Monstrous Youth

Download or read book The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children written by Simon Bacon and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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-present concerns. This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil. The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the historic ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other.

Download or read book Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters written by Markus P.J. Bohlmann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps because of the wisdom received from our Romantic forbears about the purity of the child, depictions of children as monsters have held a tremendous fascination for film audiences for decades. Numerous social factors have influenced the popularity and longevity of the monster-child trope but its appeal is also rooted in the dual concepts of the child-like (innocent, angelic) and the childish (selfish, mischievous). This collection of fresh essays discusses the representation of monstrous children in popular cinema since the 1950s, with a focus on the relationship between monstrosity and "childness," a term whose implications the contributors explore.

Download or read book Halloween written by Mark Bernard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-02 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that Halloween need not be the first nor the most influential youth slasher film for it to hold a special place in the history of youth cinema. John Carpenter’s 1978 horror hit was once considered the be-all, end-all of teen slasher cinema and was regarded as the first, the best, and the most influential American slasher film. Recent revisions in film history, however, have challenged Halloween’s comfortable place in the canon of youth horror cinema. However, this book argues that the film, like no other, draws from the themes, imagery, and obsessions that fueled youth horror cinema since the 1950s—Gothic atmosphere, atomic dread, twisted psychology, and alienated teenage monsters—and ties them together in the deceptively simple story of a masked killer on Halloween night. Along the way, the film delivers a savage critique of social institutions and their failure to protect young people. Halloween also depicts a cadre of compelling and complicated youth characters: teenage babysitters watching over preadolescents as a killer, who is viciously avoiding the responsibilities of young adulthood, stalks them through the shadows. This book explores all these aspects of Halloween, including the franchise it spawned, providing an invaluable insight into this iconic film for students and researchers alike.

Download or read book Deirdre written by James Stephens and published by Lindhardt og Ringhof. This book was released on 2024-01-04 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a young girl raised in isolation in preparation to marry the King of Ulster sounds at first a little outdated. That is until you call it what it is - an arranged marriage and child abuse. These are themes that continue to exist and they give 'Deirdre' a resonance in the 21st century. The girl at the heart of the story eventually falls in love with a young man and they run away to Scotland - cue much relief. There is a nasty twist in the tale, however, when she is lured back to Ireland many years later. The story, which is based on Irish myth and legend, has echoes of the 1993 movie 'The Piano', starring Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel, in which a mute Scottish woman was sold into marriage by her father to a frontiersman in New Zealand. James Stephens (1880-1950) was an Irish novelist and poet who based many of his works of myth and legend from Ireland's past. Life imitated art when he created his own myth - claiming to have been born on the same day as literary legend James Joyce ('Ulysses', 'Finnegans Wake'). His father died when he was two and his mother remarried, leading to his being committed to a boys' school when caught begging on the streets. During time as a solicitor and a registrar at the National Gallery of Ireland, Stephens took up writing. He is best known for 'Irish Fairy Tales' and 'The Crock of Gold', while he also wrote an influential account of the 1916 Easter Rising, describing the death of his friend Thomas MacDonagh.

Download or read book The Modern Vampire and Human Identity written by Deborah Mutch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vampires are back - and this time they want to be us, not drain us. This collection considers the recent phenomena of Twilight and True Blood, as well as authors such as Kim Newman and Matt Haig, films such as The Breed and Interview with the Vampire, and television programmes such as Being Human and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Download or read book Critical Rhetorics of Race written by Kent A. Ono and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-07-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to many pundits and cultural commentators, the U.S. is enjoying a post-racial age, thanks in part to Barack Obama's rise to the presidency. This high gloss of optimism fails, however, to recognize that racism remains ever present and alive, spread by channels of media and circulated even in colloquial speech in ways that can be difficult to analyze. In this groundbreaking collection edited by Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono, scholars seek to examine this complicated and contradictory terrain while moving the field of communication in a more intellectually productive direction. An outstanding group of contributors from a range of academic backgrounds challenges traditional definitions and applications of rhetoric. From the troubling media representations of black looters after Hurricane Katrina and rhetoric in news coverage about the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres to cinematic representations of race in Crash, Blood Diamond, and Quentin Tarantino’s films, these essays reveal complex intersections and constructions of racialized bodies and discourses, critiquing race in innovative and exciting ways. Critical Rhetorics of Race seeks not only to understand and navigate a world fraught with racism, but to change it, one word at a time.

Download or read book The Undead Child in Popular Culture written by Craig Martin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of representations of children and childhood, a global team of authors explores the theme of undeadness as it applies to cultural constructions of the child. Moving beyond conventional depictions of the undead in popular culture as living dead monsters of horror and mad science that transgress the borders between life and death, rejuvenation, and decay, the authors present undeadness as a broader concept that explores how people, objects, customs, and ideas deemed lost or consigned to the past might endure in the present. The chapters examine nostalgic texts that explore past incarnations of childhood, mementos of childhood, zombie children, spectral children, images and artefacts of deceased children, as well as states of arrested development and the inability or refusal to embrace adulthood. Expanding undeadness beyond the realm of horror and extending its meaning conceptually, while acknowledging its roots in the genre, the book explores attempts at countering the transitory nature of childhoods. This unique and insightful volume will interest scholars and students working on popular culture and cultural studies, media studies, film and television studies, childhood studies, gender studies, and philosophy.