Are You Not Entertained?

Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media

Add to my list

by Lindsay Steenberg

Type: Essays
Subject: Genre > Historical films
Keywords: sociology, ancien epic
Publishing date: 2020
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Collection: Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 320 pages
5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches (14.5 x 22.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-350-12007-5

User Ratings

(0 vote)

Average rating:

0	rating	= We can do without
0	rating	= Good book
0	rating	= Excellent book
0	rating	= Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Report incorrect or incomplete information

Book Presentation:
Anglo-American culture is marked by a gladiatorial impulse: a deep cultural fascination in watching men fight each other. The gladiator is an archetypal character embodying this impulse and his brand of violent and eroticised masculinity has become a cultural shorthand that signals a transhistorical version of heroic masculinity.

Frequently the gladiator or celebrity fighter - from the amphitheatres of Rome to the octagon of the Ultimate Fighting Championships - is used as a way of insisting that a desire to fight, and to watch men fighting, is simply a part of our human nature. This book traces a cultural interest in stories about gladiators through twentieth and twenty-first-century film, television and videogames.

About the Author:
Lindsay Steenberg is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University where she co-ordinates their graduate programme in Popular Cinema. She has published numerous articles on violence and gender in postmodern and postfeminist media culture. She is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science.

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic

> On a related topic: