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Metagaming
The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. Elegantly defined as “games about games,” metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the rules: from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renaissance painting, algorithmic trading, professional sports, and the War on Terror. In Metagaming, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux demonstrate how games always extend beyond the screen, and how modders, mappers, streamers, spectators, analysts, and artists are changing the way we play. Metagaming uncovers these alternative histories of play ...
A Scary Little Christmas
Controversial yet beloved among audiences, Christmas-themed horror movies emerged in the early 1970s and gained a notorious reputation with Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), depicting Santa as an ax-wielding maniac. Some parents and conservative groups condemned the film, while others embraced the portrayal of Yuletide as a backdrop for fear and dread. Drawing on interviews with directors, producers, special effects artists, photographers and actors, this book celebrates the sordid, colorful history of the Christmas horror subgenre. Psycho Santa films such as Christmas Evil (1980) and 3615 code Pere Noel (1989) are examined, along with "Yule-Die" slashers like The Dorm that Dripped Blood (1982), Black Christmas (1974) and Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972). Commercial successes like Gremlins (1984) and Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) are covered, as well as more recent releases such as Better Watch Out (2016), Red Christmas (2016) and Deathcember (2019). Rare photographs, promotional materials and an annotated filmography are provided.
Generation Zombie
Growing from their early roots in Caribbean voodoo to their popularity today, zombies are epidemic. Their presence is pervasive, whether they are found in video games, street signs, hard drives, or even international politics. These eighteen original essays by an interdisciplinary group of scholars examine how the zombie has evolved over time, its continually evolving manifestations in popular culture, and the unpredictable effects the zombie has had on late modernity. Topics covered include representations of zombies in films, the zombie as environmental critique, its role in mass psychology and how issues of race, class and gender are expressed through zombie narratives. Collectively, the work enhances our understanding of the popularity and purposes of horror in the modern era. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Diseased Cinema
Discusses how the depiction of diseases in movies has changed over the last century and what these changes reveal about American culture Examines disease movies as a genre that has emerged over the last century and includes pandemic and zombie films Reveals the changes to the genre’s narratives over three broad time periods: the beginning of film through the 1980s, the 1990s through the mid-2000s, and the late 2000s and afterward Investigates the evolution of disease movies through three perspectives: historically notable films, remakes, and franchises Analyses disease movies in the context of the development of American, global capitalism and the fragmentation of the social contract Expla...
Aesthetic Animism
A poetics appropriate to the digital era that connects digital poetry to traditional poetry's concerns with being. This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry's concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications). Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poeti...
Post-Apocalyptic Patriarchy
Twenty-first century American television series such as Revolution, Falling Skies, The Last Ship and The Walking Dead have depicted a variety of doomsday scenarios—nuclear cataclysm, rogue artificial intelligence, pandemic, alien invasion or zombie uprising. These scenarios speak to longstanding societal anxieties and contemporary calamities like 9/11 or the avian flu epidemic. Questions about post-apocalyptic television abound: whose voices are represented? What tomorrows are they most afraid of? What does this tell us about the world we live in today? The author analyzes these speculative futures in terms of gender, race and sexuality, revealing the fears and ambitions of a patriarchy in flux, as exemplified by the “return” to a mythical American frontier where the white male hero fights for survival, protects his family and crafts a new world order based on the old.
Redefining Sports Media
This book argues that the examination of sports media within cultural and media studies is organized around more than just a shared topic: mediated sports. What count as "sports media" in journals, books, and conferences are extremely diverse; they can cover athlete expression on social media, shoe commercials, gender in sports commentary, Indigenous name change activists, and fantasy sports. Besides being mediated and, in some cases, loosely connected to sports events and leagues, it is hard to see what they all share that could serve as the foundation for a unified field of study. Jason Kido Lopez argues that sports media are defined by genre, which is reflected in their industries, within...
Expanding Austenland
Expanding Austenland: The Pride and Prejudice Fanfiction Archive explores Jane Austen’s reception in popular culture through an exploration of the ever-expanding terrain of online fanfiction, professionally published (profic) texts, and other intertextual reworkings inspired by the author’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. The book argues that given its pervasiveness, Pride and Prejudice could be usefully considered not as a single novel, but as an entire ‘archive’ of interrelated texts, or as a portal that opens a ‘virtual world’ for readers to expand and explore. By examining the Pride and Prejudice archive of interrelated texts, this book analyses the process through which an individual novel can develop a virtual life, or afterlife. The evolving world that is opened by Pride and Prejudice, and extended and enriched through fanfiction, is conceptualised in the monograph as ‘Austenland’.
Going Viral
Outbreak narratives have proliferated for the past quarter century, and now they have reached epidemic proportions. From 28 Days Later to 24 to The Walking Dead, movies, TV shows, and books are filled with zombie viruses, bioengineered plagues, and disease-ravaged bands of survivors. Even news reports indulge in thrilling scenarios about potential global pandemics like SARS and Ebola. Why have outbreak narratives infected our public discourse, and how have they affected the way Americans view the world? In Going Viral, Dahlia Schweitzer probes outbreak narratives in film, television, and a variety of other media, putting them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news...
Colonial Revivals
In the long nineteenth century, the specter of lost manuscripts loomed in the imagination of antiquarians, historians, and writers. Whether by war, fire, neglect, or the ravages of time itself, the colonial history of the United States was perceived as a vanishing record, its archive a hoard of materially unsound, temporally fragmented, politically fraught, and endangered documents. Colonial Revivals traces the labors of a nineteenth-century cultural network of antiquarians, bibliophiles, amateur historians, and writers as they dug through the nation's attics and private libraries to assemble early American archives. The collection of colonial materials they thought themselves to be rescuing...
