Reflecting current trends in scholarly analysis of evil and the feminine, the chapters contained in Re-visiting Female Evil focus upon various ‘re-interpretations’ of evil femininities as a cultural signifier of agency, transgression and crisis, re-interpreting them through rewriting of ‘other’ stories, hermeneutic re-interpretations of ancient/classical texts, and revised film/ stage adaptations. These papers illustrate how gendered cultural myths of women’s intrinsic connection to evil still persist in today’s patriarchal society, though in variant and updated forms. Mischievous, beguiling, seductive, lascivious, unruly, carping, vengeful and manipulative – from the Disney princess to the murderous Medea, these authors grapple with our understanding of what it is to be and do ‘evil’, exploring the possible sources of the fear and hatred of women and the feminine as well as their continual fascination and appeal, and how these manifest in a range of 'real life' and fictional narratives that cross times, cultures and media.

This volume explores post-2000s artistic engagements with Holocaust memory arguing that imagination plays an increasingly important role in keeping the memory of the Holocaust vivid for contemporary and future audiences.

Evil women, who are they really? What are their motives, and how are they remembered and constructed within our culture? Evil Women: Representations within Literature, Culture and Film seeks to interrogate the nature and construction of evil women in the above fields. Through literature, poetry, history, ballads, film and real-life culture, scholars explore how the evil woman has been constructed and, in some cases, erased; the punishment and treatment of evil women; and the way evil women have been portrayed on and off screen through character, narrative and behind the camera development.

For every hero, there is a villain, and for every villain there is a story. But how much do we really know about the villain? Filling a gap in the field of gender representation and character evolution, the chapters in this edited collection focus on female villains in the fairy tale narratives of 21st Century media.

Do women have a history? Did women have a renaissance? These were provocative questions when they were raised in the heyday of women’s studies in the 1970s. But how relevant does gender remain to premodern history in the twenty-first century? This book considers this question in eight new case studies that span the European continent from 1400 to 1800. An introductory essay examines the category of gender in historiography and specifically within premodern historiography, as well as the issue of source material for historians of the period. The eight individual essays seek to examine gender in relation to emerging fields and theoretical considerations, as well as how premodern history contributes to traditional concepts and theories within women’s and gender studies, such as patriarchy.

Telling an American Horror Story collects essays from new and established critics looking at the many ways the horror anthology series intersects with and comments on contemporary American social, political and popular culture. Divided into three sections, the chapters apply a cultural criticism framework to examine how the first eight seasons of AHS engage with American history, our contemporary ideologies and social policies. Part I explores the historical context and the uniquely-American folklore that AHS evokes, from the Southern Gothic themes of Coven to connections between Apocalypseand anxieties of modern American youth. Part II contains interpretations of place and setting that mark the various seasons of the anthology. Finally, Part III examines how the series confronts notions of individual and social identity, like the portrayals of destructive leadership in Cult and lesbian representation in Asylum and Hotel.

Bringing alive the dramatic poems of Old Norse heroic legend, this new collection offers accessible, ground-breaking and inspiring essays which introduce and analyse the exciting legends of the two doomed Helgis and their valkyrie lovers; the dragon-slayer Sigurðr; Brynhildr the implacable shield-maiden; tragic Guðrún and her children; Attila the Hun (from a Norse perspective!); and greedy King Fróði, whose name lives on in Tolkien’s Frodo. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the poems for students, taking a number of fresh, theoretically-sophisticated and productive approaches to the poetry and its characters. Contributors bring to bear insights generated by comparative study, speech act and feminist theory, queer theory and psychoanalytic theory (among others) to raise new, probing questions about the heroic poetry and its reception. Each essay is accompanied by up-to-date lists of further reading and a contextualisation of the poems or texts discussed in critical history. Drawing on the latest international studies of the poems in their manuscript context, and written by experts in their individual fields, engaging with the texts in their original language and context, but presented with full translations, this companion volume to The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology (Routledge, 2002) is accessible to students and illuminating for experts. Essays also examine the afterlife of the heroic poems in Norse legendary saga, late medieval Icelandic poetry, the nineteenth-century operas of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the recently published (posthumous) poem by Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.