the cinematic zombie tradition, starting with its origins in Haitian folklore and tracking the development of the subgenre into the twenty-first century. Closely examining such influential works as Victor Halperin's White Zombie, Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie, Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2, Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, and, of course, Romero's entire "Dead" series, it establishes the place of zombies in the Gothic tradition. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Download or read book How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture written by Kyle William Bishop and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-10-02 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 2000s, popular culture has experienced a “Zombie Renaissance,” beginning in film and expanding into books, television, video games, theatre productions, phone apps, collectibles and toys. Zombies have become allegorical figures embodying cultural anxieties, but they also serve as models for concepts in economics, political theory, neuroscience, psychology, computer science and astronomy. They are powerful, multifarious metaphors representing fears of contagion and doom but also isolation and abandonment, as well as troubling aspects of human cruelty, public spectacle and abusive relationships. This critical examination of the 21st-century zombie phenomenon explores how and why the public imagination has been overrun by the undead horde.
Download or read book Better Off Dead written by Deborah Christie and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has the zombie metaphor meant in the past? Why does it continue to be, so prevalent in our culture? This collection seeks to provide an archaeology of the zombietracing its lineage from Haiti, mapping its various cultural transformations, and suggesting the post-humanist direction in which the zombie is ultimately heading.
Download or read book Zombies written by Roger Luckhurst and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Add a gurgling moan with the sound of dragging feet and a smell of decay and what do you get? Better not find out. The zombie has roamed with dead-eyed menace from its beginnings in obscure folklore and superstition to global status today, the star of films such as 28 Days Later, World War Z, and the outrageously successful comic book, TV series, and video game—The Walking Dead. In this brain-gripping history, Roger Luckhurst traces the permutations of the zombie through our culture and imaginations, examining the undead’s ability to remain defiantly alive. Luckhurst follows a trail that leads from the nineteenth-century Caribbean, through American pulp fiction of the 1920s, to the middle of the twentieth century, when zombies swarmed comic books and movie screens. From there he follows the zombie around the world, tracing the vectors of its infectious global spread from France to Australia, Brazil to Japan. Stitching together materials from anthropology, folklore, travel writings, colonial histories, popular literature and cinema, medical history, and cultural theory, Zombies is the definitive short introduction to these restless pulp monsters.
Download or read book Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film written by Keith McDonald and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at contemporary Gothic cinema within a transnational approach. With a focus on the aesthetic and philosophical roots which lie at the heart of the Gothic, the study invokes its literary as well as filmic forebears by exploring how these styles informed strands of the modern filmic Gothic: the ghost narrative, folk horror, the vampire movie, cosmic horror and, finally, the zombie film. In recent years, the concept of transnationalism has ‘trans’-cended its original boundaries, perhaps excessively in the minds of some. Originally defined in the wake of the rise of globalisation in the 1990s, as a way to study cinema beyond national boundaries, where the look and the story of a film reflected the input of more than one nation, or region, or culture. It was considered too confining to study national cinemas in an age of internationalization, witnessing the fusions of cultures, and post-colonialism, exile and diasporas. The concept allows us to appreciate the broader range of forces from a wider international perspective while at the same time also engaging with concepts of nationalism, identity and an acknowledgement of cinema itself.
Download or read book American Gothic written by Jason Haslam and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new critical companion to the Gothic traditions of American CultureThis new Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. Featuring new critical essays by established and emerging academics from a range of national backgrounds, this collection offers new discussions and analyses of canonical and lesser-known texts in literature and film, television, photography, and video games. Its scope ranges from the earliest manifestations of American Gothic traditions in frontier narratives and colonial myths, to its recent responses to contemporary global events. Key Features Features original critical writing by established and emerging scholarsSurveys the full range of American Gothic, from its earliest texts to 21st Century worksIncludes critical analyses of American Gothic in new media and technologiesWill establish new benchmarks for the critical understanding of American Gothic traditions
Download or read book Horrors of War written by Cynthia J. Miller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and popular culture brings those thoughts to life. Supernatural tales of war told in print, on screen, and in other media depict angels, demons, and legions of the undead fighting against—or alongside—human soldiers. Ghostly war ships and phantom aircraft carry on their never-to-be-completed missions, and the spirits—sometimes corpses—of dead soldiers return to confront the enemies who killed them, comrades who betrayed them, or leaders who sacrificed them. In Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled essays that explore the meaning and significance of these tales. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war? In what ways do these stories reflect or challenge the popular memories of particular wars? How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice? Divided into four sections, chapters examine undead war stories in film (Carol for Another Christmas, The Devil’s Backbone), television (The Twilight Zone), literature (The Bloody Red Baron, Devils of D-Day), comics (Weird War Tales, The Haunted Tank), graphic novels (The War of the Trenches), and gaming (Call of Duty: World at War). Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, these essays address such themes as monstrous enemies and enemies made monstrous, legacies and memories of war, and the war dead who refuse to rest. Drawing together stories from across wars, branches of service, and generations of soldiers—and featuring more than fifty illustrations—Horrors of War will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, military history, and cultural history.
Download or read book Reading the Great American Zombie written by T. May Stone and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-08-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the human understanding of life and death, the zombie figure represents a fragmentation of personhood. From its earliest appearances in literature, the zombie characterized a human being that was no longer an indivisible whole, embodying the ontological debate over which elements of personhood are most uniquely human. Through its literary evolution, the zombie's missing element gradually approached a finer definition, as narratives moved beyond highlighting metaphysically opaque concepts like "soul" or "will." Studying over a century of American literary history, this book explores how zombies translate cultural concepts and definitions of personhood. Chapters detail how literary zombies have long presented narratives of American cultural self-examination.
Download or read book Zombie Theory written by Sarah Juliet Lauro and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 659 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie’s ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties—ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism—has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other. Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong’o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.
Download or read book The American Imperial Gothic written by Johan Hoglund and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imagination of the early twenty-first century is catastrophic, with Hollywood blockbusters, novels, computer games, popular music, art and even political speeches all depicting a world consumed by vampires, zombies, meteors, aliens from outer space, disease, crazed terrorists and mad scientists. These frequently gothic descriptions of the apocalypse not only commodify fear itself; they articulate and even help produce imperialism. Building on, and often retelling, the British ’imperial gothic’ of the late nineteenth century, the American imperial gothic is obsessed with race, gender, degeneration and invasion, with the destruction of society, the collapse of modernity and the disintegration of capitalism. Drawing on a rich array of texts from a long history of the gothic, this book contends that the doom faced by the world in popular culture is related to the current global instability, renegotiation of worldwide power and the American bid for hegemony that goes back to the beginning of the Republic and which have given shape to the first decade of the millennium. From the frontier gothic of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly to the apocalyptic torture porn of Eli Roth's Hostel, the American imperial gothic dramatises the desires and anxieties of empire. Revealing the ways in which images of destruction and social upheaval both query the violence with which the US has asserted itself locally and globally, and feed the longing for stable imperial structures, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of popular culture, cultural and media studies, literary and visual studies and sociology.
Download or read book Zombies written by Bob Curran and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the myths, legends, and folklore of many peoples, the returning, physical dead play a significant role, whether they are the zombies of Haiti or the draugr of Scandinavia. But what are the origins of an actual bodily return from the grave? Does it come from something deep within our psyche, or is there some truth to it? In Zombies, Bob Curran explores how some of these beliefs may have arisen and the truths that lay behind them, examining myths from all around the world and from ancient times including Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Celtic. Curran traces the evolution of belief in the walking cadaver from its early inception in religious ideology to the "Resurrections" and cataleptics of 18th century Europe, from prehistoric tale to Arthurian romance. Zombies even examines the notion of the "living dead" in the world today—entities such as the "living mummies" of Japan. Zombies is a unique book, the only one to systematically trace the development of a cultural idea of physical resurrection and explore the myths that have grown around it, including the miracles of Old Testament prophets. It will interest those enticed by the return of the corporeal dead and also those curious as to how such an idea sits within the historical context.
Download or read book We re All Infected written by Dawn Keetley and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection brings together an introduction and 13 original scholarly essays on AMC's The Walking Dead. The essays in the first section address the pervasive bloodletting of the series: What are the consequences of the series' unremitting violence? Essays explore violence committed in self-defense, racist violence, mass lawlessness, the violence of law enforcement, the violence of mourning, and the violence of history. The essays in the second section explore an equally urgent question: What does it mean to be human? Several argue that notions of the human must acknowledge the centrality of the body--the fact that we share a "blind corporeality" with the zombie. Others address how the human is closely aligned with language and time, the disappearance of which are represented by the aphasic, timeless zombie. Underlying each essay are the game-changing words of The Walking Dead's protagonist Rick Grimes to the other survivors: "We're all infected." The violence of the zombie is also our violence; their blind drives are also ours. The human characters of The Walking Dead may try to define themselves against the zombies but in the end their bodies harbor the zombie virus: they are the walking dead. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Download or read book Undead Souths written by Eric Gary Anderson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines physical, symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms of undeadness in a variety of media and historical periods.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic written by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-23 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion offers a thorough overview of the diversity of the American Gothic tradition from its origins to the present.
Download or read book Beyond the Living Dead written by Bruce Peabody and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968, George Romero's film Night of the Living Dead premiered, launching a growing preoccupation with zombies within mass and literary fiction, film, television, and video games. Romero's creativity and enduring influence make him a worthy object of inquiry in his own right, and his long career helps us take stock of the shifting interest in zombies since the 1960s. Examining his work promotes a better understanding of the current state of the zombie and where it is going amidst the political and social turmoil of the twenty-first century. These new essays document, interpret, and explain the meaning of the still-budding Romero legacy, drawing cross-disciplinary perspectives from such fields as literature, political science, philosophy, and comparative film studies. Essays consider some of the sources of Romero's inspiration (including comics, science fiction, and Westerns), chart his influence as a storyteller and a social critic, and consider the legacy he leaves for viewers, artists, and those studying the living dead.
Download or read book The Playful Undead and Video Games written by Stephen J. Webley and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the central role of the zombie in contemporary popular culture as they appear in video games. Moving beyond traditional explanations of their enduring appeal - that they embody an aesthetic that combines horror with a mindless target; that lower age ratings for zombie games widen the market; or that Artificial Intelligence routines for zombies are easier to develop - the book provides a multidisciplinary and comprehensive look at this cultural phenomenon. Drawing on detailed case studies from across the genre, contributors from a variety of backgrounds offer insights into how the study of zombies in the context of video games informs an analysis of their impact on contemporary popular culture. Issues such as gender, politics, intellectual property law, queer theory, narrative storytelling and worldbuilding, videogame techniques and technology, and man's relation to monsters are closely examined in their relation to zombie video games. Breaking new ground in the study of video games and popular culture, this volume will be of interest to researchers in a broad range of areas including media, popular culture, video games, and media psychology.
Download or read book American Gothic Tales written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1996-12-01 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers. Joyce Carol Oates has a special perspective on the “gothic” in American short fiction, at least partially because her own horror yarns rank on the spine-tingling chart with the masters. She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that ties Edgar Allan Poe to Anne Rice and to recognize the dark psychological bonds between Henry James and Stephen King. In showing us the gothic vision—a world askew where mankind’s forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawless—Joyce Carol Oates includes Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Herman Melville’s horrific tale of factory women, “The Tartarus of Maids,” and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward,” which are rarely collected and appear together here for the first time. Added to these stories of the past are new ones that explore the wounded worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Raymond Carver, and more than twenty other wonderful contemporary writers. This impressive collection reveals the astonishing scope of the gothic writer’s subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. With Joyce Carol Oates’s superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didn’t create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith.
