Stephen King Research Articles

‘Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch’: Justifications for patriarchal violence and the mischaracterization of Stephen King’s Jack Torrance

Stephen King has criticized Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining for its characterization of Jack Torrance as an unsympathetic monster rather than a well-intentioned man tragically destroyed by his addiction and anger. However, a re-examination of the novel and its sequel shows that King’s Jack Torrance is, no matter what King says, a dangerous patriarchal figure long before he enters the Overlook. The Shining and Doctor Sleep detail Jack’s wife and son’s co-dependent attachment to him, their wariness and fear of him, his long history of toxic behaviour and his deep capacity for self-deception that all help to expose a justifying narrative for patriarchal violence. However, King’s extratextual defences of Jack and the critical narrative that reaffirms his assessment of Jack’s moral character must be part of our analysis of The Shining’s critique of patriarchal ideology, as the contrast between those statements and the textual evidence reveal a desire to see Jack as sympathetic that makes King and the audience complicit in the same narrative of justification that the novel exposes.

Roll on two: Ambiguous energies in Stephen King’s The Shining, The Green Mile and Revival

This article positions King as both heir to the literary romantics and arbiter of contemporary issues as located specifically within his representation of energy, and electricity in particular. Writing both within and beyond horror, King both characterizes and creates energic structures that reflect both romantic aesthetic conceptualizations of electricity and modern concerns regarding its generation and fuel consumption more generally. By examining how The Shining (1977), The Green Mile (1996) and Revival (2014) present energy and also formally generate it, I will explore a little attended to element of King’s work and identify how energy functions ambiguously within these texts, materializing both horror and hope, bringing about both the conclusion and continuation of human life. I will also explore how the particular spaces this power is located within both channel and amplify it, King’s work here a surprising textual conduit for our fascination with, reliance on and fear of energy and the ongoing problems and potentialities alive within it.

Dead is not better: The multiple resurrections of Stephen King’s Revival

Stephen novel, Revival, plays with its title in several respects. It is first a familiar Frankenstein-esque narrative about a mad scientist who seeks to revive the dead. It is also, however, about religious revivals, both in the specific sense of the religious gatherings held by minister and main antagonist Charles Jacobs, and in the more general sense of attempting to find something in which to place one’s faith in a world where accidents can claim the lives of loved ones. Beyond this, Revival plays with its title in two more senses. First, it elaborates on the recurring theme in King of existentialist angst precipitated by the death of a child or loved one, which King uses to question God’s benevolence or existence. In order to ask these questions, King also resurrects the spirit of Mary Shelley, taking from Frankenstein the theme of reanimation of the dead. The narrative’s conclusion, however, offers yet another revival as it transitions us from the horror of Shelley to the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft. Thus, through these various revivals, King’s novel charts the evolution of twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror from Shelley to Lovecraft and our contemporary ‘weird’ moment.

Pandemic; a Political Satire: Re-surfacing the Dysfunctional Government through the works of Stephen King and Robin Cook

Pandemic; a Political Satire: Re-surfacing the Dysfunctional Government through the works of Stephen King and Robin Cook

FEAR IN FANTASTIC NARRATIVE: THE LITERARY AND CINEMATOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF IT CHARACTERS: THE THING

Pesquisas que se concentrem nas formas de representação do medo nos estudos interartes são ainda pouco privilegiadas pelo universo crítico literário. O presente estudo visa investigar a representação do medo na literatura e no cinema, a partir da análise dos personagens do romance It de Stephen King, escrito em 1986, e o filme homônimo de Andy Muschietti, produzido em 2017. Para tanto, serão utilizados apontamentos de estudiosos, tais como Tuan (2005), King (2013), Vanoye (2012), Roas (2014), Martin (2003), Aumont (2013), dentre outros. Enquanto o texto literário se utiliza de recursos narrativos específicos para potencializar o inverossímil e ampliar o terror, o cinema, por sua vez, utiliza-se de imagens, planos e enquadramentos, para retratar indivíduos angustiados e aterrorizados. Assim sendo, nosso trabalho procura mostrar esses conceitos, e a partir deles, mapear de forma mais significativa o medo, no território da literatura e do cinema.

Fear in the fantastic narrative IT: a literary and cinematographic analysis

The present study aims to analyze the manifestation of fear in the fantastic narrative It, in both literature and cinema. Supernatural themes are a constant in fictional prose, providing an increase in studies on the relationship between fear and fantastic narratives. As theoretical support, we build on the literary scholarship of Yi-Fu Tuan (2005), Stephen King (2013), David Roas (2014), Marcel Martin (2003) and Jacques Aumont (2013). As for methodology, a content analysis model is adopted in a bibliographic, exploratory and qualitative approach. It, A novel, as a fantastic narrative, destabilizes our sources of security by questioning the validity of the systems and beliefs created by and imposed upon on humanity. The results illustrate how the fantastic genre has been characterized as presenting us phenomena and situations that signal a transgression of our reality. This rupture with the real is, therefore, a fundamen- tal effect of fantastic narratives which have also been explored in cinematic narratives.

Stephen King’s "Needful Things": a dystopian vision of capitalism during its triumph

In Stephen King’s horror novel Needful Things, a stranger comes to town and opens a shop wherein any inhabitant can find exactly the thing s/he desires most, in exchange for playing “pranks” that cause distress to other members of the community, until the whole town is caught in a war of all against all. The paper analyses the novel as a “satire of Reaganomics,” as the author himself happened to describe it. Using insights from economics, economic sociology, and economic anthropology, it aims at demonstrating that the book provides an opportunity to explore the actual and possible evolution of individual behavior in consumer societies, as well as the tensions that such societies engender between ideals of self-realization (via market logics and consumption) and social relationships.

“You’ll Float, Too”: Contemporary Rhetorics of Materiality and Ecology in Stephen King’sIt

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 54, Issue 3 p. 552-570 Original Article “You’ll Float, Too”: Contemporary Rhetorics of Materiality and Ecology in Stephen King’s It K. Shannon Howard, Corresponding Author K. Shannon Howard kshoward07@gmail.com Search for more papers by this author K. Shannon Howard, Corresponding Author K. Shannon Howard kshoward07@gmail.com Search for more papers by this author First published: 07 June 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13025Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume54, Issue3June 2021Pages 552-570 RelatedInformation

Puritan Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter" And Stephen King’s "Carrie"

It is considered that the Puritans that populated New England in the 17th century left a distinctive mark on the American culture. The article explores some projections of Puritan legacy in two American novels of different periods – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Stephen King’s Carrie (1974). After establishing a connection between the Puritan writings and gothic literature, the two novels are analyzed in terms of some Puritan projections, among which are the problem of guilt and the acceptance of an individual in the society. Some references regarding the idea of the witch and the interpretations it bears, especially in terms of the female identity, are also identified. Despite the different approach of the authors in terms of building their characters, those references are mostly used in a negative way, as an instrument of criticism and exposing inconvenient truths.

“In America?”

Critical evaluation of Stephen King’s work is far from unanimous, with a handful of scholars producing monographs devoted to his fiction, while others dismiss him as a peddler of poorly written popular narratives motivated only by commercial success. King himself acknowledges that he is as much a brand name as an author, and that he might be considered “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonalds.” Anxieties related to the aesthetic value of prolifically produced popular fiction appear to be validated by King’s novel, The Institute (2019), which treads the familiar terrain of the King brand by utilizing the genre of speculative fiction and focusing on a child with paranormal powers. Nevertheless, although The Institute repeats many of King’s abiding concerns and tropes, it represents a significant development in his work. Less a reiteration of King’s earlier speculative fiction depicting children with telekinetic, telepathic, and pyrokinetic powers, The Institute demonstrates significant complexity and nuance in its representation of power, good and evil, and the ethics underpinning American life in the twenty-first century. In addition to critiquing corrupt social structures, The Institute interrogates the assumed powerlessness of children and condemns the commodification of the human subject by late capitalist society and its militarized forms of order. In his novel, King proves his detractors wrong by not simply reproducing his particular brand of fiction but revising its previous representations in order to meaningfully engage with a rapidly changing world.

Annie and Mammy: An Intersectional Reading of Stephen King’s Misery

Annie and Mammy: An Intersectional Reading of Stephen King’s <i>Misery</i>

Creating Communicative Space and Textual Reality via Emotiogenic Means in Fictional Discourse

The article focuses on the strategies of reconstructing communicative space between the author and reader as well as forecasting the emotional impact on the reader through transforming textual reality. The emotiogenic characteristics of fictional discourse provide the emotional perception of literary texts since emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Such a perception is made possible by the identification, comprehension, and interpretation of the emotionally significant textual components of different types. The authors of the article have classified them as the following: graphical and visual, punctuation, and semantic-stylistic ones. These means, found in the postmodern novels by Salman Rushdie, Tahereh Mafi, Marina Lewycka, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alexandar Hemon, and Stephen King, have been analysed to explicate the character of the phenomenon of emotiogenic fictional narratives. The emotiogenic means in the selected novels are exploited by the writers of different ethnic affiliations that can be resulted from their multicultural experience. The superimposition of some means is explained by their semantic relationship. The article tests a hypothesis that the cognitive architecture of the emotiogenic means is determined by an emotional situation reflected in a literary text that appears to be a special code through which readers interpret their emotional and evaluative meanings. The indicators of the text’s emotionality occur to be signs of the textual representation of emotional knowledge. This study contributes to the investigation of the emotiogenic means of creating communicative space which are considered those discursive expressive elements that affect the perception of textual reality.

Stephen King, Incorporated: Genre Fiction and the Problem of Authorship

Abstract This essay examines Stephen King’s career in relation to the evolving literary status of genre fiction. Following the financialization of the publishing industry, genre fiction became one of its most profitable forms. As a result, agents and houses sought to invest in brand-name authors who could attract a mass-market readership based on reputation alone. While this development helped turn King into one of the most successful novelists of the late twentieth century, it also provided an opportunity to engage with questions about authorial autonomy, the demands of the market, and the mediating force of publishers in his own work. Novels like Misery (1984) and the “Dark Tower” series (1982–2004)—explicitly centered on the writing of genre fiction—articulate a model of authorial professionalism built upon the metaphor of the corporation. Understanding genre as a corporate form need not be grounds for critical dismissal, but can instead serve a critical purpose. Genre fiction, this essay argues, functions as a mechanism for confronting the economic conditions and expectations of the contemporary publishing industry and its impact on literary production.

“The Flaw Is Only the Inability to Accept”: Roads, Rationality and the Horror of Modernity in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

“The Flaw Is Only the Inability to Accept”: Roads, Rationality and the Horror of Modernity in Stephen King’s <i>Pet Sematary</i>

The Scapegoat Theme in Mythology, Stephen King, and René Girard

The Scapegoat Theme in Mythology, Stephen King, and René Girard

Globalization Discourse

Set in the immediate context of the recent UN conference on climate change (COP 2021) in Glasgow and the sudden emergence of the variant, Omicron, this paper involves discussion of the present state of discourse concerning globalization in the broadest sense. It begins by contrasting the approaches and substance of two specific books: Globalization Matters by Manfred Steger and Paul James and Grave New World by Stephen King. The difference between the two books is brought into sharp relief by the economism of the book by King and the multidimensionality of the volume by Steger and James. More generally, these recent books are chosen because they are almost complete opposites, the central difference being the adamant optimism about globalization in Globalization Matters and the extreme pessimism and negativity in Grave New World. It is also very important to emphasize the wide ranging and penetrative character of Globalization Matters compared with the latter. Also invoked is recent and very significant work by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Two themes are claimed here to be neglected, namely global history and the concept of glocalization. Attention is also drawn to the crucial omission of the fact that much of globalization talk began in the fields of religious study and theology. The disparity between these two latter fields of study and mainstream social science and conventional history is given attention. The contributions of other crucial commentators to the overall debate, Lovelock and Latour, are also invoked. The focus by Steger and James, on the one hand, and Chakrabarty on the other, on the Anthropocene is given attention. Overall, the article concludes by placing the global-local problematic at the centre of what is called here globalization discourse.

Kazim AliNorthern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water

Swedish, Finnish, Catalan, Norwegian, Afrikaans, and Hungarian by writers who are regarded as leading the genre’s edge in their respective countries (only Spain is represented more than once). From the collection’s first story, Italian author Luigi Musolino’s “Uironda” (a story about a divorced trucker reminiscent of the best culture-critical writing of Stephen King and the most nihilistic impulses of Thomas Ligotti), to the last, late Spanish author José María Latorre’s “Snapshot” (a macabre but humorous story of a man obsessed with snapping shots of himself in a photo booth, revealing the grim truth of what he is), The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories is a grand guignol of horrific oddities from across the world, representing as many subgeneric impulses and terrifying plays with the genre’s possibilities as there are stories. Of particular interest and terrifying conclusion are Attila Veres’s “The Time Remaining” (Hungary), Flore Hazoum é’s “Menopause” (Ivory Coast), Marko Hautala’s “Pale Toes” (Finland), and Yvette Tan’s “All the Birds” (Philippines). Lars Ahn’s “The Collection” (Denmark), about a couple who discover they’ll do anything to prove they are right for each other, is probably my favorite of the bunch. But the range of stories presented suggests no one will be without something to love. Many of these stories are translated by Jenkins and Cagle themselves, a remarkable feat, and particular attention was paid in the anthologizing process to diversity of gender, nation, race, and colonial subjectivity . The stories come from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, some from minority languages like Catalan, and all are interested at some level in power disparities (poor/rich, men/women, colonizer/colonized ). Jenkins and Cagle have promised a second volume of The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, and I can only hope that future anthologies in the series Books in Review Kazim Ali Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2021. 200 pages. ON A NIGHT WHEN icy winds blew south off Lake Erie and shook the windows of Kazim Ali’s house in Oberlin, he remembered the Canadian winters of his youth and searched online for images of Jenpeg—the company town he’d lived in as a child. He finds little online about Jenpeg . It’s mostly gone, the modest network of residential homes for employees at the hydroelectric dam under construction on the Nelson River. Other regional headlines piqued his interest instead. In Cross Lake, across the waters from Jenpeg and home to the First Nations Pimicikamak community, Chief Cathy Merrick had made headlines for serving eviction papers to Manitoba electric -utility giant Manitoba Hydro. Chief Merrick had contended that Manitoba Hydro, the province of Manitoba, and the federal government of Canada had not fulfilled their agreements in the Northern Flood Agreement, the 1977 treaty with five northern Bands under which Manitoba Hydro received easement rights to build the generating station. The Jenpeg Generating Station and the former town of Jenpeg where Ali lived were on Pimicikamak sovereign territory. Now, the dam his father had built was negatively impacting the Pimicikamak’s community and changing the biodiversity of their unceded lands and waters. He read more: last winter, in Cross Lake, six young people between the ages of fifteen and eighteen had died by suicide in the space of two months. The Pimicikamak had declared a mental-health emergency, and, Ali writes, “the Elders in the community had gathered and performed a sacred ceremony calling on the spirits of the land and water to assist.” In the weeks that followed, he couldn’t get Cross Lake out of his mind. The contemporary concerns in Cross Lake alarmed him and recalled the years that Ali, who is queer, Muslim, and the child of South Asian migrants, had spent traveling through the Palestinian territory in the West Bank teaching yoga and training yoga teachers. “I’d seen the impacts of occupation and political disenfranchisement up close,” Ali writes, and “the sociopolitical impacts of colonialism.” He wonders about his own family’s complicity in the dam that his father had worked on at the Jenpeg Generating Station. Reflecting on his family’s culpability in the...

Mirrors, Merriment and My Favourite Novel: The Imaginings of Literature in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind

Mirrors, Merriment and My Favourite Novel:The Imaginings of Literature in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind Chamois Chui Yeuk Ling (bio) Nobody had expected Carlos Ruiz Zaf n to die. At least, nobody expected it so soon. In the spring of 2020, he was only 55, and had just finished his gargantuan story cycle The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. This four-book series wove a web of intrigue spanning forty years of Spanish history and brought a city long lost in the mists of time to life. It was a beautiful escape into the distant past, perfect for distressing times like a pandemic, and it felt like Ruiz Zafón had more to say in the coming years—then came the news that he had died of colorectal cancer in Los Angeles.1 Perhaps because of this sudden event, I began to reread the first of the series, 2001's The Shadow of the Wind, despite not knowing a word of Spanish, nor having any interest in a city half a world away. Along the way, I realized not only why this was my favourite novel, but also the value behind this sentimental romance. For Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind is not merely a raucous bildungsroman or a Gothic melodrama that uses Francoist Spain to weave its layers of intrigue, but it is also a book that reveals the pleasures of reading, the role of secrets in connecting with the reader, and the way a book imprints itself on its readers. There is no doubt, of course, that a large part of the book's appeal comes down to its humorous yet absorbing retelling of a bildungsroman. Daniel Sempere's journey to adulthood and romance lies at the heart of The Shadow of the Wind, and this is a journey that is as packed with multiple plot twists as it is with intimate and funny moments. Crucial to engaging the reader is Daniel's narration, which is verbose and evocative. For example, he describes the aftermath of a home visit with the words "I carried the trace of her lips, of her breath on my skin through streets full of faceless people escaping from offices and shops."2 This fleeting moment stays with Daniel as he walks through the streets of 1950s Barcelona, vividly describing his state of inner turmoil and creating a detailed perception of the physical and mental landscape surrounding him. With such intricate descriptions, Ruiz Zafón creates an immersive experience for readers, making us feel as if we were Daniel, giving us an opportunity to embrace the plot. This is actually quite difficult, for [End Page 35] there are many improbable coincidences and tragic events in the book, and Daniel's dark yet intimate words make his storytelling sound "like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel."3 However, other critics such as writer Stephen King have asserted that this book is a "true Gothic novel" similar to those written two centuries ago.4 And therein lies the first key to this book's success—it is an escapist tale of darkness and intrigue that effectively captivates readers like me. Gothic novels are famously set in dangerous bygone periods, and with their promise of exploration and suspense, as well as their quasi-supernatural elements, they provide an alternative to the mundane realities of the real world. With Ruiz Zafón's novel, readers are thrust into times, places and events they can only imagine in reality. Combined with the rich and suspenseful prose, this becomes a dramatic adventure that allows them to take both delight and refuge in this alternative world. Some critics frown upon the novel's tendency to rely on melodrama and imaginary construct: Glennis Byron notes that tourists are unlikely to see Barcelona as Daniel describes it, and decries its "fabricated imported tradition of Victorian gothic."5 Yet the ability to explore intense feelings of love and horror is precisely what has drawn in over fifteen million readers,6 and such a detailed depiction of an imaginary world, one that somewhat resembles the historical Barcelona we know yet still...

FEATURES OF USAGE AND TRANSLATION OF STYLISTICALLY MARKED VOCABULARY IN AMERICAN FICTION

The article investigates the usage of stylistically marked vocabulary fiction. The study considers the basic concepts of this linguistic phenomenon, provides a brief classification and characteristics of individual units. It also analyses the main methods of translating stylistically marked vocabulary on the case study of Stephen King's novel. A comparative analysis of the work of Stephen King with its translations into Ukrainian to determine the degree of translation adequacy, as well as to identify various translation transformations when transferring the peculiarities of the stylistically marked vocabulary has been done. In the article, general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis in dividing the issue into its components, and the analysis to determine the meaning of terms has been used. The method of continuous sampling and the analysis of lexical units has also been used in the study. The article considers difficulties that often arise due to differences in social and cultural norms when translating non-standard vocabulary. It has been stated that the degree of correlation between the expression of foreign language and native vocabulary is currently a complex issue. The lexical replacement (partial and complete replacement of the original sing) has been defined as the most common method of translating stylistically marked words. Other methods to be mentioned are a match for a lexical item in the language of translation, euphemistic translation needed to reduce the degree of expression of the original words. In some cases, the replacement of the word of the original with a unit with a coarser expression, based on the context to convey the degree of tension of the speech situation to the reader is used. Translation failures have been considered as well. The most common reasons for unsuccessful translation are the reduction of expression and insufficient consideration of the situational factors of the language, which also leads to an unreasonable underestimation or overestimation of stylistic expression.

ЯЗЫКОВАЯ РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ЭМОЦИИ «СТРАХ» В ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЯХ С. КИНГА (АНАЛИЗ ТЕМАТИЧЕСКОЙ ГРУППЫ)

Emotions, representing a special reality, are a reflection of the ethno-cultural specifics of the world model. The emotion of fear is one of the basic and inherent in every culture. The ability of language elements to enter into relations with each other allows us to talk about the vocabulary of a language as a system. The presence of these relations determines the existence of various groupings within the language system. One of the ways to combine them is a thematic group. The relevance of this study is determined by the analyzed material, which represents the emotion of fear, not only as a thematic group, but also as a multidimensional manifestation of human emotions. This study allows us to trace how the thematic group "Fear" is represented in the English language at the present stage of its development. The purpose of this work is to identify the means of linguistic representation of the manifestation of the emotion of fear in modern English on the material of the works "Pet Cemetery" and "It" by the American writer Stephen King. In the course of the study, the following methods were used: the method of contextual analysis and the method of quantitative analysis. The study of the vocabulary that represents emotions in the text of a work of art allows us to interpret the world of emotions of characters, as well as to reveal the main theme of the work of art. Therefore, in the context of the literature of the horror genre, it is advisable to talk about the use of various means of representing the thematic group "Fear", since the main task of the author is to create an atmosphere of fear and horror in the work.