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A Cultural History of the Disney Fairy Tale
This book charts the complex history of the relationship between the Disney fairy tale and the American Dream, demonstrating the ways in which the Disney fairy tale has been reconstructed and renegotiated alongside, and in response to important changes within American society. In all of its fairy tales of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Walt Disney studios works to sell its audiences the national myth of the United States at any one historical moment. With analyses of films and television programmes such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Frozen (2013), Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Once Upon a Time (2011-2018), Mollet argues that by giving its fairy tale protagonists characteristics associated with ‘good’ Americans, and even by situating their fairy tales within America itself, Disney constructs a vision of America as a utopian space.
Investigating Stranger Things
This edited collection explores the narrative, genre, nostalgia and fandoms of the phenomenally successful Netflix original series, Stranger Things. The book brings together scholars in the fields of media, humanities, communications and cultural studies to consider the various ways in which the Duffer Brothers’ show both challenges and confirms pre-conceived notions of cult media. Through its three sections on texts, contexts and receptions, the collection examines all aspects of the series’ presence in popular culture, engaging in debates surrounding cult horror, teen drama, fan practices, and contemporary anxieties in the era of Trump. Its chapters seek to address relatively neglected areas of scholarship in the realm of cult media, such as set design, fashion, and the immersive Secret Cinema Experience. These discussions also serve to demonstrate how cult texts are facilitated by the new age of television, where notions of medium specificity are fundamentally transformed and streaming platforms open up shows to extensive analysis in the now mainstream world of cult entertainment.
Horror That Haunts Us
Horror’s pleasures fundamentally hinge on looking backward, either on destabilising trauma, or as a period of comfort and happiness which is undermined by threat. However, this stretches beyond the scares on our screens to the consumption and criticism of the monsters of our past. The horror films of our youth can be locations of psychological and social trauma, or the happy place we go back to for comfort when our lives become unsettled. Horror That Haunts Us: Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Trauma in Contemporary American Horror is a collection of essays that brings together multiple theoretical and critical approaches to consider the way popular horror films from the last fifty years commun...
New Blood
The taste for horror is arguably as great today as it has ever been. Since the turn of the millennium, the horror genre has seen various developments emerging out of a range of contexts, from new industry paradigms and distribution practices to the advancement of subgenres that reflect new and evolving fears. New Blood builds upon preceding horror scholarship to offer a series of critical perspectives on the genre since the year 2000, presenting a collection of case studies on topics as diverse as the emergence of new critical categories (such as the contentiously named ‘prestige horror’), new subgenres (including ‘digital folk horror’ and ‘desktop horror’) and horror on-demand (‘Netflix horror’), and including analyses of key films such as The Witch and Raw and TV shows like Stranger Things and Channel Zero. Never losing sight of the horror genre’s ongoing political economy, New Blood is an exciting contribution to film and horror scholarship that will prove to be an essential addition to the shelves of researchers, students and fans alike.
Black Witches and Queer Ghosts
This book is a collection of 13 essays centering on supernatural serials such as television programs, video games, anime, and manga, featuring teen protagonists and marketed to teen audiences. These essays provide discussions of characters in teen supernatural serials who disrupt white, cisgender social narratives, and addresses possible ways that the on-screen depictions of these characters, who may be POC or LGBTQIA+, can lead to additional discussions of more accurate representations of the Other in the media. This collection explores depictions of characters of color and/or LGBTQ characters in teen supernatural serials who were/are marginalized and examines the possible issues that these depictions can raise on a social level and, possibly, a developmental level for audience members who belong to these communities. The essays included in this collection thoroughly examine these characters and their narratives while providing nuanced examinations of how the media chooses to represent teens of color and LGBTQIA+ teens.
Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary
In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a bracing story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of formats—an animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this pioneering new book, the relationship between animation and war is actually as old as film itself. The world’s very first animated movie was made to solicit donations for the Second Boer War, and even Walt Disney sent his earliest creations off to fight on gruesome animated battlefields drawn from his First World War experience. As Kornhaber strikingly demonstrates, the tradition of wartime animation, long ignored by scholars and film buffs alike, is one of the world’s richest archives of wartime memory...
Haunted Laughter
A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Haunted Laughter addresses whether it is appropriate to use comedy as a literary form to depict Adolf Hitler, The Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Guided by existing theories of comedy and memory and through a comprehensive examination of comedic film and television productions, from the United States, Israel, and Europe, Jonathan Friedman proposes a model and a set of criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of comedy as a means of representation. These criteria include depth of purpose, relevance to the times, and originality of form and content. Friedman concludes that comedies can be effective if they provide relevant information about life and death in the past, present, or future; break new ground; and serve a purpose or multiple purposes—capturing the dynamic of the Nazi system of oppression, empowering or healing victims, serving as a warning for the future, or keeping those who can never grasp the real horror of genocide from losing perspective.
A Critical Companion to Wes Craven
In A Critical Companion to Wes Craven, contributors use a variety of theoretical frameworks to analyze distinct areas of Craven’s work, including ecology, auteurism, philosophy, queer studies, and trauma. This book covers both the successes and failures contained in Craven’s extensive filmography, ultimately revealing a variegated portrait of his career. Scholars of film studies, horror, and ecology will find this book particularly interesting.
The Undead Child in Popular Culture
In this study of representations of children and childhood, a global team of authors explores the theme of undeadness as it applies to cultural constructions of the child. Moving beyond conventional depictions of the undead in popular culture as living dead monsters of horror and mad science that transgress the borders between life and death, rejuvenation, and decay, the authors present undeadness as a broader concept that explores how people, objects, customs, and ideas deemed lost or consigned to the past might endure in the present. The chapters examine nostalgic texts that explore past incarnations of childhood, mementos of childhood, zombie children, spectral children, images and artefa...
Debating Disney
With stakes in film, television, theme parks, and merchandising, Disney continues to be one of the most dominant forces of popular culture around the globe. Films produced by the studio are usually blockbusters in nearly every country where they are released. However, despite their box office success, these films often generate as much disdain as admiration. While appreciated for their visual aesthetics, many of these same films are criticized for their cultural insensitivity or lack of historical fidelity. In Debating Disney: Pedagogical Perspectives on Commercial Cinema, Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode have assembled a collection of essays that examine Disney’s output from the 1930s thro...
