Undead in the West II

Undead in the West II PDF Author: Cynthia J. Miller
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810892650
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This companion to Undead in the West (Scarecrow 2012) explores the blending of the Western genre with zombies, vampires, mummies, ghosts, and spirits in comics, graphic novels, literature, games, new media, fandom and material culture.

Undead in the West II

Undead in the West II PDF Author: Cynthia J. Miller
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810892650
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book

Book Description
This companion to Undead in the West (Scarecrow 2012) explores the blending of the Western genre with zombies, vampires, mummies, ghosts, and spirits in comics, graphic novels, literature, games, new media, fandom and material culture.

Undead in the West

Undead in the West PDF Author: Cynthia J. Miller
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 081088545X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Undead in the West is a collection of essays that explore the many tropes and themes through which undead Westerns make the genre’s inner plagues and demons visible, and lay siege to a frontier tied to myths of strength, ingenuity, freedom, and independence. Featuring several illustrations and a filmography, the volume is divided into three sections: “Reanimating Classic Western Tropes” examines traditional Western characters, symbolism, and plot devices and how they are given new life in undead Westerns; “The Moral Order Under Siege” explores the ways in which the undead confront classic values and morality tales embodied in Western films; and “And Hell Followed with Him” looks at justice, retribution, and retaliation at the hands of undead angels and avengers.

Zombies in Western Culture

Zombies in Western Culture PDF Author: John Vervaeke
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 178374331X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.

Speculative Wests

Speculative Wests PDF Author: Michael Kyle Johnson
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496234812
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Looking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, we can see multiple examples of what Shelley S. Rees calls a "changeling western," what others have called "weird westerns," and what Michael K. Johnson refers to as "speculative westerns"--that is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history. Speculative Wests investigates both speculative westerns and other speculative texts that feature western settings. Just as "western" refers both to a genre and a region, Johnson's narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the "speculative Wests" that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland's Deathless Divide (2020), the reimagined future Navajo nation of Rebecca Roanhorse's Sixth World series (2018-19), and the complex temporal and geographic borderlands of Alfredo Véa's time travel novel The Mexican Flyboy (2016). Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West.

Undead in the West

Undead in the West PDF Author: Cynthia J. Miller
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810885441
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled a collection of essays that explore the many tropes and themes through which undead Westerns make the genre's inner plagues and demons visible, and lay siege to a frontier tied to myths of strength, ingenuity, freedom, and independence. The volume is divided into three sections: "Reanimating Classic Western Tropes" examines traditional Western characters, symbolism, and plot devices and how they are given new life in undead Westerns; "The Moral Order Under Siege" explores the ways in which the undead confront classic values and morality tales embodied in Western films; and "And Hell Followed with Him" looks at justice, retribution, and retaliation at the hands of undead angels and avenger. The subjects explored here run the gamut from such B films as Curse of the Undead and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula to A-list features like From Dusk 'til Dawn and Jonah Hex, as well as animated films (Rango) and television programs (The Walking Dead and Supernatural). Other films discussed include Sam Raimi's Bubba Ho-Tep, John Carpenter's Vampires, George Romero's Land of the Dead, and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Featuring several illustrations and a filmography, Undead in the West will appeal to film scholars, especially those interested in hybrid genres, as well as fans of the Western and the supernatural in cinema.

International Westerns

International Westerns PDF Author: Cynthia J. Miller, Institute for Liberal Arts, Emerson College
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 081089288X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
This collection of essays examines non-American Westerns and explores their significance, meanings, and reception. These essays also look at how Hollywood sensibilities are reflected, distorted, or challenged by filmmakers of Westerns in Europe, Australia, and other regions outside the U.S.

The Playful Undead and Video Games

The Playful Undead and Video Games PDF Author: Stephen J. Webley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351716514
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
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.

Postracial Fantasies and Zombies

Postracial Fantasies and Zombies PDF Author: Eric King Watts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520403770
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This book understands the postracial as a genre--like the zombie apocalypse--that signals a disturbance in society that is felt as terrifying and exciting. The postracial is repetitive and reproduces blackened biothreat bodies, rituals of securitization, and fantasies of the reclamation of white masculine sovereignty. Eric King Watts examines key moments when Blackness became an object of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preparing the "scientific" and philosophical ground for interpreting zombie lore. The book treats the "Greater Caribbean" as a transformative space in which an antiblack infrastructure arose and interrogates the US's militarized domination of Haiti that was the context in which the zombie emerged. Watts traces variations of the form and function of the zombie to contemplate how it matters to our contemporary struggles with racism and pandemic policies.

Weird Westerns

Weird Westerns PDF Author: Kerry Fine
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496221745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
2021 Top Ten Finalist for the Locus Awards in Nonfiction Joshua Smith's chapter "Uncle Tom's Cabin Showdown" won the 2021 Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature Association Weird Westerns is an exploration of the hybrid western genre--an increasingly popular and visible form that mixes western themes, iconography, settings, and conventions with elements drawn from other genres, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Despite frequent declarations of the western's death, the genre is now defined in part by its zombie-like ability to survive in American popular culture in weird, reanimated, and reassembled forms. The essays in Weird Westerns analyze a wide range of texts, including those by Native American authors Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) and William Sanders (Cherokee); the cult television series Firefly and The Walking Dead; the mainstream feature films Suicide Squad and Django Unchained; the avant-garde and bizarre fiction of Joe R. Lansdale; the tabletop roleplaying game Deadlands: The Weird West; and the comic book series Wynonna Earp. The essays explore how these weird westerns challenge conventional representations by destabilizing or subverting the centrality of the heterosexual, white, male hero but also often surprisingly reinforce existing paradigms in their inability to imagine an existence outside of colonial frameworks.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire

The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire PDF Author: Simon Bacon
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031362535
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1746

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Book Description