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One of the top-grossing independent films of all time, The Evil Dead (1981) sparked a worldwide cult following, resulting in sequels, remakes, musicals, comic books, conventions, video games and a television series. Examining the legacy of one of the all-time great horror films, this collection of new essays covers the franchise from a range of perspectives. Topics include The Evil Dead as punk rock cinema, the Deadites' (demon-possessed undead) place in the American zombie tradition, the powers and limitations of Deadites, evil as affect, and the films' satire of neoliberal individualism.
Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, edited by Jeffrey A. Sartain, combines the efforts of an international list of writers to explore the depths of Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction. Scholars have paid attention Palahniuk’s premiere novel, Fight Club, for years. Sacred and Immoral is the first anthology dedicated to scholarship focused on Palahniuk’s work following Fight Club, which he has been producing at an average of a book a year for thirteen years. By collecting the work of an interdisciplinary group of scholars under a single cover, Sacred and Immoral extends the reach of Palahniuk scholarship beyond any previous publication. Sacred and Immoral provides the single mo...
From trauma to postmodernism and gender theory, this guide surveys a full range of critical perspectives on three of Palahniuk's major novels, including Fight Club.
Reading the Social in American Studies offers a unique exploration of the advantages and benefits in using sociological terms and concepts in American literary and cultural studies and, conversely, in using literature—understood broadly—to uncover a microlevel of the social. Its temporal scope ranges from the early 19th to the 21st century, providing a historical dimension that is otherwise often missing from studies on the conjunction of literature and sociology. The contributors’ approaches include genre reflections as well as close readings, theoretical discussions of crucial sociological terms, and literary observations backed up by empirical sociological studies. The book will familiarize international readers with ideas on the social from both sides of the Atlantic, including scholarship of such figures as John Dewey, Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, and Pierre Bourdieu.
Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading explores how selected American and European literary texts, from the classic to the contemporary, represent reading as a dangerous endeavor. It investigates how the texts being read or the conditions of reading may produce danger and considers the various qualities of the dangers depicted: literal or metaphorical, real or imagined, minor or mortal. Whereas readers can readily imagine being depressed or bored by a book, or even perhaps corrupted in some moral fashion, readers typically assume that the mere words on a page cannot directly affect their health. Nevertheless, literature can and does stage readings in which readers suffer actual harm from the magical or supernatural qualities of a given text. Such impossibly dangerous reading fascinates, the author argues, by exaggerating the dangers that may inhabit certain real experiences of reading.
Counterculture, while commonly used to describe youth-oriented movements during the 1960s, refers to any attempt to challenge or change conventional values and practices or the dominant lifestyles of the day. This fascinating three-volume set explores these movements in America from colonial times to the present in colorful detail. "American Countercultures" is the first reference work to examine the impact of countercultural movements on American social history. It highlights the writings, recordings, and visual works produced by these movements to educate, inspire, and incite action in all eras of the nation's history. A-Z entries provide a wealth of information on personalities, places, events, concepts, beliefs, groups, and practices. The set includes numerous illustrations, a topic finder, primary source documents, a bibliography and a filmography, and an index.
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