Poison and the Popular Imagination
eBook - PDF

Poison and the Popular Imagination

Representations, Iconographies, and Meanings in Media and Culture

  1. 265 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Poison and the Popular Imagination

Representations, Iconographies, and Meanings in Media and Culture

About this book

Bringing together the work of international scholars, this book investigates the well-known conceptualization of poison as connected to seemingly contrasting ideas of 'deviousness', 'insidiousness' and 'usefulness,' demonstrating how these understandings manifest in a variety of culturally informed discourses and narrative contexts across popular culture.

Taking an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, contributors to this volume consider poison as a powerful metaphorical entity that recurrently appears across narrative formats and contexts, including film, television, comics, video games, children's literature, and boardgames. Through both historical and fictional accounts – which are explored in equal terms as part of the same cultural narrative – this book re-assesses the place occupied by poison in the popular imagination, establishing its presence as one that is simultaneously nefarious and culturally romanticized. Contributors demonstrate how discourses of poison in popular culture are often interconnected with representations of gender, ethnicity, class, cultural identity, and environmental discourses on an intersectional level.

Ultimately, through its recounting of tales about poison and poisoners, this book also reveals parallels to some of the deepest narratives about our societies, both historic and contemporary: what we fear, what we desire, and how we see ourselves at a specific moment in time.

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Yes, you can access Poison and the Popular Imagination by Lorna Piatti-Farnell in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Film History & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgements
  7. Introduction: A Matter of Life and Death
  8. Part I: Historical Echoes and Iconographic Recurrences
  9. Chapter 1: Poison and Toxicity in 1950s Hollywood Cinema: Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
  10. Chapter 2: The Leprous Distilment: Poison and the Film Noir Narrative
  11. Chapter 3: Roald Dahl’s Femme Fatales and Their Weapon of Choice: Poison
  12. Chapter 4: The Needle and the Snake: Tracing the Historical Echoes of Cleopatra’s Poisons in the Popular Imagination
  13. Chapter 5: Killer Fashion: Clothes That Poison in History, Media and Popular Culture
  14. Chapter 6: Devious Beauty and Deadly Betrayal: Poison as a Multifaceted Symbol in Asian Genres of Cinema
  15. Part II: Popular Representations and Evolving Meanings
  16. Chapter 7: Constitution Checks, Agency and Dice Rolls: Poison in the Tabletop Role-Playing Space
  17. Chapter 8: Body Transformation and the Cycle of Death and Rebirth: Poison and Scarlet Rot in the Elden Ring Video Game
  18. Chapter 9: Sex, Poison and Control in Comics: The Evolving Representation of DC’s Poison Ivy
  19. Chapter 10: ‘Even Stopper Death’: Harry Potter, Potions, Poisons and Plants
  20. Chapter 11: Poison as Allegorical to Loss and Grief in Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece
  21. Chapter 12: Growing in Nightshade: Toxic Culture and Healing Horror in Netflix’s Wednesday
  22. Index
  23. About the Editor and Contributors