Heroic Girls looks at the recent proliferation of young girl heroes in many recent mainstream films and books. These contemporary ‘final’ girls do not just survive but rather suggest that in doing so they have fundamentally changed something about themselves and or the world around them, seeing them become the ‘First Girls’ of this altered reality. The collection brings together a wide range of perspectives and cultural viewpoints that describe many recent narratives that explore the idea of a Final Girl and her “after-story”. The essays are divided into four sections, beginning with more theoretical approaches; cross-cultural examples; the ways in which fictional narratives bear strong relation to real-world circumstances; examples that more strongly depict themes of resistance, survival, and individual agency; and, finally, those that describe something more fundamental and transformative. Films and television shows covered in the collection include The Girl with All the Gifts, The Witcher, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Fear Street and Pan’s Labyrinth. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, gender studies, and media studies.
Edited by:
Simon Bacon (Independent Scholar)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 694g
ISBN: 9781032054919
ISBN 10: 1032054913
Series: Interdisciplinary Research in Gender
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 09 April 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Part I: Theoretical Approaches; 1. The Narratives of Survival: Final Girls in Videogames; 2. Fighting Fate: Representations of a ‘New Order’ in Beautiful Creatures; 3. The Shadow Self and the New Girl: Breaking Down the Old Worlds in Ursula Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan and N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky; 4. ‘She would never fall, because her friend was flying with her’: Gothic Hybridity, Queer Girls and Exceptional States in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts (2014); 5. Cheerleaders, Orphans, School Girls: The Persistent Sounding Riot(Grrrl) in the (Televisual) Apocalypse; Part II: Cross-Cultural Heroes; 6. Tranquilas: Monstrous Resistance and Feminist Storytelling; 7. Sister-matic Cannibalism in the Dying Breed: Heterotopic Representations of Australia’s Lingering Colonial Connectivity; 8. Seeking Resistance in Tropes: a Reading of the Final Girl Trope’s Used in NH10 and Stree and its Socio-Cultural Significance; 9. Gothic Agent of Revolt: The Rebel Female Hero in Pan’s Labyrinth; 10. From Vancouver Island to the City of Troy: Prophecy, Heroism, and Indigenous Classical Reception in Catherine Knutsson’s Shadows Cast by Stars; Part III: Resistance, Revenge, Reimagining; 11. Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017) and the Rape-Revenge Action Hero; 12. ‘What about you, Maxine? What’s your American Dream?’: X and Pearl Radically Refit the Final Girl with an Axe and Hack Apart the American Pastoral; 13. After The Credits Roll: Jade Daniels, Trauma and the Postmodern Final Girl; 14. Killer Girls: Red Riding Hood, Girlhood and the Final Girl; 15. The Witcher and Ciri of Cintra as the Heroic Final Girl; Part IV: Into the Future; 16. Persephone Distorted: From Teen Witch to Queen of Hell — The Evolution of Sabrina; 17. ‘The Witch Forever Lives’: Redefining the Path for Empowered Final Girls in the Trilogy Fear Street; 18. First Girl, Last Jedi, Final Girl: Rey, Resistance, and the Future of Star Wars; 19. The Environmental Context of Hope in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts
Simon Bacon is a writer and film critic based in Poznań, Poland. He has written and edited 30+ books on various subjects including Gothic: A Reader (2018), Horror: A Companion (2019), Eco-Vampires (2020), Nosferatu in the 21st Century (2023), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2023), The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (2024), and The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (forthcoming). He is Kasi the editor of the book series ‘Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead’ at https://www.peterlang.com/series/vsu.
