Mcfarland Company Inc Publishers: 2371 books
Tolkien in the New Century
Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2014
Widely considered one of the leading experts on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Alan Shippey has informed and enlightened a generation of Tolkien scholars and fans. In this collection, friends and colleagues honor Shippey with 15 essays that reflect their mentor’s research interests, methods...
Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars
Biographical, Anthropological, Literary, Scientific and Other Perspectives
Language: English
Release Date: September 27, 2013
This essay collection explores the life and work of science fiction doyen Ray Bradbury from a variety of perspectives. Noting the impact of the Southwest on Bradbury, some of the essays analyze Bradbury’s southwest metaphors: colonial pollution of a pristine ecology, the impacts of a colonial invasion...
The Worlds of Farscape
Essays on the Groundbreaking Television Series
Language: English
Release Date: August 3, 2013
Reversing a common science fiction cliché, Farscape follows the adventures of the human astronaut John Crichton after he is shot through a wormhole into another part of the universe. Here Crichton is the only human being, going from being a member of the most intelligent species on our planet to...
Too Funny for Words
A Contrarian History of American Screen Comedy from Silent Slapstick to Screwball
Language: English
Release Date: April 11, 2019
American silent film comedies were dominated by sight gags, stunts and comic violence. With the advent of sound, comedies in the 1930s were a riot of runaway heiresses and fast-talking screwballs. It was more than a technological pivot—the first feature-length sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927),...
The Ascendance of Harley Quinn
Essays on DC's Enigmatic Villain
Language: English
Release Date: October 12, 2017
Since her first appearance in 1992, Harley Quinn—eccentric sidekick to the Joker—has captured the attention of readers like few new characters have in eight decades of Batman comics. Her bubbly yet malicious persona has earned her a loyal and growing fan base as she has crossed over into television,...
Gender in Science Fiction Films, 1964-1979
A Critical Study
Language: English
Release Date: June 8, 2015
The 1950s era of science fiction film effectively ended when space flight became a reality with the first manned orbit of Earth in 1962. As the genre’s wildly speculative depictions of science and technology gave way to more reality-based representations, relations between male and female characters...
Space Sirens, Scientists and Princesses
The Portrayal of Women in Science Fiction Cinema
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2018
Women are now central to many science fiction films—but that has not always been the case. Female characters, from their token presence (or absence) in the silent pictures of the early 20th century to their roles as assistants, pulp princesses and sexy robots, and eventually as scientists, soldiers...
Apocalypse Then
American and Japanese Atomic Cinema, 1951-1967
Language: English
Release Date: August 11, 2017
The United States, the only country to have dropped the bomb, and Japan, the only one to have suffered its devastation, understandably portray the nuclear threat differently on film. American science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s generally proclaim that it is possible to put the nuclear genie...
Giallo Cinema and Its Folktale Roots
A Critical Study of 10 Films, 1962-1987
Language: English
Release Date: July 19, 2016
The Italian giallo film genre—the equivalent of the American whodunit but incorporating extreme violence and sex—was based on popular British and American fiction of the 30s and 40s, adapted to the explicitly liberal filmmaking of 1970s and 1980s Europe. Seldom released in American theaters, these...
Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime Fiction
Works and Authors of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden Since 1967
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2016
Since the late 1960s, the novels of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck detective series, along with the works of Henning Mankell, Håkan Nesser and Stieg Larsson, have sparked an explosion of Nordic crime fiction—grim police procedurals treating urgent sociopolitical issues affecting the contemporary...
Harry Potter and the Classical World
Greek and Roman Allusions in J.K. Rowling's Modern Epic
Language: English
Release Date: July 11, 2015
J.K. Rowling has drawn deeply from classical sources to inform and color her Harry Potter novels, with allusions ranging from the obvious to the obscure. “Fluffy,” the vicious three-headed dog in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, is clearly a repackaging of Cerberus, the hellhound of Greek...
Girls Transforming
Invisibility and Age-Shifting in Children's Fantasy Fiction Since the 1970s
Language: English
Release Date: April 26, 2013
This book explores representations of girlhood and young womanhood in recent English language children’s fantasy by focusing on two fantastic body transformation types: invisibility and age-shifting. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory, the study discusses the tropes of invisibility and...
Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film
A Critical Study of the Adaptations, 1924-2013
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2014
A comprehensive guide to all major film adaptations based on the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, this is essential for scholars of American modernism and film studies. The author takes the approach that all visual and printed literature is born from a cycle of celebrity culture,...
by J.W. Whitehead
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: May 21, 2014
Mike Nichols burst onto the American cultural scene in the late 1950s as one half of the comic cabaret team of Nichols and May. He became a Broadway directing sensation, then moved on to Hollywood, where his first two films—Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Graduate (1967)—earned...