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Are You Not Entertained?

Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media

Lindsay Steenberg

$200

Hardback

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English
Bloomsbury Academic
26 November 2020
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.
By:  
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 216mm,  Width: 138mm, 
Weight:   548g
ISBN:   9781350120075
ISBN 10:   1350120073
Series:   Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Pages:   320
Publication Date:  
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Primary
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

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.

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

Steenberg moves deftly across time, space, media and story type, interrogating the gladiator as a powerful archetype of joyous nostalgic violence. This definitive study maps cinema, genre histories and masculinity in new and thought-provoking ways: a truly spectacular achievement. -- Yvonne Tasker, Professor of Media and Communication, University of Leeds, UK Are You Not Entertained offers a comprehensive and meticulously researched account of the figure of the gladiator across visual media. From Ancient Rome to The Hunger Games and The Bachelor, the volume carefully traces the contested place of the gladiator. -- Frances Smith, Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Sussex, UK Are You Not Entertained is a brilliant, engaging, and innovative examination of the archetypal gladiator character, from its origins in Ancient Rome to its depictions in movies and other popular media, and brings timely attention to the complex intersections between gladiatorial masculinity, violence, nostalgia, and eroticism. -- Cynthia Felando, Lecturer, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA


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