First Published in 2017. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

First Published in 2017. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

While the undisputed heyday of folk horror was Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the genre has not only a rich cinematic and literary prehistory, but directors and novelists around the world have also been reinventing folk horror for the contemporary moment. This study sets out to rethink the assumptions that have guided critical writing on the genre in the face of such expansions, with chapters exploring a range of subjects from the fiction of E. F. Benson to Scooby-Doo, video games, and community engagement with the Lancashire witches. In looking beyond Britain, the essays collected here extend folk horror’s geographic terrain to map new conceptualisations of the genre now seen emerging from Italy, Ukraine, Thailand, Mexico and the Appalachian region of the US.

This collection explores artistic representations of vegetal life that imperil human life, voicing anxieties about our relationship to other life forms with which we share the earth. From medieval manuscript illustrations to modern works of science fiction and horror, plants that manifest monstrous agency defy human control, challenge anthropocentric perception, and exact a violent vengeance for our blind and exploitative practices. Plant Horror explores how depictions of monster plants reveal concerns about the viability of our prevailing belief systems and dominant ideologies- as well as a deep-seated fear about human vulnerability in an era of deepening ecological crisis. Films discussed include The Day of the Triffids, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wicker Man, Swamp Thing, and The Happening.

This final volume in the Public Women, Public Words series focuses on what has come to be called the second wave of American feminism. It traces the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s-from Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women to the anarchist and lesbian identity dimensions of radical feminism. Including topics such as sexual autonomy, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the black-feminist resistance to the white-dominated second wave, this volume reflects the unprecedented range of women's issues taken up by feminists during the 1970s and beyond. Volume III also charts the great diffusion of feminism with separate sections on multicultural feminism and the feminist presence in media and pop culture. Finally, through the recent writings of feminist intellectuals, it looks toward a third feminist wave for the new millennium. Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism provides a comprehensive view of the many strands of feminist thought and actions and is essential for every women's studies and feminism collection.

When twelve- year- old Jesse Pomeroy tortured seven small boys in the Boston area and then went on to brutally murder two other children, one of the most striking aspects of his case was his inability ever to answer the question of why he did what he did. Whether in court or in the newspapers, many experts tried to explain his horrible acts- and distance the rest of society from them. Despite those efforts, and attempts since, the mystery remains. In this book, Dawn Keetley details the story of Pomeroy's crimes and the intense public outcry. She explores the two reigning theories at the time- that he was shaped before birth when his pregnant mother visited a slaughterhouse and that he imitated brutal acts found in popular dime novels. Keetley then thoughtfully offers a new theory: that Pomeroy was a psychopath who revealed our potential for brutality and tested societal efforts to manage behavior. The reaction to Pomeroy's acts, then and now, demonstrates the struggle to account for those aspects of human nature that remain beyond our ability to understand them.

This edited collection brings together an introduction and 13 original scholarly essays on AMC's The Walking Dead. The first group of essays addresses the pervasive bloodletting of the series: What are the consequences of the series' unremitting violence? Essays explore violence committed in self-defence, racist violence, mass lawlessness, the violence of law enforcement, the violence of mourning, and the violence of history. The second half of the collection explores an equally urgent question: What does it mean to be human? Several of the essays argue that notions of the human must acknowledge the centrality of the body-the fact that we share a ""blind corporeality"" with the zombie. Other essays address how the human is closely aligned with language and time, the disappearance of which are represented by the aphasic, mindless zombie. Underlying each essay are the game-changing words of Walking Dead's protagonist Rick Grimes to the other survivors: ""We're all infected."" The violence of the zombie is also our violence; their blind drives are also ours. The human characters of The Walking Dead may try to define themselves against the zombies but in the end their bodies harbor the zombie virus: they are the walking dead.

From the beginning, controversies have swirled around the ways in which both Robert Kirkman's comics and AMC's series of The Walking Dead represent race, gender, and sexuality. This collection of essays will be the first to address those controversies in a sustained way. Critics and fans have protested that identity politics in The Walking Dead have veered toward the decidedly conservative, offering up traditional understandings of masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality, racial hierarchy, and white supremacy. And while some critics acknowledge that the series has undeniably evolved toward less conventional representations, there is still much more to be said. All of the essays in our collection explore the complicated nature of relationships among the survivors as they adapt to the conditions of a new world-and, in the end, characters demonstrate often surprising permutations of identity, consistently serving to comment on identity politics in our own world. While individual chapters in this collection sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with the critics of The Walking Dead, together they offer a rich view of how gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect in complex new ways in the TV series and the comics.

When twelve- year- old Jesse Pomeroy tortured seven small boys in the Boston area and then went on to brutally murder two other children, one of the most striking aspects of his case was his inability ever to answer the question of why he did what he did. Whether in court or in the newspapers, many experts tried to explain his horrible acts- and distance the rest of society from them. Despite those efforts, and attempts since, the mystery remains. In this book, Dawn Keetley details the story of Pomeroy's crimes and the intense public outcry. She explores the two reigning theories at the time- that he was shaped before birth when his pregnant mother visited a slaughterhouse and that he imitated brutal acts found in popular dime novels. Keetley then thoughtfully offers a new theory: that Pomeroy was a psychopath who revealed our potential for brutality and tested societal efforts to manage behavior. The reaction to Pomeroy's acts, then and now, demonstrates the struggle to account for those aspects of human nature that remain beyond our ability to understand them.