1st Edition
Heroic Girls as Figures of Resistance and Futurity in Popular Culture
Heroic Girls looks at the recent proliferation of young girl heroes in many recent mainstream films and books. These contemporary ‘final’ girls do not just survive but rather suggest that in doing so they have fundamentally changed something about themselves and or the world around them, seeing them become the ‘First Girls’ of this altered reality. The collection brings together a wide range of perspectives and cultural viewpoints that describe many recent narratives that explore the idea of a Final Girl and her “after-story”. The essays are divided into four sections, beginning with more theoretical approaches; cross-cultural examples; the ways in which fictional narratives bear strong relation to real-world circumstances; examples that more strongly depict themes of resistance, survival, and individual agency; and, finally, those that describe something more fundamental and transformative. Films and television shows covered in the collection include The Girl with All the Gifts, The Witcher, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Fear Street and Pan’s Labyrinth. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, gender studies, and media studies.
Introduction
Simon Bacon
Part I: Theoretical Approaches
1. The Narratives of Survival: Final Girls in Videogames
Carl Wilson
2. Fighting Fate: Representations of a ‘New Order’ in Beautiful Creatures
Lauren Christie
3. The Shadow Self and the New Girl: Breaking Down the Old Worlds in Ursula Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan and N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky
Bronwen Calvert
4. ‘She would never fall, because her friend was flying with her’: Gothic Hybridity, Queer Girls and Exceptional States in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts (2014)
Robyn Ollett
5. Cheerleaders, Orphans, School Girls: The Persistent Sounding Riot(Grrrl) in the (Televisual) Apocalypse
Renee T. Coulombe
Part II: Cross-Cultural Heroes
6. Tranquilas: Monstrous Resistance and Feminist Storytelling
Inés Ordiz
7. Sister-matic Cannibalism in the Dying Breed: Heterotopic Representations of Australia’s Lingering Colonial Connectivity
Phil Fitzsimmons
8. Seeking Resistance in Tropes: a Reading of the Final Girl Trope’s Used in NH10 and Stree and its Socio-Cultural Significance
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
9. Gothic Agent of Revolt: The Rebel Female Hero in Pan’s Labyrinth
Michail-Chrysovalantis Markodimitrakis
10. From Vancouver Island to the City of Troy: Prophecy, Heroism, and Indigenous Classical Reception in Catherine Knutsson’s Shadows Cast by Stars
Svetlana Seibel
Part III: Resistance, Revenge, Reimagining
11. Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017) and the Rape-Revenge Action Hero
M. Keith Booker
12. ‘What about you, Maxine? What’s your American Dream?’: X and Pearl Radically Refit the Final Girl with an Axe and Hack Apart the American Pastoral
Stephanie Schoellman
13. After The Credits Roll: Jade Daniels, Trauma and the Postmodern Final Girl
J. Simpson
14. Killer Girls: Red Riding Hood, Girlhood and the Final Girl
Cristina Santos
15. The Witcher and Ciri of Cintra as the Heroic Final Girl
Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska
Part IV: Into the Future
16. Persephone Distorted: From Teen Witch to Queen of Hell — The Evolution of Sabrina
Karen Graham
17. ‘The Witch Forever Lives’: Redefining the Path for Empowered Final Girls in the Trilogy Fear Street
Bruna Foletta Lucas
18. First Girl, Last Jedi, Final Girl: Rey, Resistance, and the Future of Star Wars
Cathleen Allyn Conway
19. The Environmental Context of Hope in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts
Ildikó Limpár
Biography
Simon Bacon is a writer and film critic based in Poznań, Poland. He has written and edited 30+ books on various subjects including Gothic: A Reader (2018), Horror: A Companion (2019), Eco-Vampires (2020), Nosferatu in the 21st Century (2023), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2023), The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (2024), and The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (forthcoming). He is Kasi the editor of the book series ‘Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead’ at https://www.peterlang.com/series/vsu.
