Times of Horror, Magic, and the Reproductive Body in Popular Culture

Ruth Barratt-Peacock has published broadly in literature, metal music studies, childhood studies, and Gothic studies. She studied English Literature and Musicology at the University of Tasmania before pursuing a Master’s of Literature, Culture, and Art at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and the renowned University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar. She wrote her PhD on contemporary Australian poetry and Romantic epistemological philosophy at the interdisciplinary research group Modell Romantik: Variation, Reichweite, Aktualität (Romanticism as a model) funded by the German Research Council at FSU Jena. She is currently a Walter Benjamin fellow with the University of Huddersfield. Her most recent papers appear in Popular Television, English: Journal of the English Society Oxford, Intermédialités Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des technique, The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, Aeternum : The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, and Metal Music Studies. Previous book-length publications include the edited collection Medievalism in Metal Music: Throwing Down the Gauntlet (with Ross Hagen, Emerald Press) and Concrete Horizons: Romantic Irony in the Poetry of David Malouf and Samual Wagan Watson (Peter Lang).

• Beginnings Foreword. Introduction: Intersections of Reproduction and Magic in Horror: A Matter of Time Imagined Futures 1. The Horror of Time: Reproductive Anxiety and Transgenerational Haunting in Clock (2023) 2. Body Politic Horror and the Death Drive in Kamen Rider Black Sun 3. Rebirthing the (Anglo-American) World: Reproductive Fantasies in Post-Pandemic Dystopian Cinema 4. My Blood is Magic: The Birth of the Posthuman Imagined Pasts 5. Transpositional Subjects and Postapocalyptic Monstrosities in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Last Man 6. Wrath of Kālī: The Terrible Mother and the Apocalyptic Beat Offsprings 7. Not Just the Pontianak: Maternal Death and Agency in the Malaysian Folk Horror Narrative 8. Changelings, Crones, Witches, and Werewolves: Reproductive Horror in Mike Mignola’s Early Hellboy Stories The Present: Critical Visions 9. Creation as an Act of Rebellion: Magic, Biopower, and Reclamation in Spare and Found Parts by Sarah Maria Griffin 10. Motherhood, Magic and Horror in Delicate Condition and The Upstairs House 11. Ghostly Mothers and Unborn Babies: Reading Maternal Bodies as Contested Sites of Domination and Transgression in Contemporary Bollywood Horror Cinema 12. Monstrous Ambivalence and Sociospatial Subversion in Good Manners 13. Immortality and mass production in Chucky 14. Queer Pregnancies in Kirsty Logan’s Fiction