Barbara Brodman began writing this book nearly a half century ago and abandoned it to some far corner of her heart and mind until a confluence of life experiences and advancements in science made it viable as a work of science fiction. Incorporated herein are decades of research and teaching in disciplines as diverse as literature, art, and almost every area of the social sciences. However, it was not a lifetime of teaching and research that motivated this book as much as a desire to leave...

This book is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The essays in...

"The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it, it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love." Thus Octavio Paz describes a cultural phenomenon that has for centuries fascinated scholars and aficionados of virtually every field of Mexican studies, "el culto a la muerte," the cult of death, a term that readily calls to the...

Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump:Images from Literature and Visual Arts treats literature, film, television series, and comic books dealing with utopian and dystopian worlds reflecting on or anticipating our current age. From Henry James’s dreamlike utopia of “The Great Good Place” to the psychotic world of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, from science fiction and recent horror films, television adaptations of books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and new series ...

This book deals with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times and from peoples and cultures around the world. It reflects an increasingly popular leitmotif in literature and visual arts of the 21st century: humanity’s fear of extinction and its quest for survival -- in revenant, supernatural, or living human form. It is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and ...

Since the publication of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), the vampire has been a mainstay of Western culture, appearing consistently in literature, art, music (notably opera), film, television, graphic novels and popular culture in general. Even before its entrance into the realm of arts and letters in the early nineteenth century, the vampire was a feared creature of Eastern European folklore and legend, rising from the grave at night to consume its living loved ones and neighbors, oft...

In the predecessor to this book, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, Brodman and Doan presented discussions of the development of the vampire in the West from the early Norse draugr figure to the medieval European revenant and ultimately to Dracula, who first appears as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The essays in that collection also looked at the non-Western vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican traditions, Asian and ...

In Harry Potter and Philosophy, seventeen philosophical experts unlock some of Hogwarts' secret panels, and uncover surprising insights that are enlightening both for wizards and the most discerning muggles.

Harry Potter. The name conjures up J.K. Rowling's wondrous world of magic that has captured the imaginations of millions on both the printed page and the silver screen with bestselling novels and blockbuster films. The true magic found in this children's fantasy series lies not only in its appeal to people of all ages but in its connection to the greater world of classic literature.Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures explores t...

What explains the huge popular following for Dexter, currently the most-watched show on cable, which sympathetically depicts a serial killer driven by a cruel compulsion to brutally slay one victim after another?Although Dexter Morgan kills only killers, he is not a vigilante animated by a sense of justice but a charming psychopath animated by a lust to kill, ritualistically and bloodily. However his gory appetite is controlled by Harry’s Code,” which limits his victims to...

Fantasy is a creation of the Enlightenment, and the recognition that excitement and wonder can be found in imagining impossible things. From the ghost stories of the Gothic to the zombies and vampires of twenty-first-century popular literature, from Mrs Radcliffe to Ms Rowling, the fantastic has been popular with readers. Since Tolkien and his many imitators, however, it has become a major publishing phenomenon. In this volume, critics and authors of fantasy look at its history since the E...

Was Vlad the Impaler the inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula? No! Did Stoker write about Transylvania from first-hand experience? No! Has the model for Count Dracula's castle been found? No! Must Count Dracula stay out of the sunlight? Absolutely not! Literary sleuth Elizabeth Miller exposes these and numerous other popular distortions and fabrications that have plagued our understanding of Stoker and his famous novel. Where is this nonsense coming from? This book will tell you, as...