The canon of popular cinema has long been rife with fantastic tales, yet critical studies have too often expediently mixed the fantasy genre with its kindred science fiction and horror films or dismissed it altogether as escapist fare. "Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation" reconsiders the cultural significance of this storytelling mode by investigating how films seemingly divorced from reality and presented in a context of timelessness are, in fact, encoded with the social practices and beliefs of their era of production.
Situating representative fantasy films within their...

The canon of popular cinema has long been rife with fantastic tales, yet critical studies have too often expediently mixed the fantasy genre with its kindred science fiction and horror films or dismissed it altogether as escapist fare. "Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation" reconsiders the cultural significance of this storytelling mode by investigating how films seemingly divorced from reality and presented in a context of timelessness are, in fact, encoded with the social practices and beliefs of their era of production.
Situating representative fantasy films within their...

The Demon of the Continent Indians and the Shaping of American Literature Joshua David Bellin "This work will join such studies as Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations, and Lucy Maddox's Removals. It is a thoughtful, engaging study."--Priscilla Wald, Duke University "Bellin not only proposes a major and fundamentally new reading of American literature itself, he also writes beautifully."--Barry F. O'Connell, Amherst College In recent years, the study and teaching of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the same...

Medicine Bundle Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932 Joshua David Bellin "An excellent book about the way in which performance constitutes (rather than merely reflects) cultural differences between and among Native American and Anglo-American peoples."--Joseph Roach, Yale University "Bellin's important book challenges readers to rethink questions of colonization and acculturation. . . . Highly recommended. "--Choice From the 1820s to the 1930s, Christian missionaries and federal agents launched a continent-wide assault against Indian sacred dance, song,...

Long before the Boston Tea Party, where colonists staged a revolutionary act by masquerading as Indians, people looked to Native Americans for the symbols, imagery, and acts that showed what it meant to be American. And for just as long, observers have largely overlooked the role that Native peoples themselves played in creating and enacting the Indian performances appropriated by European Americans. It is precisely this neglected notion of Native Americans playing Indian that Native Acts explores. These essays by historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and folklorists provide...