The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-pres...

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis, presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st century, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ...

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis, presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st century, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ...

This book explores the captivating intersection of lunar influence and the Gothic imagination, revealing how the moon has shaped narratives of horror, mystery, and transformation across cultures and media. Edited by Elana Gomel and Simon Bacon, this volume delves into the genre of Lunar Gothic, tracing its roots from ancient folklore to contemporary science fiction and horror. Readers will encounter a diverse array of essays that examine the moon's role as both a setting and a character in...

Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic TitleToxic nostalgia is not a new phenomenon, and instances of an undying past refusing to perish and plaguing the present, can be found throughout history. However, examined in Toxic Nostalgia on Screen, in the early years of the new millennium, it has acquired further meaning and not just applies to a dangerous longing for the past, but a way of being in the present world. Here in our modern time, undead memory is not jus...

This Handbook is a unique encompassing overview of the figure of the Zombie. This project will show that while there are many zombies and many texts about zombies it is still often mistakenly viewed as little more than a sub-genre of Horror. However, its history and multiplicity warrants something far more ambitious in terms of cataloguing and defining its many forms, types and possible readings. Consequently, this Handbook proposes to feature elements of all the many and varied representa...

This book offers an original and innovative study of how the intersection of the Doppelgänger and the Gothic reveals repressed aspects of our singular and collective past, while also serving as a lens to investigate ourselves and our historical moment. The concept of the doppelgänger has seen a resurgence in popular culture, with films and series like The Haunting of Bly Manor, Us, and Dark exploring themes of doubles, twins, and clones. These narratives transfor...

Vampires and the Making of the United States in the Twenty-First Century offers a unique and multifaceted study of how vampires on screen have shaped America and how specific environments here have shaped their vampires.Examining the figure of the vampire within the framework of uniquely American environments — both physical and immaterial — the book delves into the questions relating to American geography, identity, racial and ethnic tensions, American colonial past and i...

An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television, film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely intervention in...

Despite Disney’s carefully crafted image of family friendliness, Gothic elements are pervasive in all of Disney’s productions, ranging from its theme parks to its films and television programs. The contributors to Disney Gothic reveal that the Gothic, in fact, serves as the unacknowledged motor of the Disney machine. Exploring representations of villains, ghosts, and monsters, this book sheds important new light on the role these Gothic elements play throughout the Disney universe...

This book examines how the vampire has always been connected to ideas of infection, pollution and disease—even more so in the 21st century where it expresses the horrors of unseen and unstoppable disease and the foreboding and anxiety that accompany viral outbreaks and wider epidemics. Here the vampire gives physical form to the contagion and associated anxieties around the perceived causes and spread of disease, where it can take on many forms from animal to pestilential particulate matte...

This book is an original and innovative study of how Gothic nostalgia and toxic memoryare used to underpin and promote the ongoing culture wars and populist politics incontemporary popular culture. The essays collected here cover topics from the spectral tothe ecological, deep fakes to toxic ableism, Mary Poppins to John Wick to revealhow the use of an imaginary past to shape the present, creates truly Gothic times that wecan never ...