In Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity, Maarten van Delden argues that there is a fundamental paradox at the heart of Fuentes's vision of Mexico and in his role as novelist and critic in putting forth that vision. This paradox hinges on the tension between national identity and modernity. A significant internal conflict emerges in Fuentes's work from his attempt to stake out two different positions for himself, as experimental novelist and as politically engaged and responsible intellectual. Drawing from the fiction, literary essays, and political journalism, van Delden places these tensions in Fuentes's work in relation to the larger debates about modernity and postmodernity in Latin America. He concludes that Fuentes is fundamentally a modernist writer, in spite of the fact that he occasionally gravitates toward the postmodernist position in literature and politics. Van Delden's thorough command of the subject matter, his innovative and sometimes iconoclastic conclusions, and his clear and engaging writing style make this study more than just an interpretation of Fuentes's work. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity offers nothing less than a comprehensive analysis of Fuentes's work. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity offers nothing less than a comprehensive analysis of Fuentes's intellectual development in the context of modern Mexican political and cultural life.

Shakespearean Spaces in Australian Literary Adaptations for Children and Young Adults offers a comprehensive examination of Shakespearean adaptations written by Australian authors for children and Young Adults. The 20-year period crossing the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came to represent a diverse and productive era of adapting Shakespeare in Australian literature. As an analysis of Australian and international marketplaces, physical and imaginative spaces and the body as a site of meaning, this book reveals how the texts are ideologically bound to and disseminate Shakespearean cultural capital in contemporary ways. Combining current research in children’s literature and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital deepens the critical awareness of the status of Australian literature while illuminating a corpus of literature underrepresented by the pre-existing concentration on adaptations from other parts of the world. Of particular interest is how these adaptations merge Shakespearean worlds with the spaces inhabited by young people, such as the classroom, the stage, the imagination and the gendered body. The readership of this book would be academics, researchers and students of children’s literature studies and Shakespeare studies, particularly those interested in Shakespearean cultural theory, transnational adaptation and literary appropriation. High school educators and pre-service teachers would also find this book valuable as they look to broaden and strengthen their use of adaptations to engage students in Shakespeare studies.

A critical exploration of one of the most exciting, original and influential figures to emerge in contemporary film, Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art is a major contribution to the analysis of Guillermo del Toro's cinematic output. It offers an in-depth discussion of del Toro's oeuvre and investigates key ideas, recurrent motifs and subtle links between his movies. The book explores the sources that del Toro draws upon and transforms in the creation of his rich and complex body of work. These include the literary, artistic and cinematic influences on films such as Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, Cronos and Mimic, and the director's engagement with comic book culture in his two Hellboy films, Blade II and Pacific Rim. As well as offering extensive close textual analysis, the authors also consider del Toro's considerable impact on wider popular culture, including a discussion of his role as producer, ambassador for 'geek' culture and figurehead in new international cinema.

Ophelia Castellan will never be just another girl at Elsinore Academy. Seeing ghosts is not a skill prized in future society wives. Even when she takes her pills, the bean sidhe beckon, reminding her of a promise to her dead mother. Now, in the wake of the Headmaster's sudden death, the whole academy is in turmoil, and Ophelia can no longer ignore the fae. Especially once she starts seeing the Headmaster's ghosts—two of them—on the school grounds. Her only confidante is Dane, the Headmaster's grieving son. Yet even as she gives more of herself to him, Dane spirals toward a tragic fate—dragging Ophelia, and the rest of Elsinore, with him. You know how this story ends. Yet even in the face of certain death, Ophelia has a choice to make—and a promise to keep.

The father-daughter relationship was one that Shakespeare explored again and again. His typical pattern featured a middle-aged or older man, usually a widower, with an adolescent daughter who had spent most of her life under her father's control, protected in his house. The plays usually begin when the daughter is on the verge of womanhood and eager to assert her own identity and make her own decisions, especially in matters of the heart, even if it means going against her father's wishes. This work considers Capulet in Romeo and Juliet as an inept father to Juliet and Prospero in The Tempest as an able mentor to Miranda; Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice and Desdemona in Othello as daughters who rebel against their fathers; Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Lavinia in Titus Andronicus and Ophelia in Hamlet as daughters who acquiesce; Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew and Goneril and Regan in King Lear as daughters who cunningly play the good girl role; Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It as daughters who act in their fathers' places; and Marina in Pericles, Perdita in The Winter's Tale and Cordelia in Lear as daughters who forgive and heal.

The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives. To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic-the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration. Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan's Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.