An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past
ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection
with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead
as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the
ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring
depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television,
film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely
intervention into how zombies enable speculation about future modes of
being in a changing world and represent the fluid notion of 'old' and
'new' normals. With each chapter moving beyond traditional readings of
the undead, Zombie Futures situates the zombie as an evolving cultural
imaginary at the centre of discourses around how human cognition and
embodiment are effected by global realities such as consumerism, new
technologies, climate change and planetary degeneration. Structured
around contagious partisan ideologies, ecological sickness, mental
health crisis and the very literal COVID-19 virus, this book
establishes how the zombie figure might manifest post-human and
post-normative futures. Works featured include graphic novels and
comics like The West + Zombies, Crossed and Endzeit, the South Korean
series and films Kingdom, Train to Busan and Peninsula, The Last of Us
and the Resident Evil game franchises, Bollywood horror anthology
Ghost Stories, Joss Whedon's Serenity, Cargo and literature such as
The Girl with All the Gifts, the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and
Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku. In a time when popular culture and
scholarship has been overrun with the undead, this original study
offers a refreshing look at the zombie and what it can tell us about
about our world going into and emerging from global catastrophe.
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Pandemics, Society and the Evolution of the Undead in the 21st Century
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781350285514
Publisert
2024
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Bloomsbury UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter