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Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens—typically with a singular figure... more
Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens—typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and major obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future?

This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in films like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world.

Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/apocalypse-and-heroism-in-popular-culture/
“In Meditations on Quixote, Ortega y Gasset notes that the writer’s choice of literary genre reflects ‘at one and the same time a certain thing to be said and the only way to say it fully.’ Sugg brilliantly affirms this insight by showing... more
“In Meditations on Quixote, Ortega y Gasset notes that the writer’s choice of literary genre reflects ‘at one and the same time a certain thing to be said and the only way to say it fully.’ Sugg brilliantly affirms this insight by showing how writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Rosario Castellanos, Zoé Valdés, Cherrie Moraga, and Julia Álvarez, engage allegorical and performative strategies to say things that the novel can no longer say, to transcend identity politics and its positivist paradigms, to reposition the relations of consciousness and community. Furthermore, her transamerican perspective on these profoundly transamerican writers complicates the cultural connections that she (and they) make between genre and gender. This book will serve as a model for the comparative study of emerging expressive forms in and across the Americas.”--Lois Parkinson Zamora, University of Houston
... FICATIONS: THE FATHERLANDS OF SIL? VIA MOLINA Katherine Sugg ... literature. Although Molina herself has admitted the autobiographical basis of a number of her novels, her narrative strategies notoriously undermine transparent notions... more
... FICATIONS: THE FATHERLANDS OF SIL? VIA MOLINA Katherine Sugg ... literature. Although Molina herself has admitted the autobiographical basis of a number of her novels, her narrative strategies notoriously undermine transparent notions of personal history ...