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Author: Susannah Clements
Publisher: Brazos Press
Published: 2011-04
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 1587432897
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA literary expert reveals the Christian roots of the vampire myth and helps make Christian sense of today's popular obsession with vampires.
Author: Alena Eikens
Publisher: diplom.de
Published: 2017-06-27
Total Pages: 22
ISBN-13: 3960676638
DOWNLOAD EBOOKVampires have been part of peoples’ folklore since the pre-history. Although they had meant different things and had different traits depending on the cultures, they appeared over and over again throughout various tales. In the beginning, the vampire used to be depicted as a bloodsucking, murdering monster, while more recently he became desirable, a heartthrob for which not only his fictive love interests fall, but also millions of readers who make vampire stories so popular in our time. Despite these radical changes, literary vampire stories have in common that most of them reflect on the social circumstances during their time of origin. The vampire is particularly suitable for the exemplification of sexuality. This term paper deals with the statement that the changes in sexuality and gender account for the changes in vampire stories. Chapter 1 will look at vampires in folklore to show the legitimacy of the vampire/sexuality connection, since these have been linked very early on. Chapters 2 and 3 give an overview over sexuality and gender in the Victorian age – the time in which the literary vampire first became popular – and how these topics are perceived today. Chapters 4 and 5 will explain how the circumstances are reflected in Victorian vampire literature and modern literature respectively.
Author: Simon Bacon
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published:
Total Pages: 1746
ISBN-13: 3031362535
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Elaine A. Heath
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: 2011-01-01
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13: 0664236782
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Twilight saga has become one of the most successful fiction series ever written, with more than one hundred million copies in print and several blockbuster films. Despite the tremendous commercial success Twilight has generated, few readers have analyzed its theological teachings or the messages Stephenie Meyer might be sending to women and teenage girls. This book offers both a feminist critique of Twilight and a theological review of the stories' ideas about salvation, heaven and hell, power, reconciliation, resurrection, and organized religion. Elaine Heath writes in an accessible voice, calling attention to both the "good news" of Twilight's theology and the "bad news" of its gender stereotypes and depictions of violence against women. The book includes questions for youth and adult groups or for classroom discussions.
Author: Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-07
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 1135053375
DOWNLOAD EBOOKProminent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the "new vampire" as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in "vampire identity" impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.
Author: Theda Black
Publisher: TKB Books
Published: 2011-07-15
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 1452495599
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLevi is a vampire, villain and tragedy, a monster made rather than born. He was only a teen when another vampire went rogue and turned him. He's obsessed with his first victim, Jared, who survived the attack. Jared is in love with his best friend, Jordan, and has been for years. Jordan feels the same--but it's too late. Jared pushes him away, believing Jordan's in danger. Jordan is crushed until he discovers Jared's hiding something from him. Something that's killing him. And in the meantime, Levi's growing stronger every day, drawing Jared in against his will. (36,500 words)
Author: M. Jess Peacock
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-02-05
Total Pages: 168
ISBN-13: 1620327198
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEvil, death, demons, reanimation, and resurrection. While such topics are often reserved for the darker mindscapes of the vampire subgenre within popular culture, they are equally integral elements of religious history and belief. Despite the cultural shift of presenting vampires in a secular light, the traditional figure of the vampire within cinema and literature has a rich legacy of serving as a theological marker. Whether as a symbol of the allure of sin, as an apologetic for assorted religious icons, or as a gateway into a discussion of liberationist theology, the vampire has served as a spiritual touchstone from Bram Stoker's Dracula, to Stephen King's Salem's Lot, to the HBO television series True Blood. In Such a Dark Thing, Jess Peacock examines how the figure of the vampire is able to traverse and interconnect theology and academia within the larger popular culture in a compelling and engaging manner. The vampire straddles the ineffable chasm between life and death and speaks to the transcendent in all of us, tapping into our fundamental curiosity of what, if anything, exists beyond the mortal coil, giving us a glimpse into the interminable while maintaining a cultural currency that is never dead and buried.
Author: Joseph Crawford
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2014-05-15
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 1783160659
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the history of the paranormal romance genre; from its origins in the revisionist horror fiction of the 1970s, via its emergence as a minor sub-genre of romantic fiction in the early 1990s, to its contemporary expansion in recent years into an often-controversial genre of mainstream fiction. Tracing the genre from its roots in older Gothic fiction written by and for women, it explores the interconnected histories of Gothic and romantic fiction, from Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen in the eighteenth century to Buffy, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries in the present day. In doing so, it investigates the extent to which the post-Twilight paranormal romance really does represent a break from older traditions of Gothic fiction – and just what it is about the genre that has made it so extraordinarily divisive, captivating millions of readers whilst simultaneously infuriating and repelling so many others.
Author: Matthew John Paul Tan
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2016-07-06
Total Pages: 89
ISBN-13: 149829118X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhy are zombies consuming the popular imagination? This book--part social analysis, part theological critique, and part devotional--considers how the zombie can be a way to critically situate our culture, awash with consumer products. Matthew Tan considers how zombies are the endpoint of social theory's exploration of consumer culture and its postsecular turn towards an earthly immortality, enacted on the flesh of consumers. The book also shows how zombies aid our appreciation of Christ's saving work. Through the lens of theology and the prayer of the Stations of the Cross, Tan incorporates social theory's insights on the zombie concerning postmodern culture's yearning for things beyond the flesh and also reveals some of social theory's blind spots. Turning to the Eucharist flesh of Christ, Tan challenges the zombie's secularized narrative of salvation of the flesh, one where flesh is saved by being consumed and made to die. By contrast, Jesus saves by enacting an alternative logic of flesh, one that redeems the zombie's obsession with flesh by eucharistically giving it away. In doing so, Jesus saves by assuming the condition of the zombie, redirecting our logic of consumption and fulfilling our yearning for immortality.
Author: Kevin O'Neill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2022-06-17
Total Pages: 580
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
