Readers of all stripes will find something to appreciate in this collection, which illuminates how King’s horror literature as a media form has shifted in relation to cultural understandings over time. Many chapters touch upon how surrounding texts, such as film/TV adaptations, have played into these mediations throughout King’s storied career. For the first-time reader of King, this volume offers a doorway into his works: an array of exciting critical frameworks with which to make sense of King’s fictional universe. For literary critics, this volume argues that King’s corpus remains a site for robust intellectual inquiry. And for all of us, the book provides an occasion—one that is long overdue—to rethink King’s relationship to critical theory as well as his legacy as a major American author. While it may prove impossible to reconcile King and the academy, we might nonetheless explore the evolution of their inescapable bond in hopes of negotiating a greater understanding between them.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: Stephen King and His Critics
- I Why Theorize?
- 1. Reading Stephen King through the Years: Theoretical Permutations
- 2. “Can’t someone else do it?”: An (Attempted) A-theoretical Reading of Needful Things
- 3. Stephen King and the Trouble with Poststructuralism
- II Making Meaning
- 4. Reading Stephen King Religiously: Scary Stories and the Teaching of Religion
- 5. Stephen King’s and Peter Staub’s Mythmaking: Jack Sawyer as an American Hero
- 6. The Gospel (Paraphrase): King and Christian Epigraphs
- 7. Excursus on Suffering, Meaning, and Metaphysics in Stephen King’s Revival
- III Adapting Stephen King
- 8. Cinematic Skeleton Crew: Adapting Stephen King in the Mid-1980s
- Joseph Maddrey and Carl H. Sederholm
- 9. Towards Infection: Viral Adaptations of King
- Matthew Holtmeier and Chelsea Wessels
- IV New Critical Interventions
- 10. “Is Zelda dead yet?”: Disability, Mortality, and Narratives of Appropriation in Pet Sematary
- 11. “For you the sun never came back out”: Theorizing Trauma in IT and Gerald’s Game
- 12. Choosing to See: Gardening IT within The Upside Down without a Cord
- 13. “the tongueless voice of the temple whispered”: Delirious Voices in Rose Madder
- 14. A Lovecraftian Critique of the Art of Stephen King
- 15. “A certain rough justice”: Stephen King, Digital Activism, and Donald Trump
- 16. Dead Is Better: Pet Sematary and Animal Studies
- 17. Author Functions: Stephen King’s Writers
- Index
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