Times of Horror, Magic, and the Reproductive Body in Popular Culture

Foreword Lorna Piatti-Farnell Beginnings Introduction: Intersections of Reproduction and Magic in Horror: A Matter of Time Ruth Barratt-Peacock Imagined Futures 1. The Horror of Time: Reproductive Anxiety and Transgenerational Haunting in Clock (2023) Qian Zhang 2. Body Politic Horror and the Death Drive in Kamen Rider Black Sun (2022) Sophia Staite 3. The Recursive Horrors of Techno-Magical Reproduction: From Children of Men to Poor Things, Birth/Rebirth, and The End We Start From Tomas Elliot 4. "My Blood Is Magic": The Birth of the Posthuman Nesrine I. Affara and Jeffrey S. Squires Imagined Pasts 5. Transpositional Subjects and Postapocalyptic Monstrosities in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man Martina Jauch 6. Wrath of Kālī: The Terrible Mother and the Apocalyptic Beat Offsprings Ashima Bhardwaj 7. Not Just the Pontianak: Maternal Death and Agency in Malaysian Supernatural Narratives Ikhlas Abdul Hadi 8. Changelings, Crones, Witches, and Werewolves: Reproductive Horror in Mike Mignola’s Early Hellboy Stories Daniel Morse The Present: Critical Visions 9. Creation as an Act of Rebellion: Magic, Biopower, and Reclamation in Spare and Found Parts by Sarah Maria Griffin Betty Thompson 10. Motherhood, Magic, and Horror in Delicate Condition and The Upstairs House Kathleen Murphey 11. Ghostly Mothers and Unborn Babies: Reading Maternal Bodies as Contested Sites of Domination and Transgression in Contemporary Bollywood Horror Cinema Suhana Simran and Zainab Wahab 12. Monstrous Ambivalence and Sociospatial Subversion in Good Manners Márton Árva 13. Immortality and Mass Production in Chucky Gabriela Zogall 14. Queer Pregnancies in Kirsty Logan’s Fiction Gina Lyle

Biography

Ruth Barratt-Peacock has published broadly in literature, metal and popular music studies, childhood studies, and popular culture. She studied English literature and musicology at the University of Tasmania before pursuing a master’s of literature, culture, and art at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and the renowned University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar. She wrote her PhD on contemporary Australian poetry and Romantic epistemological philosophy at the interdisciplinary research group Modell Romantik: Variation, Reichweite, Aktualität (Romanticism as a model) at FSU Jena. She has also been a Walter Benjamin fellow with the University of Huddersfield funded by the German Research Foundation (project no. 405662736). Her most recent papers appear in Popular Television; English: Journal of the English Society Oxford; Intermédialités Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des technique; The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture; The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture;  Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies and Metal Music Studies. Previous book-length publications include the edited collection Medievalism in Metal Music: Throwing Down the Gauntlet (with Ross Hagen, Emerald Press) and Concrete Horizons: Romantic Irony in the Poetry of David Malouf and Samual Wagan Watson (Peter Lang).