Bücher von Kevin O'Neill

The Afterlife in Popular Culture: Heaven, Hell, and the Underworld in the American Imagination gives students a fresh look at how Americans view the afterlife, helping readers understand how it's depicted in popular culture.What happens to us when we die? The book seeks to explore how that question has been answered in American popular culture. It begins with five framing essays that provide historical and intellectual background on ideas about the afterlife in Western culture. These essays are followed by more than 100 entries, each focusing on specific cultural products or authors that feature the afterlife front and center. Entry topics include novels, film, television shows, plays, works of nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, all of which address some aspect of what may await us after our passing.This book is unique in marrying a historical overview of the afterlife with detailed analyses of particular cultural products, such as films and novels. In addition, it covers these topics in nonspecialist language, written with a student audience in mind. The book provides historical context for contemporary depictions of the afterlife addressed in the entries, which deal specifically with work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries.

London, 1975. The Sex Pistols do their first gig at the Marquee. Death Race 2000 and Rollerball are on at the cinema. The first Macdonald's has just opened. And women are banned from wearing trousers in the office. Meet Dave Maudling, editor of The Spanker, Britain's most popular weekly comic. He's a liquorice-pipe-chewing man-child, and the world's laziest serial killer. Actually, he hasn't killed anyone…yet. He's intent on killing off his readers by inserting lethal information into his comic. But then something unexpected and wonderful happens… This is Dave's world, so he's also being blackmailed by a monster from his childhood. He has a strange desire to date fur coats. And his femme fatale mother, Jean, is nagging him to solve her murder. Yes, she's dead, but is she really just a figment of his imagination? As he sets out to discover the truth about her death, despite casting himself as the Villain in his life story, Dave begins to turn into a Hero. From Pat Mills, Godfather of British comics and creator of 2000AD, and Kevin O'Neill, award-winning artist-creator of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, comes a dark and bittersweet comedy of life in the 1970s, of flawed and eccentric characters, strange passions, and revenge for a lost childhood.

Can you imagine swapping your body for a virtual version? This technology-based look at the afterlife chronicles America's fascination with death and reveals how digital immortality may become a reality.The Internet has reinvented the paradigm of life and death: social media enables a discourse with loved ones long after their deaths, while gaming sites provide opportunities for multiple lives and life forms. In this thought-provoking work, author Kevin O'Neill examines America's concept of afterlife-as imagined in cyberspace-and considers how technologies designed to emulate immortality present serious challenges to our ideas about human identity and to our religious beliefs about heaven and hell.The first part of the work-covering the period between 1840 and 1860-addresses post-mortem photography, cemetery design, and spiritualism. The second section discusses Internet afterlife, including online memorials and cemeteries; social media legacy pages; and sites that curate passwords, bequests, and final requests. The work concludes with chapters on the transhumanist movement, the philosophical and religious debates about Internet immortality, and the study of technologies attempting to extend life long after the human form ceases.