Transformation Reading List - JSCC Pioneer Con 2025

Since its inception, the story of the apocalypse has been used as a means by which to understand the world and one's place in it. The appeal of the apocalyptic myth is largely rooted in its ability to make sense of instances of crisis by incorporating those crises into a larger plan for history and an end of time that God has planned. Apocalypse is both an organizing principle to be imposed on an overwhelming, seemingly-disordered universe and a fundamentally moral story which offers hope of a new world where good and evil can be clearly delineated and addressed. But all of the traditional functions and comforts of the apocalyptic myth are challenged when the myth collides with postmodernism. The characteristics that define a work as postmodern ultimately destabilize the traits that make the apocalyptic myth unique.

Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world.

Cinderella's sisters surgically modify their feet to win the prince's love. A werewolf gathers up enough courage to visit a dentist. A medium trying to reach the afterworld gets a recorded message. A fox and a badger compete to out-fool each other. Whether writing of insomnia from a mosquito's point of view or showing us what happens after the princess kisses the frog, Ana María Shua, in these fleet and incandescent stories, is nothing if not pithy--except, of course, wildly entertaining.

The undead are very much alive in contemporary entertainment and lore. Indeed, vampires and zombies have garnered attention in print media, cinema, and on television. The vampire, with roots in medieval European folklore, and the zombie, with origins in Afro-Caribbean mythology, have both undergone significant transformations in global culture, proliferating as deviant representatives of the zeitgeist. As this volume demonstrates, distribution of vampires and zombies across time and space has revealed these undead figures to carry multiple meanings.

This collection was inspired by the observation that film remakes offer us the opportunity to revisit important issues, stories, themes, and topics in a manner that is especially relevant and meaningful to contemporary audiences.

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote the apocalyptic novel The Last Man in 1826. Its first person narrative tells the story of our world standing at the end of the twenty-first century and - after the devastating effects of a plague - at the end of humanity.

Are werewolves real? When the moon is full, do ordinary people under a supernatural curse transform into snarling creatures charging out of the fog, only to revert to human form? Throughout history, people have claimed to have seen weird beings that are part human and part wolf, dog, fox, or even cat. Modern-day eyewitnesses across the United States report strange encounters with dogmen and wolf-like creatures. And while theories abound to explain the stories, the only certain thing is that popular interest in the mystery of werewolves remains strong. ""Werewolves"" examines the lore and legends of lycanthropy throughout history and from around the world, describing the many types of werewolves and case studies, and offering readers information they need to conduct their own field investigation.

Werewolves, Magical Hounds, and Dog-Headed Men in Celtic Literature : A Typological Study of Shape-Shifting