Zombie Futures in Literature, Media and Culture : Pandemics, Society and the Evolution of the Undead in the 21st Century / edited by Simon Bacon.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bacon, Simon, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Zombies in literature.

Zombies in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (281 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing (UK), 2024.

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

System Details:

text file HTML

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction SECTION ONE: ZOMBIE NORMALS Part I: Patient Zero: The Zombie Society Katarzyna Ancuta J is for Jombi: The Social Concerns of Korean Zombies Debaditya Mukhopadhyay Eat or be Eaten: a Socio-Political Reading of the Zombies of Ghost Stories Carl Wilson The Future of Resident Evil Video Games: Remakes, Revivals, and the RE Engine Part II: The Contagion of Consumerism and Neoliberalism Alberto Añón Lara Kingdom and the Rise of the Zombie in South Korean Television Fiction Tom Ue Rage, Revenge, and Redress in André Øvredal's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Dave Jeffery 'Consumerism will eat the future' :Consumerism During and After the Apocalypse in Army of the Dead (2021) and Necropolis Rising (2010-17) Part III: Disability and the Mental Health Pandemic David Edwards Zombies and Mental Health: Place, Space and the Post-Millennial Apocalypse Lynn Huggins-Cooper Fear and Loathing: Mental Illness and the Othering of the Zombie Catherine Pugh 'Say Something Human': Identity, Disability and the Self-Aware Zombie SECTION TWO: NEW ZOMBIE NORMALS Part IV: Gender, Sexuality, and the Zombie Eoin Murray Body and Soul: A Trans-Reading of Resident Evil: Code Veronica's Alfred Ashford Martine Mussies Zombie Mermaids: 'The Lake of Mystery' (Tooba 2023) Renita Sörensdotter Women and Girls as Survivors in Zombie Films: How Gender, Race and Age Matters for Shaping the Hope for a Better World Part V: Eco-zombies and the Environmental Pandemic Beth Michael-Fox The Future is Ash: Climate Crisis and Human Responsibility in The Fades Daniel Otto Jack Peterson A Blackfeet Biology of Postapocalypse: Tracking Ecomonstrous Transmotion in the Zombie Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones Teresa Fitzpatrick Fungal Futures: Eco-Zombies in the 21st Century John R. Ziegler The Posthuman Eco-Zombie and the End of the Capitalocene in Endzeit [Ever After](Hellsgård: 2018) Part VI: Beyond the Pandemic, New Normals and New Normatives Ildikó Limpár Matters of the Heart When the Brain is Attacked: Zombification and Its Consequences in HBO's The Last of Us Sharon Coleclough 'A chance to give your life purpose and meaning': The Evolution and Testing of the Future Zombie in Star Trek: Picard Nikoleta Zampaki and Peggy Karpouzou The Poetics of Zombification in Ryan Mecum's Dawn of Zombie Haiku Index

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

9781350285521

1350285528

9781350285507

1350285501

9781350285514

135028551X

OCLC:

1451802791