Zombies: A Cultural History - Hardcover

Luckhurst, Roger

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1780235283 ISBN 13: 9781780235288

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2015

Synopsis

Add a gurgling moan with the sound of dragging feet and a smell of decay and what do you get? Better not find out. The zombie has roamed with dead-eyed menace from its beginnings in obscure folklore and superstition to global status today, the star of films such as 28 Days Later, World War Z, and the outrageously successful comic book, TV series, and video game—The Walking Dead. In this brain-gripping history, Roger Luckhurst traces the permutations of the zombie through our culture and imaginations, examining the undead’s ability to remain defiantly alive.
Luckhurst follows a trail that leads from the nineteenth-century Caribbean, through American pulp fiction of the 1920s, to the middle of the twentieth century, when zombies swarmed comic books and movie screens. From there he follows the zombie around the world, tracing the vectors of its infectious global spread from France to Australia, Brazil to Japan. Stitching together materials from anthropology, folklore, travel writings, colonial histories, popular literature and cinema, medical history, and cultural theory, Zombies is the definitive short introduction to these restless pulp monsters. 
 

About this title

About the Author:

Roger Luckhurst is professor of modern literature at Birkbeck College at the University of London. He has written or edited many books on film, horror, science fiction, and gothic literature.
 

Review:

“Entertaining and informative. It is more than worth having a read if you are a fan of the flesh eating, mindless killing machine that is the zombie.” (Impulse Gamer)

“No matter how lurid and pulpy, popular culture is Luckhurst’s meat and drink, and he’s a connoisseur. He interprets historical shifts and nuance with scrupulous attention to detail and a lucid grasp of the larger picture; in this succinct yet rich study, the case he makes for zombies’ political and psychological significance is compelling, disturbing, and consistently lively.”  (Marina Warner, author of Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale)

“Luckhurst’s wide-ranging history of this cult phenomenon is a richly detailed and eminently readable, nuanced, and rigorous story. He outlines the different shapes the complex, colonially driven monster takes in its century-long journey through the imperial American sub-Zeitgeist—including its surprising global resurrection in the new millennium. Everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to 1950s pulp comics to esoteric space scientists and Kirkman had a hand in fashioning the imaginary creature we know today as the zombie.” (Victoria Nelson, author of Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets)

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1780235283
• ISBN 13: 9781780235288
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224