Bücher der Reihe Genre Fiction and Film Companions

What is Sci-Fi? Science fiction is a non-realist genre that revels in discovery and revelation, whether through human ingenuity or world-altering paradigm shifts. With accessible chapters on key texts appealing to both general readers and researchers, this volume offers a useful survey of the genre, from Octavia Butler to Westworld.

What is Cli-Fi? Climate change fiction is a new phenomenon that responds to the effects of extreme weather events and explores what climate change means for the survival of humanity. With short, accessible chapters on texts from Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy to Frozen, this book will appeal to fans, teachers and students alike.

What are Monsters? Monsters serve as a warning about something amiss in our surroundings. This collection of original and accessible essays looks at a variety of contemporary monsters from literature, film, television, music and the internet in their respective cultural contexts. Texts range from District 9 to Cleverman to Lady Gaga.

What is the Gothic?From ghosts to vampires, from ruined castles to steampunk fashion, the Gothic is a term that evokes all things strange, haunted and sinister.This volume offers a new look at the world of the Gothic, from its origins in the eighteenth century to its reemergence today. Each short essay is dedicated to a single text ¿ a novel, a film, a comic book series, a festival ¿ that serves as a lens to explore the genre. Original readings of classics like The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Joan Lindsay) are combined with unique insights into contemporary examples like the music of Mexican rock band Caifanes, the novels Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer), Goth (Otsuichi) and The Paying Guests (Sarah Waters), and the films Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland).Together the essays provide innovative ways of understanding key texts in terms of their Gothic elements. Invaluable for students, teachers and fans alike, the book¿s accessible style allows for an engaging look at the spectral and uncanny nature of the Gothic.

What is Horror? Horror is an inherently sensational and popular phenomenon. Extreme violence, terrifying monsters and jarring music shock, scare and excite us out of our everyday lives. The horror genre gives shape to the particular anxieties of society but also reveals the fundamental nature of what it is to be human. This volume provides an introduction to horror in compact and accessible essays, from classics such as Stanley Kubrick¿s The Shining to contemporary throwbacks like the Duffer Brothers¿ Stranger Things. Beginning with the philosophical and historical background of horror, this book touches upon seminal figures such as Poe, Lovecraft, Quiroga, Jackson, King and Suzuki and engages with the evolution of the genre across old and new media from literature, art and comics to film, gaming and social media. Alongside this is a consideration of established and emerging areas like smart horror (Jordan Peele¿s Get Out), queer horror (Brad Falchuk¿s American Horror Story), eco-horror (Alex Garland¿s Annihilation), horror video games (P.T.) and African American horror (Tananarive Due¿s Ghost Summer: Stories).This volume provides an invaluable resource for experts, students and general readers alike for further understanding the horror genre and the ways it is developing into the future.

From "The Lottery" to The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson's oeuvre has created an influential apocalyptic vision of America. This collection of essays offers new insights into her work, in light of themes of space, motherhood and race, as well as filmic adaptations of her work.

This volume offers a fresh approach to transmedia cultures, including not only franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter but also contemporary transmedia worlds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead, and BTS Universe and urgent topics like such as COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and human rights on the internet.

«We live in an age defined by toxicity. Bacon and the contributors have produced a timely, astute collection that intelligently and creatively engages and analyzes the wide panoply of trauma and poisoned discourse. Entertaining, fascinating and, honestly, terrifying, this book is paradoxically a delight and purgative to read! An antidote to the very thing it explores.» (Professor Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., author of Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema)What is Toxic?This volume provides a timely and original examination of the concept of «toxic» that today seems to inform all areas of popular culture and society. Connoting many forms of negativity, denial or disillusion, «toxic» has become central to the experience of living in the twenty-first century.Comprising twenty-nine original essays by experts in their fields, this collection offers something of a guide to how areas of toxicity often overlap and/or inform other ones. Topics as diverse as «fake news», environmental denialism, toxic nostalgia, deep fakes, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and cancel culture are covered. Studied texts include popular culture from the film Get Out (2018) to the Pussy Hat Movement, from social media «sadfishing» to governmental responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.This companion unravels the often purposely entangled narratives that are used to fuel much cultural and political populism. It serves as an important intervention into the conversations occurring around extreme partisanship and divisive views on where we might be heading and how dystopian the future will really be.

What is Magic?Magic has been present throughout human cultures in history, proving equally constant and mutable. Defined as supernatural powers, an explanatory belief system or a form of entertainment, magic persists to this day in new kinds of magical thinking in our highly technical, digitized environment.Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, magic has enjoyed a growing visibility in popular culture and scholarship. Contributing to this field, this volume illuminates the multi-faceted topic from a variety of perspectives. The chapters collected here investigate diverse aspects and shapes of magic to uncover its manifold material and immaterial appearances in past and present cultures. While offering a broad overview, this book also provides close readings and in-depth analyses of specialist examples, including magical talismans and amulets, magic of the stage and screen (e.g. Black Panther, Shape of Water), historical magicians and their representations (e.g. Harry Houdini) and contemporary queer and feminist witchcraft (e.g. #MagicResistance).By tracing magic¿s strong interrelation with colonial discourses, politics, the economy and the arts, magic¿s role is shown to go well beyond its traditional definition. Magic can be a political act, a means of empowerment and protest, an economic metaphor, and an instrument of oppression and liberation alike. This broad spectrum of magic discourses and their permeation into different aspects of cultures in history, present day and fiction is analysed by the more than thirty contributors to this volume in short, accessible essays.