#Possessed Child Narratives In Literature And Film PDF

This book undertakes a study of the trope of possessed child in literature and film. It argues that the possessed child is fundamentally an American phenomenon which, first, may be traced to the Calvinist bias of the US as a nation founded on Puritanism and, second, to the rise of Catholicism in that country, to which Puritanism owes its origins.

Books about Contrary States

This collection of essays turns to misfit children as those found in-between socio-cultural, psychological and physical realms. It explores both the possibilities and futilities of negotiating this in-betweenness.

Since the release of The Exorcist in 1973, there has been a surge of movies depicting young women becoming possessed by a demonic force that only male religious figures can exorcise, thereby saving the women from eventual damnation. This book considers this history of exorcism cinema by analyzing how the traditional exorcism narrative, established in The Exorcist, recurs across the exorcism subgenre to represent the effects of demonic possession and ritual exorcism. This traditional exorcism narrative often functions as the central plot of the exorcism film, with only the rare film deviating from this structure. The analysis presented in this book considers how exorcism films reflect, reinforce or challenge this traditional exorcism narrative. Using various cultural and critical theories, this book examines how representations of possession and exorcism reflect, reinforce or challenge prevailing social, cultural, and historical views of women, minorities, and homosexuals. In particular, exorcism films appear to explore tensions or fears regarding empowered and sexually active women, and frequently reinforce the belief that such individuals need to be subjugated and disempowered so that they no longer pose a threat to those around them. Even more recent films, produced after the emergence of third wave feminism, typically reflect this concern about women. Very rarely do exorcism films present empowered women and feminine sexuality as non-threatening. In examining this subgenre of horror films, this book looks at films that have not received much critical scrutiny regarding the messages they contain and how they relate to and comment upon the historical periods in which they were produced and initially received. Given the results of this analysis, this book concludes on the necessity to examine how possession and exorcism are portrayed in popular culture.

Moving away from traditional studies of Gothic domesticity based on symbolism, Soon instead focuses on domestic space's material presence and the traces it leaves on the human subjects inhabiting it. Approaching novels and films such as Beloved and The Exorcist , this study intersects psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and various spatial theories.

This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.

This book provides a fascinating historical and cultural overview of traditional beliefs about spirit possession and exorcism around the world, from Europe to Asia and the Middle East to the Americas. • Provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the subject of spirit possession, reflecting the work of scholars and experts from many fields • Covers a wide range of cultures, traditions, and phenomena with up-to-date, little-known information that is difficult to find through independent research • Includes primary documents that give students accounts of exorcism and spiritual possession and serve to foster critical thinking skills and media literacy • Features sidebars that illuminate key points and present related information, with special attention paid to exorcism and spirit possession in popular culture

This exploration into the development of women's self-defence from 1850 to 1914 features major writers, including H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Robins and Richard Marsh, and encompasses an unusually wide-ranging number of subjects from hatpin crimes to the development of martial arts for women.

The monstrous child is the allegorical queer child in various formations of horror cinema: the child with a secret, the child 'possessed' by Otherness, the changeling child, the terrible gang. This book explores the possibilities of 'not growing up' as a model for a queer praxis that confronts the notion of heternormative maturity.

Fully revised, updated, and extended, this compilation of interpretive essays and primary documents teaches students to read films as cultural artifacts within the contexts of actual past events. A new edition of this classic textbook, which ties movies into the broader narrative of US and film history Ten new articles which consider recently released films, as well as issues of gender and ethnicity Well-organized within a chronological framework with thematic treatments to provide a valuable resource for students of the history of American film Fourth edition includes completely new images throughout

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film offers a uniquely comprehensive study of children's cinema from an interdisciplinary, nuanced, global perspective.

This book illustrates how global horror film images of children re-conceptualised childhood at the beginning of the twenty-first century, unravelling the child's long entrenched binding to ideologies of growth, futurity, and progress. The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema analyses an influential body of horror films featuring subversive depictions of children that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and considers the cultural conditions surrounding their emergence. The book proposes that complex cultural and industrial shifts at the turn of the millennium resulted in potent cinematic renegotiations of the concept of childhood. In these transnational films-largely stemming from Spain, Japan, and America-the child resists embodying growth and futurity, concepts to which the child's symbolic function is typically bound. By demonstrating both the culturally specific and globally resonant properties of these frightening visions of children who refuse to grow up, the book outlines the conceptual and aesthetic mechanisms by which long entrenched ideologies of futurity, national progress, and teleological history started to waver at the turn of the twenty-first century.