Are You Not Entertained?: Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media

Lindsay Steenberg

ISBN 10: 1350120073 / ISBN 13: 9781350120075

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2020

About this Item

Anglo-American culture is marked by a gladiatorial impulse: a deep cultural fascination in watching men fight each other. The gladiator is an archetypal character embodying this impulse and his brand of violent and eroticised masculinity has become a cultural shorthand that signals a transhistorical version of heroic masculinity. Frequently the gladiator or celebrity fighter - from the amphitheatres of Rome to the octagon of the Ultimate Fighting Championships - is used as a way of insisting that a desire to fight, and to watch men fighting, is simply a part of our human nature. This book traces a cultural interest in stories about gladiators through twentieth and twenty-first-century film, television and videogames.

Seller Inventory # 0087702

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Are You Not Entertained?: Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350120073
• ISBN 13: 9781350120075
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Anglo-American culture is marked by a gladiatorial impulse: a deep cultural fascination in watching men fight each other. The gladiator is an archetypal character embodying this impulse and his brand of violent and eroticised masculinity has become a cultural shorthand that signals a transhistorical version of heroic masculinity.

Frequently the gladiator or celebrity fighter - from the amphitheatres of Rome to the octagon of the Ultimate Fighting Championships - is used as a way of insisting that a desire to fight, and to watch men fighting, is simply a part of our human nature. This book traces a cultural interest in stories about gladiators through twentieth and twenty-first-century film, television and videogames.

About the Author

Lindsay Steenberg is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University where she co-ordinates their graduate programme in Popular Cinema. She has published numerous articles on violence and gender in postmodern and postfeminist media culture. She is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science.