Description
Book SynopsisExamines how the zombie has evolved over time, its continually evolving manifestations in popular culture, and the unpredictable effects the zombie has had on late modernity. Topics covered include representations of zombies in films, the zombie as environmental critique, its role in mass psychology and how issues of race, class and gender are expressed through zombie narratives.
Trade Review“demonstrates that zombies, as a field, has the heft to sustain serious academic inquiry…contributes to the field because it links zombies to some of the foundational questions of modernity and specifically the instability of many modernity’s assumptions…a fun and engaging critical field to a casual reader or students of cultural studies…many of these essays make important claims…Zombie experts should take note…. most interesting…This collection provides a range of exciting lines of flight and ample evidence that zombies are, and have long been, an important trope in the articulation of anxieties related to our globalist future.”—Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
“zombies have come to stand for everything from conformity and consumerism to dangerous science and the military industrial complex… fertile ground here for those of us who like to deconstruct pop-culture and seek out all the hidden undercurrents…extremely literary essays that investigate a series of thought provoking topics…very interesting…fascinating…extremely engaging and thought provoking”—Bricks of the Dead
“collects some academic perspectives on z-horror, including zombie origins, environmental contagion, living-dead crowd psychology, and zombies on campus”—C&RL News
“presents 16 essays that examine the zombie’s evolution, continually evolving manifestations in popular culture and effects on modernity. Topics include the zombie in film, zombie as environmental critique and issues of race, class and gender”—CBQ.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Generation Z, the Age of Apocalypse
(Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz) 1
Zombies as Internal Fear or Threat
(Kim Paffenroth) 18
White Zombie and the Creole: William Seabrook’s The Magic Island and American Imperialism in Haiti
(Gyllian Phillips) 27
The Origin of the Zombie in American Radio and Film: B- Horror, U.S. Empire, and the Politics of Disavowal
(Chris Vials) 41
The Eco-Zombie: Environmental Critique in Zombie Fiction
(Sarah Juliet Lauro) 54
Lost Bodies/Lost Souls: Night of the Living Dead and Deathdream as Vietnam Narrative
(Karen Randell) 67
Shambling Towards Mount Improbable to Be Born: American Evolutionary Anxiety and the Hopeful Monsters of Matheson’s I Am Legend and Romero’s Dead Films
(Sean Moreland) 77
Ztopia: Lessons in Post- Vital Politics in George Romero’s Zombie Films
(Tyson E. Lewis) 90
Soft Murders: Motion Pictures and Living Death in Diary of the Dead
(Randy Laist) 101
Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Zombie: From Suggestion to Contagion
(Phillip Mahoney) 113
Gray Is the New Black: Race, Class, and Zombies
(Aalya Ahmad) 130
Cyberpunk and the Living Dead
(Andrea Austin) 147
The End Begins: John Wyndham’s Zombie Cozy
(Terry Harpold) 156
Zombies in a “Deep, Dark Ocean of History”: Danny Boyle’s Infected and John Wyndham’s Triffids as Metaphors of Postwar Britain
(Nicole LaRose) 165
Dead and Live Life: Zombies, Queers, and Online Sociality
(Shaka McGlotten) 182
The E- Dead: Zombies in the Digital Age
(Brendan Riley) 194
A Brain Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Isolation U. and the Campus Zombie
(Brian Greenspan) 206
Rhetoric Goes Boom(er): Agency, Networks, and Zombies at Play
(Scott Reed) 219
The National Strategy for Zombie Containment: Myth Meets Activism in Post–9/11 America
(Christopher Zealand) 231
About the Contributors 249
Index 253
