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Videogames and Horror
Videogames are full of horrors – and of horror, a facet of the media that has been largely overlooked by the academic community in terms of lengthy studies in the fast-growing field of videogame scholarship. This book engages with the research of prominent scholars across the humanities to explore the presence, role and function of horror in videogames, and in doing so it demonstrates how videogames enter discussion on horror and offer a unique, radical space that horror is particularly suited to fill. The topics covered include the construction of stories in videogames, the role of the monster and, of course, how death is treated as a learning tool and as a facet of horror.
Folk Horror
While the undisputed heyday of folk horror was Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the genre has not only a rich cinematic and literary prehistory, but directors and novelists around the world have also been reinventing folk horror for the contemporary moment. This study sets out to rethink the assumptions that have guided critical writing on the genre in the face of such expansions, with chapters exploring a range of subjects from the fiction of E. F. Benson to Scooby-Doo, video games, and community engagement with the Lancashire witches. In looking beyond Britain, the essays collected here extend folk horror's geographic terrain to map new conceptualisations of the genre now seen emerging from Italy, Ukraine, Thailand, Mexico and the Appalachian region of the US.
End-Game
Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.
On the Fringes of Literature and Digital Media Culture
On the Fringes of Literature and Digital Media Culture offers a polyphonic account of mutual interpenetrations of literature and new media. Shifting its focus from the personal to the communal and back again, the volume addresses such individual experiences as immersion and emotional reading, offers insights into collective processes of commercialisation and consumption of new media products and explores the experience and mechanisms of interactivity, convergence culture and participatory culture. Crucially, the volume also shows convincingly that, though without doubt global, digital culture and new media have their varied, specifically local facets and manifestations shaped by national contingencies. The interplay of the common subtext and local colour is discussed by the contributors from Eastern Europe and the Western world. Contributors are: Justyna Fruzińska, Dirk de Geest, Maciej Jakubowiak, Michael Joyce, Kinga Kasperek, Barbara Kaszowska-Wandor, Aleksandra Małecka, Piotr Marecki, Łukasz Mirocha, Aleksandra Mochocka, Emilya Ohar, Mariusz Pisarski, Anna Ślósarz, Dawn Stobbart, Jean Webb, Indrė Žakevičienė, Agata Zarzycka.
Posthuman Gothic
Posthuman Gothic is an edited collection of thirteen chapters, and offers a structured, dialogical contribution to the discussion of the posthuman Gothic. Contributors explore the various ways in which posthuman thought intersects with Gothic textuality and mediality. The texts and media under discussion – from I am Legend to In the Flesh, and from Star Trek to The Truman Show, transgress the boundaries of genre, moving beyond the traditional scope of the Gothic. These texts, the contributors argue, destabilise ideas of the human in a number of ways. By confronting humanity and its Others, they introduce new perspectives on what we traditionally perceive as human. Drawing on key texts of b...
Trauma in American Popular Culture and Cult Texts, 1980-2020
This book examines trauma in late twentieth- and twenty-first century American popular culture. Trauma has become a central paradigm for reading contemporary American culture. Since the early 1980s, an extensive range of genres increasingly feature traumatised protagonists and traumatic events. From traumatised superheroes in Hollywood blockbusters to apocalyptic-themed television series, trauma narratives abound. Although trauma is predominantly associated with high culture, this project shows how popular culture has become the most productive and innovative area of trauma representation in America. Examining film, television, animation, video games and cult texts, this book develops a series of original paradigms through which to understand trauma in popular culture. These include: popular trauma texts’ engagement with postmodern perspectives, formal techniques termed ‘competitive narration’, ‘polynarration’ and ‘sceptical scriptotherapy’, and perpetrator trauma in metafictional games.
Project(ing) Human: Representations of Disability in Science Fiction
This edited volume examines representations of disability within popular science fiction, using examples from television, film, literature, and gaming to explore how the genre of science fiction shapes cultural understanding of disability experience. Science fiction texts typically grapple with concepts such as transhumanism, embodiment, and autonomy more directly than do those of other genres. In doing so, they raise significant questions about the experience of disability. More broadly, they often convey the place of disability in not only the future but also the world of today. Through critical research, the chapters within this interdisciplinary collection explore what science fiction te...
Global Perspectives on Digital Literature
Global Perspectives on Digital Literature: A Critical Introduction for the Twenty-First Century explores how digital literary forms shape and are shaped by aesthetic and political exchanges happening across languages and nations. The book understands "global" as a mode of comparative thinking and argues for considering various forms of digital literature—the popular, the avant-garde, and the participatory—as realizing and producing global thought in the twenty-first century. Attending to issues of both political and aesthetic representation, the book includes a diverse group of contributors and a wide-ranging corpus of texts, composed in a variety of languages and regions, including East...
Theorizing Adaptation
From film and television theory to intertextuality, poststructuralism to queer theory, postcolonialism to meme theory, a host of contemporary theories in the humanities have engaged with adaptation studies. Yet theorizing adaptation has been deemed problematic in the humanities' theoretical and disciplinary wars, been charged with political incorrectness by both conservative and radical scholars, and declared outdated and painfully behind the times compared to other disciplines. And even separate from these problems of theorization is adaptation's subject matter - with many film adaptations of literature widely and simply declared "bad." In this thorough and groundbreaking study, author Kami...
Video Games and Comedy
Video Games and Comedy is the first edited volume to explore the intersections between comedy and video games. This pioneering book collects chapters from a diverse group of scholars, covering a wide range of approaches and examining the relationship between video games, humour, and comedy from many different angles. The first section of the book includes chapters that engage with theories of comedy and humour, adapting them to the specifics of the video game medium. The second section explores humour in the contexts, cultures, and communities that give rise to and spring up around video games, focusing on phenomena such as in-jokes, player self-reflexivity, and player/fan creativity. The third section offers case studies of individual games or game series, exploring the use of irony as well as sexual and racial humour in video games. Chapter “Emergence and Ephemerality of Humour During Live Coverage of Large-Scale eSports Events” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
