A thriller from start to end. We hurriedly walk across an empty, weed-filled lot to approach the house from the back. There’s very little light. Most street lights don’t work here. It’s perfect. I can only imagine how we would look to an incidental observer tonight, this gang of painted up, crazy looking freaks, and we are truly all of that. The living dead have come to call. White painted faces like death masks, all dressed in black as we stride across the overgrown lot in a neighborhood of abandoned and boarded up ramshackle houses, like a scene from a war torn country or the movie set of some vile, cheap, B-horror flick. We are a nightmare from Halloween come to life. Anyone encountering this spectacle would turn and run the other way...

The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White (Breaking Bad) and serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter) are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction? Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral evaluation, making the spectator rely on moral emotions and intuitions that are relatively easy to manipulate with narrative strategies. Nevertheless, she also argues that these series regularly encourage reactivation of deliberate, moral evaluation. In so doing, these fictional series can teach us something about ourselves as moral beings—what our moral intuitions and emotions are, and how these might differ from deliberate, moral evaluation.

In an age of upheaval and challenged faith, traditional heroes are hard to come by, and harder still to love, with their bloodstained hands and backs unbowed by the consequences of their actions. Through penetrating readings of key works of modern European literature, Victor Brombert shows how a new kind of hero—the antihero—has arisen to replace the toppled heroic model. Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs: deficiency translated into strength, failure experienced as honesty, dignity achieved through humiliation. Brombert explores these paradoxes in the works of Büchner, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Svevo, Hašek, Frisch, Camus, and Levi. Coming from diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers all use the figure of the antihero to question handed-down assumptions, to reexamine moral categories, and to raise issues of survival and renewal embodying the spirit of an uneasy age.

The most interesting characters are almost never the good guys. Doing the right thing is great and all, but a little bit of darkness—or a lot of it—often makes for a more engaging story. Antiheroes: Heroes, Villains, and the Fine Line Between is dedicated to the dark heroes and sympathetic villains we love. Find out why William McKinley High's agonist Sue Sylvester is essential to Glee. Discover where your favorite comic book character falls on the continuum of good and evil. Weigh in on Twilight's very dangerous boy Edward Cullen: romantic, sparkly hero, or sociopath suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder? Plus other essays on: • The Vampire Diaries' most antiheroic antihero, Damon Salvatore • America's favorite serial killer, Dexter Morgan, and the nature (and nurture) of evil • The curious appeal of Alias' Arvin Sloane • Supernatural's vampire hunter-cum-vampire Gordon Walker • The shared monstrosity of Spider-Man, Doc Ock, and the Green Goblin • Gun-slinging necromancer Anita Blake, and the benefits (and pitfalls) of embracing the monster within This brand new, e-book only collection of essays—"remixed" from previous Smart Pop series titles—gives a funny and thought-provoking in-depth look at the antihero, from the villains just a little too good to be unequivocal bad guys, and the heroes just a bit too bad to be truly good.

Advances in science and technology no longer change how we live, they determine it. In the not-too-distant future, techno-scientific developments may make individuals stronger, smarter, healthier and more productive--but to what end? Addressing this question, speculative fiction has created an abundance of transhuman characters, protagonists with extraordinary strength, intelligence or abilities. Often they are antiheroes, openly rejecting--or rejected by--society and acting on immoral or extreme principles that challenge readers to approve, condemn, excuse or explain. This study explores the antihero of speculative fiction as a paradoxical blend of human and transhuman. These protagonists illustrate the dynamics of individual, techno-scientific and societal norms, and blur distinctions between human and machine, biology and technology, right and wrong. Fictional works covered include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935), Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956), William Gibson's Neuromancer (1986), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (1986-1987), Richard Morgan's trilogy (Altered Carbon, 2001, Broken Angels, 2003 and Woken Furies 2005) and Black Man (2007).

This master's thesis approaches the heroes in George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire", analyzing the journeys of Eddard Stark, Quentyn Martell, Jon Snow, and Daenerys Targaryen. The application of Campbell's famous Monomyth, or Hero's Journey, did not prove particularly successful when it comes to this series, which leads to a series of ponderations about its universality and the role point of view plays in this debate. "A Song of Ice and Fire" is a masterpiece of fantasy literature that helps scholars to rethink axioms they have been taking for granted for decades, and there is still much more to be said about it.

Design, build, and deploy performant and maintainable web applications using Spring, Spring Boot, and Angular Key Features Find solutions to common problems faced while developing applications with Angular and Spring Boot Explore tips, tricks, and best practices to overcome challenges related to source code Build applications faster and more efficiently using the Spring Framework and the Spring Boot extension Book DescriptionAngular makes building applications with the web easy and Spring Boot helps get an application up and running using just a few lines of code and minimal configuration. This book provides insights into building full-stack apps using Angular and Spring Boot effectively to reduce overall development time and increase efficiency. You'll start by setting up your CI/CD pipeline and then build your web application’s backend guided by best practices. You'll then see how Spring Boot allows you to build applications faster and more efficiently by letting the Spring Framework and Spring Boot extension do the heavy lifting. The book demonstrates how to use Spring Data JPA and add its dependencies along with Postgres dependencies in the project to save or persist a user's data in a database for future use. As you advance, you'll see how to write tests and test a service using Mockito. Finally, you'll create a CI workflow or pipeline for a Spring Boot and Angular application to enable operations to deliver quality applications faster. By the end of this Spring Boot and Angular book, you'll be able to build a full-stack web application and deploy it through continuous integration and continuous deployment.What you will learn Explore how to architect Angular for enterprise-level app development Create a Spring Boot project using Spring Initializr Build RESTful APIs for enterprise-level app development Understand how using Redis for caching can improve your application s performance Discover CORS and how to add CORS policy in the Spring Boot application for better security Write tests to maintain a healthy Java Spring Boot application Implement testing and modern deployments of frontend and backend applications Who this book is for The book is for busy Java web developers and TypeScript developers with little experience developing Angular and Spring Boot apps who want to learn best practices for building full-stack web apps. Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript or the Java programming language is necessary.