Lorna Piatti-Farnell

A Global History

Beef

Donna Lee Brien

Routledge Companion to Literature and Food

"Banana: A Global History takes us from the agricultural beginnings of the banana in New Guinea to the fruit's almost ubiquitous presence in culinary repertoires around the globe, from the United States to the Caribbean, from regions of Africa to the heart of Southeast Asia. The book gives us an insight into the life of the banana over millennia, focusing on our recent history and its cultural affair with the fruit. The global life of the banana is traced in cultural practices, advertising, commercial schemes and the unmissable icons of popular culture, from nineteenth-century medical manuals to cookbooks, songs, the famous 'banana peel gag' and the well-known Miss Chiquita icon."--Publisher's description.

Banana

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food explores the relationship between food and literature in transnational contexts, serving as both an introduction and a guide to the field in terms of defining characteristics and development. Balancing a wide-reaching view of the long histories and preoccupations of literary food studies, with attentiveness to recent developments and shifts, the volume illuminates the aesthetic, cultural, political, and intellectual diversity of the representation of food and eating in literature.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food

The Superhero Multiverse focuses on the evolving meanings of the superhero icon in 21st-century film and popular media, with an emphasis on re-adapting, re-imagining, and re-making. With its focus on multimedia and transmedia transformations, The Superhero Multiverse pivots on two important points: firstly, it reflects on the core concerns of the superhero narrative--including the relationship between 'superhero comics' and 'superhero films', the comics roots of superhero media, matters of canon and hybridity, and issues of recycling and stereotyping in superhero films and media texts. Secondly, it considers how these intersecting textual and cultural preoccupations are intrinsic to the process of remaking and re-adapting superheroes, and brings attention to multiple ways of materializing these iconic figures in our contemporary context.

Readapting Comic Book Icons in Twenty-first-century Film and Popular Media

The Superhero Multiverse

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Food Studies and American literary scholarship, Piatti-Farnell investigates the significances of food and eating in American fiction, from 1980 to the present day. She argues that culturally-coded representations of the culinary illuminate contemporary American anxieties about class gender, race, tradition, immigration, nationhood, and history. As she offers a critical analysis of major works of contemporary fiction, Piatti-Farnell unveils contrasting modes of culinary nostalgia, disillusionment, and progress that pervasively address the cultural disintegration of local and familiar culinary values, in favor of globalized economies of consumption. In identifying different incarnations of the "American culinary," Piatti-Farnell covers the depiction of food in specific categories of American fiction and explores how the cultural separation that molds food preferences inevitably challenges the existence of a homogenous American identity. The study treads on new grounds since it not only provides the first comprehensive study of food and consumption in contemporary American fiction, but also aims to expose interrelated politics of consumption in a variety of authors from different ethnic, cultural, racial and social backgrounds within the United States.

Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction

This book brings together a carefully selected range of contemporary disciplinary approaches to new areas of Gothic inquiry. Moving beyond the representational and historically based aspects of literature and film that have dominated Gothic studies, this volume both acknowledges the contemporary diversification of Gothic scholarship and maps its changing and mutating incarnations. Drawing strength from their fascinating diversity, and points of correlation, the varied perspectives and subject areas cohere around a number of core themes — of re-evaluation, discovery, and convergence — to reveal emerging trends and new directions in Gothic scholarship. Visiting fascinating areas including the Gothic and digital realities, uncanny food experiences, representations of death and the public media, Gothic creatures and their popular legacies, new approaches to contemporary Gothic literature, and re-evaluations of the Gothic mode through regional narratives, essays reveal many patterns and intersecting approaches, forcefully testifying to the multifaceted, although lucidly coherent, nature of Gothic studies in the 21st Century. The multiple disciplines represented — from digital inquiry to food studies, from fine art to dramaturgy — engage with the Gothic in order to offer new definitions and methodological approaches to Gothic scholarship. The interdisciplinary, transnational focus of this volume provides exciting new insights into, and expanded and revitalised definitions of, the Gothic and its related fields.

The Gothic Compass

New Directions in 21st-Century Gothic

Gothic Afterlives examines the intersections between contemporary Gothic horror and remakes scholarship from various disciplinary perspectives. The essays in the collection cover a wide range of transmedia examples, including literature, film, television, video games, and digital media reimaginings.

Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media

Gothic Afterlives

Prominent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the "new vampire" as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in "vampire identity" impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.

The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature

Few, if any, books come close to being as beloved – or as ubiquitous – as The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The book delves into the philosophy of the series and its fans, the distinctions between the films’ fans and the books’ fans, the process of adaptation, and the role of New Zealand in the translation of words to images. Lavishly illustrated, it is guaranteed to appeal to anyone who has ever closed the last page of The Return of the King and wished it to never end.

Fan Phenomena The Lord of the Rings

Ever since Peter Jackson first released his film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien s beloved books in 2001, "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy has become a household name, as well as an utterly unavoidable example of fantasy cinema. The trilogy is now arguably one of the most recognizable cinematic series in the world; Jackson s films have catapulted "The Lord of the Rings" narratives to the mainstream, and there are probably very few people who do not know what a hobbit or an orc is. Winner of multiple awards including many Academy Awards The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a real popular-culture icon, beloved by zealous fans and lay-watchers alike. That love often overspills into obsession, as the desire to relive the fantastic narratives of Middle-earth, and feel part of the rings, induces followers to extend the experience of the films into other areas of their everyday life. From fan fiction to fan-made movies, weddings in Hobbiton, film location tours of New Zealand, and celebrity worshipping, the devoted fans of trilogy do it all. Academically informed, but written for the generally reader, "Fan Phenomena: The Lord of the Rings" delves into the philosophy of the fans of the rings, and explores the multi-faceted nuances of the films fan community. It also addresses the reach of "The Lord of the Rings" into the world of fandom and assesses its effects on viewers and their way of life. Including analysis of LOTR tours in New Zealand and fan-based tourism, character franchises and adaption processes, this lavishly illustrated collection is a must read. "

Lorna Piatti-Farnell

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