Zombie Futures in Literature, Media and Culture Pandemics, Society and the Evolution of the Undead in the 21st Century
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Simon Bacon is an independent scholar working in Poland. He has previously edited works such as Gothic: A Reader, Horror: A Companion and Monsters: A Companion. Previous monographs include Becoming Vampire, Dracula as Absolute Other, Eco-Vampires, Vampires From Another World, and Unhallowed Ground.They are risen … again! This impressive new collection of essays contributes to the ever-expanding field of Zombie/Undead scholarship. Covering rich and varied themes: late-stage capitalism, zombie mermaids, mental illness the undead, eco-zombies and more are examined within this wide-reaching consideration of the future zombie as we stagger on through the 21st Century.
Darren Elliott-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film and Gender, University of Stirling, UK
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.
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
An exploration into how the figure of the zombie uniquely articulates the societal changes prompted by the health, ecological and ideological threats to humanity in the 2020s and what such narratives can reveal about future modes of being and survival.