This thought-provoking volume offers an overview of contemporary representations of prominent female characters as they appear in an array of moving-image narratives from a Jungian and post-Jungian perspective. Applying a theoretical frame that is richly informed by the Jungian and post-Jungian concepts of persona, individuation, and archetypes, works including Fleabag (2016-2019), Ladybird (2017), and The Queen’s Gambit (2020) as well as Disney productions such as Brave (2012), Moana (2016), and Frozen (2013), are contextualized and discussed alongside their non-screen precedents and contemporaries, including myths, fairy tales, and works of literature, to closely examine new patterns of the female journey. This book identifies how young female characters rebel against the female persona of previous eras through the trickster, the shadow, and other archetypes, comparing the contemporary female protagonist with her predecessors to assess the new paths, roles, and milestones available to her. Examining the construction of the female persona across time periods and mediums in an accessibly written yet academic style, this book is the first of its kind. With a fulsome account of the progressive developments in entertainment media and Jungian thought, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of film, as well as anyone with an interest in analytical psychology and wider feminist issues in contemporary culture.

As portrayals of heroic women gain ground in film, television, and other media, their depictions are breaking free of females as versions of male heroes or simple stereotypes of acutely weak or overly strong women. Although heroines continue to represent the traditional roles of mothers, goddesses, warriors, whores, witches, and priestesses, these women are no longer just damsels in distress or violent warriors. In Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture,award-winning authors from a variety of disciplines examine the changing roles of heroic women across time. In this volume, editors Norma Jones, Maja Bajac-Carter, and Bob Batchelor have assembled a collection of essays that broaden our understanding of how heroines are portrayed across media, offering readers new ways to understand, perceive, and think about women. Contributors bring fresh readings to popular films and television shows such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Kill Bill, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Weeds, Mad Men, and Star Trek. The representations and interpretations of these heroines are important reflections of popular culture that simultaneously empower and constrain real life women. These essays help readers gain a more complete understanding of female heroes, especially as related to race, gender, power, and culture. A companion volume to Heroines of Comic Books and Literature, this collection will appeal to academics and broader audiences that are interested in women in popular culture.

Hollywood Divas, Indie Queens, and TV Heroines offers an entertaining and critical look at the representation of women in recent movies. Written in a refreshingly accessible style, the book analyzes over thirty box-office hits. The authors explore the screen personae of top stars such as Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan, and Renée Zellweger, as well as independent movie queens like Parker Posey and TV heroines like Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A must-read book for all film buffs who are tired of the mixed gender messages of mainstream culture.

This book explores how the next generation of teen and young adult heroines in popular culture are creating a new feminist ideal for the 21st century. Representations of a teenage girl who is unique or special occur again and again in coming-of-age stories. It's an irresistible concept: the heroine who seems just like every other, but under the surface, she has the potential to change the world. This book examines the cultural significance of teen and young adult female characters—the New Heroines—in popular culture. The book addresses a wide range of examples primarily from the past two decades, with several chapters focusing on a specific heroic figure in popular culture. In addition, the author offers a comparative analysis between the "New Woman" figure from the late 19th and early 20th century and the New Heroine in the 21st century. Readers will understand how representations of teenage girls in fiction and nonfiction are positioned as heroic because of their ability to find out about themselves by connecting with other people, their environment, and technology.

This book explores how the next generation of teen and young adult heroines in popular culture are creating a new feminist ideal for the 21st century. Representations of a teenage girl who is unique or special occur again and again in coming-of-age stories. It's an irresistible concept: the heroine who seems just like every other, but under the surface, she has the potential to change the world. This book examines the cultural significance of teen and young adult female characters—the New Heroines—in popular culture. The book addresses a wide range of examples primarily from the past two decades, with several chapters focusing on a specific heroic figure in popular culture. In addition, the author offers a comparative analysis between the "New Woman" figure from the late 19th and early 20th century and the New Heroine in the 21st century. Readers will understand how representations of teenage girls in fiction and nonfiction are positioned as heroic because of their ability to find out about themselves by connecting with other people, their environment, and technology.

This book focuses on the emergence of female characters in typically male roles, particularly in the crime and prison drama genres. Contributors explore the role of race and sexuality, focusing on the transgression of female identity, and examine how bad women are portrayed and how they reveal the challenges by women to social and economic norms.

This volume offers a stimulating perspective on the status of representations of a new kind of female character who emerged on the scene on US television in the mid-2000s, that of the anti-heroine. This new figure rivaled her earlier counterpart, the anti-hero, in terms of her complexity, and was multi-layered and morally flawed. Looking at the cable channels Showtime and HBO, as well as Netflix and ABC Television, this volume examines a range of recent television women and shows, including Homeland, Weeds, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, Veep, Girls, and Orange is the New Black as well as a host of other nighttime programs to demonstrate just how dominant the anti-heroine has become on US television. It examines how the figure has arisen within the larger context of the turn towards “Quality Television”, that has itself been viewed as part of the post-network era or the “Third Golden Age” of television where new forms of broadcast delivery have created a marketing incentive to deliver more compelling characters to niche audiences. By including an exploration of the historical circumstances, as well as the industrial context in which the anti-heroine became the dominant leading female character on nighttime television, the book offers a fascinating study that sits at the intersection of gender studies and television. As such, it will appeal to scholars of popular culture, sociology, cultural and media studies.