When the teenage Alicia McCann has a horrible accident, she is visited by the Whisper Catcher - a dreamlike spirit girl with great powers. But the Whisper Catcher's powers are waning, her strength stolen by an evil shadowy spectre. To help the Whisper Catcher, Alicia must undertake a strange and terrifying journey from her home in San Francisco to the depths of the Australian outback. Dark treachery awaits and Alicia must dig through history to uncover a terrifying secret, unlike any she c...

What mental and physical distress do actors, camerapersons, and reporters experience when working on reenactments of traumatic moments in history?In Political Camerawork, D. Andy Rice theorizes that the intense feelings produced while creating these performed scenarios, called "simulation documentaries," connect difficult pasts to the present. Building on his background as a nonfiction film director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, Rice analyzes performance techniqu...

50 WESTERNS (Vol. 1) offers an expansive exploration into the rugged terrains and adventurous spirit quintessential to the Western genre. This anthology captures a broad spectrum of styles, from the vivid storytelling of epic landscapes to the gritty, suspenseful encounters with the elements of the wild. An exhilarating array of narratives awaits within these pages, each capturing the optimism and challenges of frontier life. The anthology stands as a literary mosaic, weaving together tale...

Black Women in Sequence takes readers on a search for women of African descent in comics subculture. From the 1971 appearance of the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly” - the first Black female superheroine in a comic book - to contemporary comic books, graphic novels, film, manga, and video gaming, a growing number of Black women are becoming producers, viewers, and subjects of sequential art.As the first detailed investigation of Black women’s participation in...

Sequential art combines the visual and the narrative in a way that readers have to interpret the images with the writing. Comics make a good fit with education because students are using a format that provides active engagement. This collection of essays is a wide-ranging look at current practices using comics and graphic novels in educational settings, from elementary schools through college. The contributors cover history, gender, the use of specific graphic novels, practical application...

From D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee's Malcolm X, Ed Guerrero argues, the commercial film industry reflects white domination of American society. Written with the energy and conviction generated by the new black film wave, Framing Blackness traces an ongoing epic—African Americans protesting screen images of blacks as criminals, servants, comics, athletes, and sidekicks.These images persist despite blacks' irrepressible demands for eman...

Film studies has been a part of higher education curricula in the United States almost since the development of the medium. Although the study of film is dispersed across a range of academic departments, programs, and scholarly organizations, film studies has come to be recognized as a field in its own right. In an era when teaching and scholarship are increasingly interdisciplinary, film studies continues to expand and thrive, attracting new scholars and fresh ideas, direction, and resear...

A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth.In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North Ame...

A broad survey on how audiences make meaning out of mass mediaMedia Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media.Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Sov...

Horror films have exploded in popularity since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, many of them breaking box-office records and generating broad public discourse. These films have attracted A-list talent and earned award nods, while at the same time becoming darker, more disturbing, and increasingly apocalyptic. Why has horror suddenly become more popular, and what does this say about us? What do specific horror films and trends convey about American society in the wake of events so h...

The documentary has achieved rising popularity over the past two decades thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this, documentary studies still tends to favor works that appeal primarily to specialists and scholars.Reclaiming Popular Documentary reverses this long-standing tendency by showing that documentaries can be—and are—made for mainstream or commercial audiences. Editors Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson, who consider popular...

Each year brings a batch of new memoirs, ranging from works by former teachers and celebrity has-beens to disillusioned soldiers and bestselling novelists. In addition to becoming bestsellers in their own right, memoirs have become a popular object of inquiry in the academy and a mainstay in most MFA workshops. Courses in what is now called "life writing" study memoir alongside personal essays, diaries, and autobiographies. Memoir: An Introduction proffers a succinct and comprehen...