Popular Fantasy Research Articles

THE NOSTALGIA BEHIND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF DEATH AND ITS PERSONIFICATION IN TERRY PRATCHETT’S DISCWORLD

The paper explores the portrayals of nostalgia and the notion of death in the popular fantasy book series Discworld, written by Terry Pratchett. In the novels, death is not depicted as a mere natural phenomenon but rather as a recurring, fully developed character whose role throughout the series is manifold and essential to convey the author’s underlying doctrine. Firstly, the paper is to briefly demonstrate the relevant perspectives on nostalgia by Davis (1979), Boym (2001,2007), and Salmose (2019) and their relation to the topic of the paper. The following part is to exemplify Pratchett’s illustrations of death and the nostalgia they convey, as well as to uncover the philosophy behind the deconstruction of conventional supposition towards humanness and dying. The character of Death simultaneously functions as an objective observer of humanity and a subjective participant who frequently fails to meet the criteria of being a human. It is precisely through these instances that Pratchett invokes the uniquely human mixture of follies and decency he glorifies throughout his oeuvre. The analysis is generated by presenting different narratives centered on the character of Death, which often encompass nostalgic views on the simplicity of life in the past and the loss of human essence associated with the deteriorating social values of the contemporary era. Therefore, the research aims to investigate Pratchett’s purportedly nostalgic personification of death in relation to his depiction of the aforementioned concerns.

Когнитивные метафоры и сравнения в удмуртских загадках о пчелах

The work is devoted to the consideration of riddles about bees in the Udmurt linguistic culture. The article aims to study comparisons and metaphors, as well as analyze the image of an insect in riddles. The material was riddles reflected in special folklore publications and lexicographic sources. During the analysis, linguoculturological, semantic, etymological, and conceptual methods were used. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the bee in riddles is presented in the form of complex metaphors, comparisons and euphemisms. The bee and the hive in Udmurt culture are revealed in different categories. The hive is most often associated with a house, a pit and a syulyk (a woman’s headdress). The sounds made by a bee and a bee colony are compared to the crying of a baby, the whining of a dog, or the growling of a motor. The bee itself or the bee family is associated in popular fantasy with a daughter-in-law, who is sad about parting with her parents and expecting hardships in the new family. Riddles about bees are typically compared to a huge number of people or a flock of sheep. In quantitative terms, the sound or hum of a beehive corresponds to a hundred or a thousand. Along with crying, the flight of bees from the hive is compared to sifting flour. Fairy tales also reflect the bee's ability to sting, build honeycombs, and make honey.

Review: Chinatown Film Culture: The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese Neighborhood, by Kim K. Fahlstedt

Review: <i>Chinatown Film Culture: The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese Neighborhood</i>, by Kim K. Fahlstedt

Performing “Realness” in a Transnational Ethnic Imaginary: Starring Dilraba on Post-2010 Chinese TV

Abstract This research examines the rising and televisual mediation of Xinjiang ethnic minority female celebrities within Han-centric China’s heteropatriarchal, nationalistic cultural imaginaries in the post-2010 years. Specifically, my analysis focuses on one of the most popular Uyghur female TV celebrities in China, Dilraba Dilmurat. By identifying a popular cultural discourse of “transnational ethnic imaginary” surrounding her celebrity images, I explore the ways in which her geo-cultural-ethnic-gender identity has been capitalized on by the Chinese TV industry and subjectively performed by herself within official and popular fantasies about a global, harmonious China. Ultimately, I argue that her success as a TV star in the post-2010 years exposes the artificiality and contingency of the self-imagined dimorphism of the dominant Han Chinese and ethnic minorities within the party-state’s interethnic, transnational, heteropatriarchal-structured fantasies about a global China and a homogenous Chineseness.

Policy Experts Negotiating Popular Fantasies of ‘Benefit Tourism’ Policy Discourses on Deservingness and Their Relation to Welfare Chauvinism

Welfare provision as a border control strategy is often discussed in relation to irregular migrants and refugees. However, this article focuses on EU migrants. Using discourse theory, it explores interviews with policy experts from four migrant-receiving EU countries. The aim is to identify policy discourses on deservingness articulated in relation to intra-EU migrants from four member states in Eastern Europe, to detect mechanisms that generate these discourses and to reveal how they relate to welfare chauvinism. The article uncovers contesting logics that move policy experts toward welfare-chauvinist assumptions, which might contribute to the discursive welfare exclusion of EU migrants.

Fantasies About Consensual Nonmonogamy Among Persons in Monogamous Romantic Relationships.

The present research explored fantasies about consensual nonmonogamous relationships (CNMRs) and the factors that predict such fantasies in a large and diverse online sample (N = 822) of persons currently involved in monogamous relationships. Nearly one-third (32.6%) of participants reported that being in some type of sexually open relationship was part of their favorite sexual fantasy of all time, of whom most (80.0%) said that they want to act on this fantasy in the future. Those who had shared and/or acted on CNMR fantasies previously generally reported positive outcomes (i.e., meeting or exceeding their expectations and improving their relationships). In addition, a majority of participants reported having fantasized about being in a CNMR at least once before, with open relationships being the most popular variety. Those who identified as male or non-binary reported more CNMR fantasies than those who identified as female. CNMR fantasies were also more common among persons who identified as anything other than heterosexual and among older adults. Erotophilia and sociosexual orientation were uniquely and positively associated with CNMR fantasies of all types; however, other individual difference factors (e.g., Big Five personality traits, attachment style) had less consistent associations. Unique predictors of infidelity fantasies differed from CNMR fantasies, suggesting that they are propelled by different psychological factors. Overall, these results suggest that CNMRs are a popular fantasy and desire among persons in monogamous romantic relationships. Clinical implications and implications for sexual fantasy research more broadly are discussed.

Role-Playing, Reader Response, and Play-Therapy in Fantasy Fiction: “You could hear the dice rolling” in Novels About Abuse and Recovery

Role-Playing, Reader Response, and Play-Therapy in Fantasy Fiction: “You could hear the dice rolling” in Novels About Abuse and Recovery James Gifford (bio) Role-playing games (rpgs) have an established use in play-therapy, particularly psychotherapy with children and teens as well as in social work with these groups. Likewise, reader response studies have long established the self-reflective and transformative nature of literary reading, as well as the therapeutic uses of writing. While these four areas are typically approached as distinct from each other—rpgs, therapy, reading, and writing—they find common ground in responses to and concerns with trauma and abuse. We know that rpg players may use their persona in gaming sessions as an avatar to work through issues of concern in their real lives. Similarly, readers consuming fiction may process and reflect on their own real-life experiences through the imaginary worlds inside. Authors, as a third group, also may use their writing as a way of processing their experiences in a sense akin to how a patient works with a therapist through dialogue, play-therapy, and journaling. There is, however, an overlapping point not yet recognized among these quasi-therapeutic possibilities. The crux of this article is a niche literary genre in which all four of these distinct areas coincide: fantasy fiction, and in particular popular fantasy of 1977 to 1990, in which “you could hear the dice rolling” (Lindskold, n.p.). This article considers where these topics overlap in the therapeutic components [End Page 103] of such novels for both readers and authors based on critical attention to affect and literary reading combined with the person-player-persona distinctions in sociological studies of rpgs. By doing so I argue for the value of an affect-based approach to genre fiction parallel with the ubiquity of critical cultural studies, taxonomies, and identity politics as approaches to popular media.1 The phrase “you could hear the dice rolling” typifies a well-recognized sub-genre of “franchise fiction” (Robertson 130) as well as other general fantasy fiction for which some conventions of role-playing infiltrate the organization of the narrative, tropes, or action. While this is typically a pejorative description, its use here signals affinities rather than a value judgment. My interest is in the affective role-playing rather than the contingency-focused possibilities of this sub-genre and the notional “dice.” The broader sense of “dice rolling” novels began in earnest with Andre Norton’s 1978 novel Quag Keep, which is directly based on her gaming sessions with the founder of the rpg Dungeons & Dragons (d&d), Gary Gygax. Her novel’s characters move from real life into the Greyhawk gaming world and back again, with their adventure along the way following the conventions of the rpg’s set of rules.2 In other words, Quag Keep is essentially a novelization of an rpg session with role-playing shaping many parts of the narrative and even the traits of characters.3 An excerpt [End Page 104] from the novel was published as a preview in the rpg gaming magazine The Dragon in February 1978 prior to its full publication as a novel the next year for the purpose of enabling useful cross-promotion between the novel and the game module.4 But it also served another purpose related to affect: to model or even mentor new rpg players on how to self-narrate the experiences, decisions, and feelings of their persona-character in a gaming session. This element of affect and self-modifying reading is the issue at stake, as well as how the conventions of such novels shaped the genre more generally. This innovation subsequently led to extensive use of fantasy novels in which “you could hear the dice rolling” to create novel-form narratives set in various rpg worlds for cross-promotion among experienced players, as well as to exemplify the narrative and self-narrating paradigms of rpgs for new players unfamiliar with these conventions. Such novels were more than entertainment: in a commercial frame they were cross-marketing for a franchise (Robertson 130), and for the concerns of this article they are also pedagogical tools for...

"O čemu sanjaju mačke" - izazovi antropocentrizmu u fantazijama "San hiljadu mačaka", "Zubi" i "Princeza Mononoke"

Relying on recent theoretical work in the field of critical animal studies and ecocriticism, the paper discusses several fantasies across different media and genres (a comic book series, a young adult novel, and an animated film), whose common characteristic is a critical stance towards anthropocentrism, also known, tellingly, as "human exceptionalism", "human supremacy", and "human chauvinism". The selected corpus consists of Neil Gaiman's "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", Hannah Moskowitz's "Teeth", and Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke". Dissimilar as they are, these fantasies share common thematic concern with the relationship between the human and the nonhuman - primarily animals - as well as commitment to challenging the notions of natural, just and desirable human supremacy over all other forms of life. In the selected works, human exceptionalism is challenged by unmasking human exceptional brutality at its root, and, perhaps more unnervingly, by the exploration of the fundamental kinship between human and nonhuman animals. Although these popular fantasies do not voice explicit or simple ecological messages, due to the abovementioned concerns, they function as ecocritical texts as well. In the context of the global environmental crisis, it is in this ecocritical potential that some relevance of fantasy arguably lies.

The Most Popular Fantasy Novel in the Beginning of Twenty- First Century ‘Harry Potter’

The Most Popular Fantasy Novel in the Beginning of Twenty- First Century ‘Harry Potter’

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

How to Survive the Postfeminist Impasse

An emerging genre across literature, screen, and digital media is beginning to articulate profound dissatisfaction with postfeminist social norms and scripts. In this article, I explore how American comedian Grace Helbig exploits and reworks classic postfeminist self-improvement genres through her parodying of the YouTube how-to video. Using Helbig’s video as an illustrative case study, my analysis demonstrates that affect theory has the capacity to make a vital contribution to current postfeminist debates. Recent research finds postfeminist analysis lacks the facility to fully comprehend the complexity of contemporary femininities, suggesting that postfeminist media studies as a genre of scholarship has reached a critical impasse. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s (2008, 2011, 2015) work, I examine how Helbig affectively deflates popular postfeminist fantasies of fun-loving confident girlhood. More widely, I argue that affective approaches offer feminist scholars a dynamic framework to make sense of the continuing impact and legacies of postfeminist media culture.

Post-editing Effort of a Novel With Statistical and Neural Machine Translation

We conduct the first experiment in the literature in which a novel is translated automatically and then post-edited by professional literary translators. Our case study is Warbreaker, a popular fantasy novel originally written in English, which we translate into Catalan. We translated one chapter of the novel (over 3,700 words, 330 sentences) with two data-driven approaches to Machine Translation (MT): phrase-based statistical MT (PBMT) and neural MT (NMT). Both systems are tailored to novels; they are trained on over 100 million words of fiction. In the post-editing experiment, six professional translators with previous experience in literary translation translate subsets of this chapter under three alternating conditions: from scratch (the norm in the novel translation industry), post-editing PBMT, and post-editing NMT. We record all the keystrokes, the time taken to translate each sentence, as well as the number of pauses and their duration. Based on these measurements, and using mixed-effects models, we study post-editing effort across its three commonly studied dimensions: temporal, technical and cognitive. We observe that both MT approaches result in increases in translation productivity: PBMT by 18%, and NMT by 36%. Post-editing also leads to reductions in the number of keystrokes: by 9% with PBMT, and by 23% with NMT. Finally, regarding cognitive effort, post-editing results in fewer (29 and 42% less with PBMT and NMT, respectively) but longer pauses (14 and 25%).

Ambiguous title deeds: contesting values of land and documents in Eldoret, Kenya

This paper explores changing values of land and title deeds through a case study of the Langas land dispute in Eldoret, a secondary city of about 300,000 people in Kenya's Rift Valley. Spanning Kenya's postcolonial history and taking place in the context of rapid urbanization, the Langas land dispute is emblematic of the complexity and persistence of land matters in the country. Based on ethnographic data collected between 2014 and 2016, this paper traces actors in the conflict, showing how the disputed area developed from a farm in the so-called White Highlands to Eldoret's largest informal settlement. The case study suggests that legal documents have gained significance in the past few decades, but it also shows that title deeds are deeply ambiguous. Sometimes respected for their ‘sanctity’, sometimes contested because of alleged forgery, title deeds have become the object of popular fantasy, conveying hopes and dreams of a better future. While land titles are assumed to enhance security of tenure and eradicate multiple ownership claims, I argue that they add layers of complexity to the repertoires actors mobilize to support or contest claims and that they thus expand the ways in which land can be valued.

Intellectual Property in Experience

In today’s economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters— they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy’s Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019.Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion-a-year industry in merchandising, fashioning “merchandising rights” appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that give fantasy owners exclusive rights to supply our fantasy worlds with everything from goods to a good time. But are there any limits? Do merchandising rights extend to fan activity, from fantasy-themed birthday parties and summer camps to real world Quidditch leagues? This Article challenges the conventional account, arguing that as the economic value of fantasy merchandising increases in the emergent “experience economy,” intellectual property owners may prove less keen on tolerating uncompensated uses of their creations. In fact, from Amazon’s Kindle Worlds granting licenses for fan fiction, to crackdowns on sales of fan art sold on internet sites like Etsy, to algorithms taking down fan videos from YouTube, the holders of intellectual property in popular fantasies are seeking to create a world requiring licenses to make, do, and play. This Article turns to social and cultural theories of art as experience, learning by doing, tacit knowledge, and performance to demonstrate that fan activity, from discussion sites to live-action role-playing fosters learning, creativity, and sociability. Law must be attentive to the profound effects these laws have on human imagination and knowledge creation. I apply the insights of these theories to limit merchandising rights in imaginative play through fair use, the force in the legal galaxy intended to bring balance to intellectual property law.

The Wild Work of Gender Play in the Journals of Abby Williams Hill

This article explores the practice and triumph of unconventional gender expression that were central concerns of Abby Williams Hill's writing from the American West, particularly from 1902 to 1906. Hill, a professional landscape painter, created romantic representations of the wilderness to fuel the popular fantasies of American frontier life. This essay turns to her unpublished journals and letters to argue that Hill pursued a contradictory project in her daily life and personal writing, documenting the work of resisting social expectation from within an idealized space. Hill understood that one does not escape the overlapping ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, and social class in the West, yet the voluminous diary entries and letters that she produced during her travels reveal that she also recognized the natural world as a site in which cultural formations might be more malleable and thus more open to revision. This article contends that Hill claimed for herself and her children the transformative potential of that exclusionary space. More so than her western landscape paintings, Hill's personal writing models an alternative mode of engagement with the natural world as a space to critique and revise the status quo.

Size Matters: Penis Size and Sexual Position in Gay Porn Profiles

ABSTRACTThis article combines qualitative and quantitative textual approaches to the representation of penis size and sexual position of performers in 10 of the most visited gay pornography Web sites currently in operation. Specifically, in excess of 6,900 performer profiles sourced from 10 commercial Web sites are analyzed. Textual analysis of the profile descriptions is combined with a quantitative representation of disclosed penis size and sexual position, which is presented visually by two figures. The figures confirm that these sites generally market themselves as featuring penises that are extraordinarily large and find a sample-wide correlation between smaller penis sizes (5–6.5 inches) and receptive sexual acts (bottoming), and larger (8.5–13 inches) with penetrative acts (topping). These observations are supported through the qualitative textual readings of how the performers are described on these popular sites, revealing the narratives and marketing strategies that shape the construction of popular porn brands, performers, and profitable fantasies.

After Indenture: Three Photo Stories

A photographic portfolio published as a special section “Art After Indenture,” in which five scholars characterize and respond to eight contemporary visual artists who are descendants of indentured workers. The author Andil Gosine as guest editor also raises questions about the commemoration of indentureship and calls for greater contention with its traumatic legacy. Abstract and introduction to photo stories: Face Up: Life and transgressive acts on screen Roshini Kempadoo A screen-based video installation as character ‘idents'1 that combine photographs and short stories about living in London. As the inevitable eavesdropper, listener, earwigger, I can’t help but overhear partial conversations and oversee occurrences on screen – at the bus stop, in the supermarket queue, walking along the street. These are starting points for imagining what happens next. Bus 321 northbound, November 24 2015, Lewisham, London. I witness a young black man being refused entry onto the bus. In protest, he stood in front of the vehicle, challenging the driver. The bus driver revved the engine and inched forward, escalating the state of play. The man and the driver were at an impasse. I and others look on and use phones to document and screen share what happens next. It soon went viral. Deirdre takes a look at the state of her hair on the laptop whilst waiting to speak to her cousin. Her connections are international and ubiquitous; she knows her Skype conversation gives news about family in Guyana and the place she remembers. She feels it is right to offer what she can, which may mean money, arranging documents, or accommodating an unknown relative who is passing through. As a Londoner – of colour and diasporic, who knows about at least two places called ‘home,’ she keeps track of and maintains her tenuous and multiple ‘identities.’ Her screen use is dynamic and multiple. It is the hyperspace for intimate correspondence that closes distance, a transparent mediated tool for gathering evidence or self-affirmation. It is a semi-autonomous sensing instrument for sharing encounters and experiences. As a popular cultural space of performance the screen becomes ‘profoundly mythic… a theatre of popular desires, a theatre of popular fantasies.‘ 2 As it feeds our senses as eye and ear candy, her screen facilitates performance and acts of transgression. It is where she and I ‘do’ and perform life on the screen. 1 ‘idents’ is derived from the promotional video sequences associated with television identification/promotional videos. 2 Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 477.

Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I by Peter Lake

Reviewed by: Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I by Peter Lake Frank Swannack Lake, Peter, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016; hardback; pp. 512; R.R.P. £35.00; ISBN 9780198753995. Peter Lake argues that Bad Queen Bess? fills a neglected historical gap by focusing on Catholic propaganda in the Elizabethan period. Key historical moments are given renewed significance through the dialogue between Catholic dissenters and the Elizabethan government. Chapters 1 to 3 analyse the defence and condemnation of Mary Queen of Scots. Lake reveals in a narrative by John Leslie a predicted marriage between the Duke of Norfolk and Mary. When the marriage negotiations failed, the Northern Earls revolted. Lake analyses the response to the rebellion in Thomas Norton's pamphlets. Initially defending Queen Elizabeth from evil Catholics, Norton calls for the queen to act against the Duke of Norfolk and Mary. With the Ridolfi conspiracy seeking to replace Elizabeth with Mary, Lake notes how pamphlet activity increased. Although these pamphlets claim to officially represent the Catholics or Queen Elizabeth, Lake finds them nothing more than spurious gossip. Furthermore, their various authors use print to create a version of events that appealed to popular fantasies. Despite the threat to [End Page 231] Elizabeth from Mary, the Spanish and the Scots, Lake remarks that she is still queen in 1572. By then a Marian conspiracy is being spread claiming that the Queen of Scots is set on world domination. Meanwhile a Catholic treatise pushes anti-monarchical plotting within Elizabeth's government, claiming Mary's condemnation is simply part of a strategy by the queen's closest aides to stop Queen Elizabeth marrying, then replace her with a king. Chapters 4 to 6 tackle Queen Elizabeth's proposed marriage to the duke of Anjou. Catholic propaganda presented a successful marriage to Anjou, and a treaty between Mary and Elizabeth. Lake also examines John Stubbs's concern in The Gaping Gulf that if Elizabeth married Anjou she might die in childbirth with her baby. Lake comments that the marriage became 'an assassination attempt by gynaecological means' (p. 101). Furthermore, Stubbs's apparent paranoia extended to Anjou marrying Mary following Elizabeth's death. Lord Henry Howard pens the Catholic response. Lake remarks Howard uses similar arguments to Stubbs, though Howard casts suspicion on those who oppose the marriage. Lake then considers the Catholic tract Leicester's Commonwealth as exemplary political writing in a battle for truth. It reimagines the Anjou marriage as solving all of England's problems both at home and abroad. Chapters 7 to 9 investigate 'monarchical republicanism' (p. 155), a response to Catholic criticism of the Elizabethan counsellors who plotted England's future without the queen's assent or even knowledge. Lake argues persuasively that both sides endeavoured to make a distinction between religion and politics. He states that recognizing and not blurring that distinction gave the arguments for each side the greater authenticity. Lake investigates the Catholic spy Dr William Parry. His apparent plot to kill the queen allowed the government to insist that tolerating Catholics placed Elizabeth's safety at risk. Lake then examines two texts that respond to John Leslie's defence of Mary. These texts confirm Lake's argument that the Elizabethan government's actions are largely influenced by Catholic activity. Chapters 10 and 11 examine pamphlets published in 1585. Lake notes these texts begin a genre of ostensibly translated works ventriloquizing the opposition. Within these tracts, Lake identifies the new discursive strategy he terms 'the trope of the whistleblower' (p. 236). Edward Rishton's continuation of the staunch Catholic Robert Parson's historical narrative of the English Reformation is evaluated. Lake identifies that previous arguments in Catholic tracts are rehashed in response to changing contemporary circumstances. Lake deals with Mary's execution and its aftermath in Chapters 12 and 13. He shows how Elizabeth is eventually convinced to deal directly with Mary. God's judgement and her long-suffering Protestant subjects are used to bend the queen's ear. Lake also reveals in Elizabeth's first...

Black invisibility on a Brazilian ‘frontier’: land and identity in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil

ABSTRACTThis article centers attention on race, place, and space as co-produced concepts that reveal much about both how racial ideology operates and is constituted in contemporary Brazil. In Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the ethno-racial order constructs the region as devoid of colonized people and consummately available for capital-intensive agribusiness production. Land protests in Mato Grosso do Sul by black and indigenous activists undermine popular fantasies of racial harmony embedded in Brazilian-ness. The regional variation of the latter denies the historical and contemporary presence of black Brazilians in narratives of the state’s founding and contemporary status as a ‘frontier’. This article argues that we may consider ‘coming out’ moments by blacks in the state as defiant counters, revealing identification processes that undermine the denial of full recognition of blacks as citizens.

Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series by James Chapman, and: The Middle Ages on Film: Critical Essays ed. by Meriem Pagès and Karolyn Kinane, and: Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones ed. by Helen Young, and: The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre ed. by Helen Young

THE FAIR FIELD OF MEDIEVALISM-THE RECENT HARVESTJAMES CHAPMAN, Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 279 (with 27 stills). isbn: 978-0-7190- 8881-0. $110.00.MERIEM PAGES and KAROLYN KINANE, eds., The Middle Ages on Film: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015. Pp. vi, 219. isbn: 978-0-7864-7941-2. $40.00.HELEN YOUNG, ed., Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to 'A Game of Thrones.' Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 230. isbn: 978-1-60497-896-4. $104.99.HELEN YOUNG, ed., The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 231. isbn: 978-1-60947-897-1. $109.99.Helen Young is indefatigable. She has published, almost simultaneously, two excellent complementary edited collections of essays that discuss many of the subfields of medievalism. The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre offers nine essays that engage what Young calls 'the multiple Middle Ages' (1). Young eschews dividing this collection into discrete sections-she calls each essay a 'chapter'-better to reflect the 'impossibility of neatly categorizing contemporary medievalisms as well as the tendency of genres to bleed into each other' (4). Chapters are clustered to reveal overlaps rather than boundaries.The first four chapters cluster around issues of gender roles and agency. Clare Bradford and Rebecca Hutton look at the ways in which recent film and television retellings of the Arthuriad have used female protagonists, though that use is neatly circumscribed in a way that denies the protagonists real agency. Judy Ann Ford sees a similar restriction on agency for the protagonists in the films Red Riding Hood and Brave. Geneva Diamond argues that this pattern-a sort of one step forward, two steps backward approach that results in unrealized agency-continues offscreen in the romances of Julie Garwood, where a medieval setting 'allows a hypermasculinization of courtship' (5) not found in Garwood's non-medieval romances. In contrast, Robin Anne Reid notes how Nicola Griffith's 2013 historical novel Hild offers an eponymous hero who successfully counters 'popular neo-medieval fantasies of the twenty-first century' (84). The novel is at its heart a political statement determined to re-envision the distant past in terms of contemporary notions of gender-neutral activism.Alana Bennett's essay changes genre once again as the chapters in this volume move from the big and small screens to print and now to music, specifically the ways that neo-medieval music raises questions about cultural identity. Accuracy of performance is not essential to such music-it is in some ways antithetical to it. Neo-medieval music 'deliberately re-creates and repurposes' medieval music and instruments, coupling them with spectacular stage effects 'to signal and enable an escape from the mundane world into the reclaimed past' (6).Similarly, the video game Assassin's Creed, as Elisabeth Herbst Buzay and Emmanuel Buzay demonstrate, while bearing all the trappings of the medieval, uses those trappings as a backdrop for discussing a variety of contemporary issues, specifically present-day tensions between Christianity and Islam.Carol Robinson surveys issues of gender and sexuality in the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and the Matrix film franchise of the brothers Wachowski. Anne McKendry pairs the quest of the modern detective with that of the medieval knight by looking at the medievalist crime fiction of Ellis Peters, Peter Tremayne, and Bernard Knight and finds that both medieval and post-medieval questers seek a common ground-the establishment of social order.The final essay brings this collection back full circle to the Arthuriad, as Molly Brown examines how the art of telling a story, not nostalgia, informs Kevin Crossley- Holland's 2001-2003 Arthurian trilogy and Catherine Fisher's 2002 novel Corbenic. …