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Examining the significance of women's work in popular film genres, this test sheds light on women's contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola, and Kelly Reichard.
Winner of the the 2021 Best Edited Collection Award from BAFTSS Winner of the 2021 British Fantasy Award in Best Non-Fiction Finalist for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction Runner-Up for Book of the Year in the 19th Annual Rondo Halton Classic Horror Awards “But women were never out there making horror films, that’s why they are not written about – you can’t include what doesn’t exist.” “Women are just not that interested in making horror films.” This is what you get when you are a woman working in horror, whether as a writer, academic, festival programmer, or filmmaker. These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, cri...
This volume examines contemporary reformulations of the ‘Final Girl’ in film, TV, literature and comic, expanding the discussion of the trope beyond the slasher subgenre. Focusing specifically on popular texts that emerged in the 21st century, the volume asks: What is the sociocultural context that facilitated the remarkable proliferation of the Final Girls? What kinds of stories are told in these narratives and can they help us make sense of feminism? What are the roles of literature and media in the reconsiderations of Carol J. Clover’s term of thirty years ago and how does this term continue to inform our understanding of popular culture? The contributors to this collection take up these concerns from diverse perspectives and with different answers, notably spanning theories of genre, posthumanism, gender, sexuality and race, as well as audience reception and spectatorship.
The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture examines the gothic mode deployed in a variety of texts that touch upon inherently US American themes, demonstrating its versatility and ubiquity across genres and popular media. The volume is divided into four main thematic sections, spanning representations related to ethnic minorities, bodily monstrosity, environmental anxieties, and haunted technology. The chapters explore both overtly gothic texts and pop culture artifacts that, despite not being widely considered strictly so, rely on gothic strategies and narrative devices.
How work and capitalism inspire horror in modern film. American ideals position work as a source of pride, opportunity, and meaning. Yet the ravages of labor are constant grist for horror films. Going back decades to the mad scientists of classic cinema, the menial motel job that prepares Norman Bates for his crimes in Psycho, and the unemployed slaughterhouse workers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, horror movies have made the case that work is not so much a point of pride as a source of monstrosity. Editors Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton assemble the first study of horror’s critique of labor. In the 1970s and 1980s, films such as The Shining and Dawn of the Dead responded to deindustr...
This book explores the various manifestations of affects in British theatre of the 21st century. The introduction gives a concise survey of existing and emerging theoretical and research trends and argues in favour of a capacious understanding of affects that mediates between more autonomous and more social approaches. The twelve chapters in the collection investigate major works in Britain by playwrights and theatre makers including Mojisola Adebayo, Mike Bartlett, Alice Birch, Caryl Churchill, Tim Crouch and Andy Smith, Rachel De-lahay, Reginald Edmund, James Fritz, David Greig, Idris Goodwin, Zinnie Harris, Kieran Hurley, Lucy Kirkwood, Anders Lustgarten, Yolanda Mercy, Anthony Neilson, Lucy Prebble, Sh!t Theatre, Penelope Skinner, Stef Smith, Kae Tempest and debbie tucker green. The interpretations identify significant areas of tension as they relate affects to the fields of cognition, politics and hope. In this, the chapters uncover interrelations of thought, intention and empathy; they reveal the nexus between identities, institutions and ideology; and, finally, they explore how theatre can accomplish the transition from a sense of crisis to utopian visions.
Behind every crime novel there is a family. The author’s, the hero’s (or the heroine’s), and that of the villains themselves. Some families organise themselves into crime syndicates, controlling drugs, prostitution and illegal gambling. Others are simply dysfunctional, tearing themselves apart, fathers against sons, mothers against daughters, sisters against brothers, husbands against wives. Not everyone escapes alive. However, families do not exist in a vacuum. They are an important part of our society—for many, one of its most essential building blocks. That being said, society itself can impinge disastrously on personal relationships. War, that greatest of crimes, leaves children bereft of parents. Generations of children are stolen by cynical, racist administrators in supposedly civilised countries. Religion requires its followers to flourish and multiply, while abandoning all—including family—for their faith. All of these issues and more are explored in this collection of essays about crime fiction and the family.
This edited collection offers an exploration of American literature in the age of Trumpism—understood as an ongoing sociopolitical and affective reality—by bringing together analyses of some of the ways in which American writers have responded to the derealization of political culture in the United States and the experience of a ‘new’ American reality after 2016. The volume’s premise is that the disruptions and dislocations that were so exacerbated by the political ascendancy of Trump and his spectacle-laden presidency have unsettled core assumptions about American reality and the possibilities of representation. The blurring of the relationship between fact and fiction, bolstered ...
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.
This volume offers eight interdisciplinary readings to the films of Sofia Coppola, analyzing her oeuvre with a focus on her treatment of masculinity, sexual politics, bodies, and love.