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"This volume examines seven of Richard Matheson's (1926-2013) full-length novels, a sampling of short stories, and several film adaptations. The chapters, which are arranged in three thematic sections, emphasize Matheson's historical prominence, considerhis precursors and successors, and situate him within narrative traditions of mythology, cinema, genre, and memory studies" --
List of contents
Introduction
Richard Matheson: Wisdom Writer
Cheyenne Mathews
Part I. I Am Legend: Influence and Intertextuality
Chapter 1: "Crawling Out of the Middle Ages": The Deep Literary Roots of the Vampires in I Am Legend, Charles Hoge
Chapter 2: "The last of the old race": I Am Legend and Bio-Vampire-Politics, Aspasia Stephanou
Chapter 3: "Wild Work": The Monstrosity of Whiteness in I Am Legend, Adryan Glasgow
Chapter 4: "The World is Quieter Now": The Threat of Silence in Night of the Living Dead and I Am Legend, Ruth Ellen Covington
Chapter 5: Last-Person Narration: Cultural Imagination At the End of the World As We Know It, Glenn Jellenik
Chapter 6: Who Killed All the Humans?: The Threat of Conformity, Consumerism, and Pure War in "Lemmings," Amy S. Jorgensen
Part II. Norms from the 1950s to Now: Gender, Sexuality, and Race
Chapter 7: Giant Bugs and Shrinking Men: Domesticating Technology in The Incredible Shrinking Man, Amanda Hagood
Chapter 8: (Male) Matter and its Dissolution: Crisis of Masculinities as Horror in Richard Matheson's Short Stories, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
Chapter 9:"The Most Monstrous of Monsters": Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage in A Stir of Echoes and Earthbound, Rebecca Janicker
Chapter 10: "Amelia" and Trilogy of Terror: Mother-Daughter Identification and the Oscillation of the Abject-Matrophobic, Kyle Christensen
Chapter 11: "The Most Bizarre of All": Reading Progressive Race and Gender Identity Markers in "From Shadowed Places," Tiffany A. Bryant
Chapter 12: "lice-infested, mule-eating Apaches!": The Intersection of the First Technological Revolution and Gothic Imperialism in Shadow on the Sun, Shannon Cummings
Part III. The Forms of Matheson's Fiction
Chapter 13: What Would You Do? Justice Between Destiny and Freedom in Richard Matheson's Short Fiction, Ralph Beliveau
Chapter 14: A "private and particular hell": Mathesonian Noir in The Twilight Zone, Cheyenne Mathews
Chapter 15: (Re)Presenting the Past: Bid Time Return as Historiographic Metafiction, Tanfer Emin Tunc
Chapter 16: Locked in Time: Trauma, Memory, and the Barthesian Punctum in Richard Matheson's Fiction, Simon Bacon
Chapter 17: Another Time: Novelizing History after the Canon in Matheson, Joshua Comer
About the author
Cheyenne Mathews is a Ph.D. student in modern British literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research interests include espionage fiction, film, and popular culture.
Janet V. Haedicke, Ph.D., is a professor in the department of English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. She has served as editor of the Tennessee Williams Literary Journal, president of the David Mamet Society, and performance review editor of the David Mamet Newsletter.
