This book critically examines images in the borderlands of the art world, investigating relations between visual art and vernacular visual culture within different images communities from the 1870s to the present day.
From his debut in a six-page comic in 1939 to his most recent portrayal by Christian Bale in the blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises, Batman is perhaps the world's most popular superhero.
In 1968, George Romero's film Night of the Living Dead premiered, launching a growing preoccupation with zombies within mass and literary fiction, film, television, and video games.
With fresh appraisals of popular Westerns, this book examines the history of the genre with a focus on definitional aspects of canon, adaptation and hybridity.
The remarkable commercial success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004 came as a surprise to the Hollywood establishment, particularly considering the film's failure to find production funding through a major studio.
Unlike most makers of modern or futuristic films, George Lucas turned away from the standard special operatives or secret agents when he created the heroes for his epic Star Wars saga.
Serial killers, mass murderers, spree killers, outlaws, and real-life homicidal maniacs have long held a grim fascination for both filmmakers and viewers.
Joss Whedon's works, across all media including television, film, musicals, and comic books, are known for their commitment to gender and sexual equality.
This history of literary Arabic describes the evolution of Arabic poetry and prose in the context of music, ritual performance, the arts and architecture.
When the first season of Star Trek opened to American television viewers in 1966, the thematically insightful sci-fi story line presented audiences with the exciting vision of a bold voyage into the final frontiers of space and strange, new galactic worlds.
A richly illustrated cultural history of the midcentury pulp paperback"e;There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes.
Although the horror genre has been embraced by filmmakers around the world, Japan has been one of the most prolific and successful purveyors of such films.
This book investigates desert islands in postwar anglophone popular culture, exploring representations in radio, print and screen advertising, magazine cartoons, cinema, video games, and comedy, drama and reality television.
The Politics of Horror features contributions from scholars in a variety of fields-political science, English, communication studies, and others-that explore the connections between horror and politics.
This book addresses what a superhero body can do by developing several "e;x-rays"e; of the superbody's sensoria, anatomic structures, internal systems, cellular organizations, and orthotic, chemical, or technological enhancements.
This book presents close-readings of seven post-millennial comedic films: Up in the Air, Tropic Thunder, JCVD, Winnebago Man, The Trotsky, Be Kind Rewind, and Hamlet 2.
This book analyzes Walt Disney's impact on entertainment, new media, and consumer culture in terms of a materialist, psychoanalytic approach to fantasy.
In contrast to the main body of current Victorian detective criticism, which tends to concentrate on Conan Doyle's creation and only uses other detectives as a backdrop, the texts gathered in this volume examine various contemporary ways of (re)presenting real and fictional detectives that originated in or are otherwise associated with that era: Inspector Bucket, Sergeant Cuff, Inspector Reid, Tobias Gregson, Flaxman Low, and psychiatrists as detectives.
Japanese Horror and the Transnational Cinema of Sensations undertakes a critical reassessment of Japanese horror cinema by attending to its intermediality and transnational hybridity in relation to world horror cinema.
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.
The Formation of Chinese Art Cinema: 1990-2003 examines the development of Chinese art film in the People's Republic of China from 1990, when the first Sixth Generation film Mama was released, to 2003, when authorities acknowledged the legitimacy of underground filmmakers.
This book analyzes Hollywood storytelling that features an American crimefighter-whether cop, detective, or agent-who must safeguard society and the nation by any means necessary.
This edited book represents the first cohesive attempt to describe the literary genres of late-twentieth-century fiction in terms of lexico-grammatical patterns.
This book provides a corpus-led analysis of multi-word units (MWUs) in English, specifically fixed pairs of nouns which are linked by a conjunction, such as 'mum and dad', 'bride and groom' and 'law and order'.
Romantic comedy is an enduringly popular genre which has maintained its appeal by constantly evolving, from the screwball comedy to the recent emergence of the bromance.