It Came from the 1950s!, Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties (Innbundet (stive permer))

DARRYL JONES is Head of the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he teaches Popular Literature and Culture. He is author of a number of books and many articles in this field. His most recent publications include an edition of M R. James's Collected Ghost Stories (2011). ELIZABETH MCCARTHY is a Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has published critical studies on a wide variety of subjects, including Romantic aesthetics and the serial killer, the politics of the guillotine in the French Revolution, and propaganda and advertising in Post-World War One America. She has also co-edited the book Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear (2007) and is currently compiling and editing the book Jack the Ripper: Early Fictional Accounts of the Whitechapel Murderer (2012). BERNICE M. MURPHY is a Lecturer in Popular Literature in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has previously published The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and edited the collection Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (2005).

It Came From the 1950s is an eclectic, witty and insightful collection of essays predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times. The essays explore the emergence of 'Hammer Horror' and the company's groundbreaking 1958 adaptation of Dracula; the work of popular authors such as Shirley Jackson and Robert Bloch, and the effect that 50s food advertisements had upon the poetry of Sylvia Plath; the place of special effects in the decade's science fiction films; and 1950s Anglo-American relations as refracted through the prism of the 1957 film Night of the Demon. There are also essays on radioactive mutants, zombie-human love triangles, far-out girl gangs and mad science at its most nefarious. The collection features contributions from leading scholars and critics such as Christopher Frayling, Mark Jancovich, Kim Newman and David J. Skal.

KEVIN CORSTORPHINE Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, UK DARA DOWNEY IRCHSS Post-doctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING Rector and Professor of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art in London from 1996-2009, as well as a former Chairman of the Arts Council England, UK MARK JANCOVICH Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK DEREK JOHNSTON Ph.D. Graduate from the University of East Anglia, UK WAYNE KINSEY Consultant Histopathologist in Norwich and Lecturer at the University of East Anglia School of Medicine, UK KIM NEWMAN Novelist, critic and broadcaster LORNA PIATTI-FARNELL Lecturer in Cultural and Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology, Australia DAVID J. SKAL Author and Documentary Filmmaker

Acknowledgements Dedication List of Illustrations Note on Contributors Introduction 'A-Bombs, B-Pictures and C-Cups'; D.J.Skal 'It's in the trees! It's coming!' Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire; D.Jones Mutants and Monsters; K.Newman 'Don't Dare See It Alone!' The Fifties Hammer Invasion; W.Kinsey Genre, Special Effects and Authorship in the Critical Reception of Science Fiction Film and Television during the 1950s; M.Jancovich & D.Johnston Hammer's Dracula; C.Frayling Fast Cars and Bullet Bras: The Image of the Female Juvenile Delinquent in 1950s America; E.McCarthy 'A Search for the Father-Image': Masculine Anxiety in Robert Bloch's 1950s Fiction; K.Corstorphine 'Reading her Difficult Riddle': Shirley Jackson and late 1950s' Anthropology; D.Downey 'At My Cooking I Feel It Looking': Food, Domestic Fantasies and Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath's Writing; L.Piatti-Farnell 'All that Zombies Allow' Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far From Heaven and Fido; B.M.Murphy Bibliography Filmography Index