Ruth Barratt-Peacock – författare

This collection explores the intersection of magic, reproduction, and horror in contemporary culture, examining how these elements reflect and critique societal anxieties during a time of unprecedented challenges to reproductive rights, scientific advances in reproduction, and rising magical thinking in our post-pandemic world.Addressing horror in popular culture, this volume investigates how bodies become sites of cultural contradiction, where ancient myths meet modern technologies, and where social power structures manifest through narratives of purity, contamination, and transformation. This book brings together diverse perspectives from biology, film studies, literary history, ethnology, and queer studies. Key features include analysis of horror across global cultures, from Anglo-American film to Indian cinema and East Asian popular culture; exploration of reproductive themes in young adult literature and superhero narratives; and examination of how magical thinking intersects with modern reproductive technologies. This volume's creative structure, organised around temporal categories, allows readers to trace the importance of these themes from ancient stories through to contemporary issues and future speculations, while highlighting the persistent role of magic in shaping cultural narratives about reproduction. This collection will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in gender studies, film studies, cultural studies, and reproductive rights, as well as researchers working at the intersection of horror and society. It offers valuable insights for academics studying contemporary media, feminist theory, and the sociology of reproduction, while remaining accessible to informed readers seeking to understand how horror reflects and shapes cultural attitudes toward reproduction. The interdisciplinary approach makes it particularly valuable for those seeking to understand the complex relationships between magical thinking, reproductive rights, and popular culture in our rapidly changing world.

Metal music has long nurtured an obsession with visions of the Middle Ages, with countless album covers and lyric sheets populated by Vikings, knights, wizards, and castles. Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing down the Gauntlet addresses this fascination with all things medieval, exploring how metal musicians and fans find inspiration both in authentically medieval materials and neomedievalist depictions of the period in literature, cinema, and other media. Within metal music, the medieval takes on multiple, and even contradictory meanings, becoming at once a cipher of difference and grotesque alterity while simultaneously being imagined as a simpler, more authentic time, as opposed to the complexities and stresses of modernity. In this fashion, the medieval period becomes both a source for artistic creativity and a vector for countercultural social and political critique.  The contributors in this book hail from a wide range of fields including medieval history, music performance, musicology, media studies, and literature, and computer linguistics, bringing a variety of critical perspectives to bear on the topic. Engaging in analyses of cover art, liner notes, lyrics, and musical style, the contributors investigate issues of research methodologies, crucial concerns over identity and nationalism, and the recontextualisation of historical materials, all aimed at critically examining how and why medievalism has permeated heavy metal music and culture. Hearken to our tales!

Drawing on Bernd Mahr’s model theory, this volume introduces a new approach to Romanticism in contemporary Australian literature. Focusing on two very different authors, David Malouf and the Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson, this book highlights their similarities rather than their differences. It is the first book-length study dedicated specifically to each author’s poetic oeuvre. Comprehensive readings reveal that an ironic dialectic underpins how each poet writes from within a disjunct of culture and environment following colonisation, finding hope in dialogue and a productive process of negative assertion. The theoretical framing of Romanticism developed here effectively rehabilitates Romanticism as a productive paradigm in contemporary Australian poetry.