Tony Magistrale

Anthony S. Magistrale

One of the very first books to take Stephen King seriously, Landscape of Fear (originally published in 1988) reveals the source of King's horror in the sociopolitical anxieties of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. In this groundbreaking study, Tony Magistrale shows how King's fiction transcends the escapism typical of its genre to tap into our deepest cultural fears: "that the government we have installed through the democratic process is not only corrupt but actively pursuing our destruction, that our technologies have progressed to the point at which the individual has now become expendable, and that our fundamental social institutions-school, marriage, workplace, and the church-have, beneath their veneers of respectability, evolved into perverse manifestations of narcissism, greed, and violence." Tracing King's moralist vision to the likes of Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville, Landscape of Fear establishes the place of this popular writer within the grand tradition of American literature. Like his literary forbears, King gives us characters that have the capacity to make ethical choices in an imperfect, often evil world. Yet he inscribes that conflict within unmistakably modern settings. From the industrial nightmare of "Graveyard Shift" to the breakdown of the domestic sphere in The Shining, from the techno-horrors of The Stand to the religious fanaticism and adolescent cruelty depicted in Carrie, Magistrale charts the contours of King's fictional landscape in its first decade.

Stephen King's American Gothic

Landscape of Fear

Introduces the life and work of Poe, explores his contributions to American literature, and analyzes his poetry, tales of love and terror, and detective stories.

Student Companion to Edgar Allan Poe

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Edgar Allan Poe is a popular author, and students have often read his work by the time they reach the college or university classroom. His writings have inspired film, television, and musical adaptations�sources for much of students' knowledge about Poe. Thus the challenge for teachers is to reacquaint students with Poe as a complex literary figure. This volume equips teachers with the tools necessary to meet that challenge. Part 1 identifies the most frequently taught Poe texts, reviews useful editions of his work, and suggests secondary sources on Poe as well as television, film, music, and Web materials for use in the classroom. Essays in part 2 explore the relation between Poe's writing and his biography, including his attitudes toward racial difference and plagiarism and his wide publication in the literary magazines of his time. Contributors consider the range of Poe's writings, from his horror stories to his analytic essays and tales of ratiocination; his work is also compared with that of Stephen King, Alfred Hitchcock, and graphic novelists. Other essays assess the usefulness of theoretical approaches to Poe, especially psychoanalytic ones, and discuss the controversies concerning the literary merit of his work. Together, these essays bring to life the political, philosophical, and religious context in which Poe wrote.

Approaches to Teaching Poe's Prose and Poetry

Frederick S. Frank

?? [[ Best known as the author of imaginative short fiction, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, and as the author of hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe was a leading practitioner of the American Gothic and helped popularize the short story as a genre. This reference work assembles in dictionary format a complete and current body of information on Poe's life and work. More than 1900 entries cover all phases of Poe's art and literary criticism, his family relationships, his numerous travels and residences, and the abundance of critical responses to his works. Each entry provides bibliographical information, and the volume concludes with an extensive listing of works for further consideration. ]] ?? Best known for his mysterious and imaginative short fiction, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado, as well as hauntingly sonorous poems such as The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe has secured a lasting place in the American literary canon. He was one of the first American authors to be given serious attention in Europe, and his works popularized the Gothic, the short story, and detective fiction in America. Poe's works are frequently studied in schools and colleges, but he also retains his appeal as one of America's most demanding popular authors. His works reflect his vast and sometimes arcane erudition, his probing insights into the workings of the mind, his theories of literature and aesthetics, and his interest in science and the supernatural. Through more than 1900 alphabetically arranged entries, this reference book provides complete and current coverage of Poe's life and work. Some entries treat Poe's known reading and his responses to literary contemporaries and international literary figures. Others comment on the impact of various writers and literary traditions on Poe's imagination. Still others address Poe's views on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to mesmerism to phrenology. Each entry is supplemented by a bibliographical note which gives the basis for the entry and suggests sources for further investigation. Each entry for Poe's fiction and poetry contains a critical synopsis, and an extensive bibliography at the end of the volume lists the most important critical and biographical studies of Poe.

The Poe Encyclopedia

Kenneth Wagner

This book is about culture shock and the writing process. For a student, the relationship between writing and the challenge of living in a foreign culture may not be obvious. The purpose of Writing Across Culture is to aid the student in documenting and analyzing the connection. If culture can be broadly defined as the unwritten rules of every-day life, one effective method for learning these rules is to write about them as they are discovered. In this way, it is possible to see writing as a tool for cultural inquiry and comprehension, and, hence, an antidote for culture shock. Writing Across Culture encourages its readers to become writers engaged in a dialogue - between the individual and the new society - about everyday cultural differences.

An Introduction to Study Abroad and the Writing Process

Writing Across Culture

This analysis of the work of Stephen King explores the distinctly American fears and foibles that King has celebrated, condemned, and generally examined in the course of his wildly successful career. Stephen King: America's Storyteller explores the particular American-ness of Stephen King's work. It is the first major examination to follow this defining theme through King's 40-year career, from his earliest writings to his most recent novels and films made from them. Stephen King begins by tracing Stephen King's rise from his formative years to his status as a one of the most popular writers in publishing history. It then takes a close look at the major works from his canon, including The Shining, The Stand, It, Dolores Claiborne, and The Dark Tower. In these works and others, author Tony Magistrale focuses on King's deep rooted sense of the American experience, exemplified by his clear-eyed presentation of our historical and cultural foibles and scars; his gallery of unlikely friendships that cross race, age, and class boundaries; and his transcendent portrayals of uniquely American survival instincts, fellowship, and acts of heroism from the least likely of sources.

America's Storyteller

Stephen King

Over seventy-five films have been made based either on Stephen King narratives or screen/teleplay scripts that King himself authored, yet this body of work has received very little scholarly attention. An original collection of essays assembled on the cinematic adaptations of Stephen King and written by experts in cinema, television, and cultural studies, this work examines the most important films from the King canon, from Carrie to The Shining to The Shawshank Redemption. Focusing on the most intriguing aspects of these movies--race, gender, technology--this rich collection draws conclusions on their socio-political relevance in contemporary society. ***With updated material on 1408, The Mist, and more!

From Carrie to The Mist

The Films of Stephen King

Sidney Poger

This study traces Edgar Allan Poe's contribution to the Gothic tradition and his invention of the detective tale. It explores the connections between these genres in British and American writers influenced by Poe, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Harris, and Stephen King. This book also examines women writers strongly influenced by Poe, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton. The last chapter of the volume considers films - in particular, the Roger Corman Poe series, Chinatown, Seven, and Blade Runner - that connect the horror and detective genres.

Connections Between Tales of Terror and Detection

Poe's Children

John Baxter

Massive collection of new essays on The Shining with new interviews with the cast and crew.

Studies in the Horror Film: Stanley Kubrick's the Shining

Maura Grady

This book features an in-depth analysis of the world’s most popular movie, The Shawshank Redemption, delving into issues such as: the significance of race in the film, its cinematic debt to earlier genres, the gothic influences at work in the movie, and the representation of Andy’s poster art as cross-gendered signifiers. In addition to exploring the film and novella from which it was adapted, this book also traces the history of the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, which served as the film’s central location, and its relationship to the movie’s fictional Shawshank Prison. The last chapter examines why this film has remained both a popular and critical success, inspiring diverse fan bases on the Internet and the evolution of the Shawshank Trail, fourteen of the film’s actual site locations that have become a major tourist attraction in central Ohio.

Tracking the History of the World’s Favorite Movie

The Shawshank Experience

Jessica Slayton

An introduction to some of the most important illustrators producing work inspired by the tales and poems of American writer Edgar Allan Poe from their earliest iterations in the 1880s to the present day

The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe

Anthony Magistrale

Magistrale discusses the themes that turn King's fiction into morality tales.

The Moral Voyages of Stephen King

Michael J. Blouin

Contributors analyze the theme of violence in the film adaptations of Stephen King’s work, ranging from his earliest movies to the most recent, through a variety of lenses.

Violence in the Films of Stephen King

This book surveys the labyrinthine relationship between Stephen King and American History. By depicting American History as a doomed cycle of greed and violence, King poses a number of important questions: who gets to make history, what gets left out, how one understands one's role within it, and how one might avoid repeating mistakes of the past. This volume examines King's relationship to American History through the illumination of metanarratives, adaptations, "queer" and alternative historical lenses, which confront the destructive patterns of our past as well as our capacity to imagine a different future. Stephen King and American History will present readers with an opportunity to place popular culture in conversation with the pressing issues of our day. If we hope to imagine a different path forward, we will need to come to terms with this enclosure—a task for which King's corpus is uniquely well-suited.

Stephen King and American History

Abject Terrors is an expansive study of the most significant films from the prolific horror genre - from its origins in the 1920s and 1930s, to its contemporary representations. This survey brings together close analyses of individual motion pictures, demonstrating the interconnections among these filmic texts and their contribution to defining quintessential aspects of the modern and postmodern horror film.

Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film

Abject Terrors

Over seventy-five films have been made based either on Stephen King narratives or screen/teleplay scripts that King himself authored-yet this body of work has received very little scholarly attention. The Films of Stephen King is the first collection of essays assembled on the cinematic adaptations of Stephen King. The individual chapters, written by cinema, television, and cultural studies scholars, examine the most important films from the King canon, from Carrie to The Shining to The Shawshank Redemption. Contributors focus on the most intriguing aspects of these movies: race, gender, and technology, and draw conclusions on their socio-political relevance.

From Carrie to Secret Window

Although there have been over 700 illustrators of Poe’s work over the past two centuries, this book chooses to examine only the best of them. Beginning with the French in the nineteenth century and tracing the great illustrators of Poe to the present, this book not only provides close analyses of individual visualizations but also seeks to supply an art history context to understanding their emergence. The majority of the artists featured remain unknown, even to Poe scholars, although their artwork represents iterations inspired by the most famous of Poe’s poems and stories. In some cases, the illustrations helped increase the visibility of particular Poe works and to make them part of the international Poe canon. A few of the illustrators featured in this book (e.g., Manet, Doré, Redon, Beardsley) are recognized among the most famous artists in the world. Others, such as Martini and Blumenschein, while remaining minor figures in art history, nevertheless produced immortal work based on Poe’s fiction and poetry. While still other visual artists represented here (Rackham, Dulac, Clarke) achieved artistic fame as book illustrators based on homages to other writers and fairy tales in combination with their Poe studies; their work on Poe, however, helped to solidify their larger reputations as professional illustrators. The last chapter extends traditional visualizations influenced by Poe to include his impact on twentieth- and twenty-first century filmmakers and cartoonists. They, too, found in Poe’s writing either a source for direct re-creation or an inspiration for their own atmospheric excursions into the bizarre, the exotic, and the psychologically complex.

Provides a critical look at King's more recent works

The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half

A survey of criticism on King's book and Kubrick's film adaptation "The Shining."

Tony Magistrale

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