In this book, Blackford historicizes the appeal of the Persephone myth in the nineteenth century and traces figurations of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades throughout girls' literature of the ...nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illuminates developmental patterns and anxieties in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Nutcracker and Mouse King, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. The story of the young goddess's separation from her mother and abduction into the underworld is, at root, an expression of ambivalence about female development, expressed in the various Neverlands through which female protagonists cycle and negotiate a partial return to earth. The myth conveys the role of female development in the perpetuation and renewal of humankind, coordinating natural and cultural orders through a hieros gamos (fertility coupling) rite. Meanwhile, popular novels such as Twilight and Coraline are paradoxically fresh because they recycle goddesses from myths as old as the seasons. With this book, Blackford offers a consideration of how literature for the young squares with broader canons, how classics flexibly and uniquely speak through novels that enjoy broad appeal, and how female traditions are embedded in novels by both men and women.
Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination
Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The ...promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.
The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries , Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games , Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin , and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.
In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”
In Horror Literature and Dark Fantasy: Challenging Genres, more than a dozen scholars and teachers explore the pedagogical value of using horror literature in the classroom to teach critical literacy ...skills to students in secondary schools and higher education.
Gothic Things Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew
07/2023
eBook
Offering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic
Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks
ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting
the ways that, since ...its origins in the eighteenth century, the
Gothic has been intensely focused on "ominous matter" and "thing
power." In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and
other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has
always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious
animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status
of just one thing among many-more powerful-others. In exploring how
the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew
Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human
and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic
Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger
of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just
beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it
haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and
their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark
reflection of the contemporary "nonhuman turn," expressing a
twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety
over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and
apocalypse. Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock
explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations
to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions
about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to
live more harmoniously with the world around us.
Chinese culture of the Six Dynasties period (220-589) saw a blossoming of stories of the fantastic.Zhiguai, "records of the strange" or "accounts of anomalies," tell of encounters with otherness, in ...which inexplicable and uncanny phenomena interrupt mundane human affairs. They depict deities, ghosts, and monsters; heaven, the underworld, and the immortal lands; omens, metamorphoses, and trafficking between humans and supernatural beings; and legendary figures, strange creatures, and natural wonders in the human world.Hidden and Visible Realms, traditionally attributed to Liu Yiqing, is one of the most significantzhiguaicollections, distinguished by its varied contents, elegant writing style, and fascinating stories. It is also among the earliest collections heavily influenced by Buddhist beliefs, values, and concerns. Beyond the traditionalzhiguainarratives, it includes tales of karmic retribution, reincarnation, and Buddhist ghosts, hell, and magic. In this annotated first complete English translation,Zhenjun Zhang gives English-speaking readers a sense of the wealth and wonder of thezhiguaicanon.Hidden and Visible Realmsopens a window into the lives, customs, and religious beliefs and practices of early medieval China and the cultural history of Chinese Buddhism. In the introduction, Zhang explains the key themes and textual history of the work.
Fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis may have belonged to different branches of Christianity, but they both made use of a faith-based environmentalist ethic to counter the ...mid-twentieth-century's triple threats of fascism, utilitarianism, and industrial capitalism. In Fire and Snow, Marc DiPaolo explores how the apocalyptic fantasy tropes and Christian environmental ethics of the Middle-earth and Narnia sagas have been adapted by a variety of recent writers and filmmakers of "climate fiction," a growing literary and cinematic genre that grapples with the real-world concerns of climate change, endless wars, and fascism, as well as the role religion plays in easing or escalating these apocalyptic-level crises. Among the many other well-known climate fiction narratives examined in these pages are Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, Mad Max, and Doctor Who. Although the authors of these works stake out ideological territory that differs from Tolkien's and Lewis's, DiPaolo argues that they nevertheless mirror their predecessors' ecological concerns. The Christians, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who penned these works agree that we all need to put aside our cultural differences and transcend our personal, socioeconomic circumstances to work together to save the environment. Taken together, these works of climate fiction model various ways in which a deep ecological solidarity might be achieved across a broad ideological and cultural spectrum.
