Overview
- Offers the first dedicated, multi-media critical study of contemporary American revenge narratives
- Utilizes a range of analytic methodologies ranging from Marxist to historical materialist, third-wave feminist critique to critical race theory
- Argues that the revenge genre can be read as a national catalog of socio-political debts
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Revenge on the Page
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Revenge on the Screen
Keywords
About this book
American Revenge Narratives critically examines the nation’s vengeful storytelling tradition. With essays on late twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, film, and television, it maps the coordinates of the revenge genre’s contemporary reinvention across American culture. By surveying American revenge narratives, this book measures how contemporary payback plots appraise the nation’s political, social, and economic inequities.
The volume’s essays collectively make the case that retribution is a defining theme of post-war American culture and an artistic vehicle for critique. In another sense, this book presents a scholarly coming to terms with the nation’s love for vengeance. By investigating recent iterations of an ancient genre, contributors explore how the revenge narrative evolves andthrives within American literary and filmic imagination. Taken together, the book’s diverse chapters attempt to understand American culture’s seemingly inexhaustible production of vengeful tales.Reviews
“American Revenge Narratives offers a timely intervention into the history and scholarship of violent payback. Investigating diverse literary and cinematic genres, its contributors not only disclose the complex consequences of contemporary revenge fiction, but also tarry with its ambiguous mix of justice and vigilantism. Essential reading for understanding the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of American retribution fantasies.” (Amy Rust, Associate Professor & Graduate Coordinator, Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies, University of South Florida, USA)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Kyle Wiggins is Lecturer of Rhetoric at Boston University, USA, where he teaches courses on writing, argumentation, and research methods. His work has appeared in Postmodern Culture, Great Plains Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, and other publications.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: American Revenge Narratives
Book Subtitle: A Collection of Critical Essays
Editors: Kyle Wiggins
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93746-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-93745-8Published: 02 August 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-06714-4Published: 26 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-93746-5Published: 21 July 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 288
Number of Illustrations: 4 illustrations in colour
Topics: American Culture, Popular Culture , American Cinema and TV, North American Literature, Media and Communication