The Post-Zombie: Essays on the Evolving Undead

by C. Wylie Lenz (Editor), Angela Tenga (Editor), Kyle William Bishop (Editor)

Overview

The living dead have come a long way from the shambling corpses depicted by George A. Romero. While traditional zombie monsters continue to flourish—thanks in part to the ongoing popularity of The Walking Dead universe—the global community now features reanimated zombies, resurrected zombies, protagonist zombies, robotic zombies, romantic zombies, fake zombies, zombie-adjacent monsters, and post-zombie zombies.

This collection of scholarly essays considers recent and contemporary examples of zombies in fiction, literature, popular culture, and politics from around the world and makes the case that, because of the evolution of the undead, the zombie remains an important allegorical feature of horror fiction, satire, and ideological perspectives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476695808
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Publication date:	05/21/2025
Series:	Contributions to Zombie Studies
Pages:	249
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

C. Wylie Lenz is an associate professor of English in the humanities and social sciences department at Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland, Florida. Angela Tenga is an associate professor at Florida Institute of Technology. Her classes focus on literature, culture, and history, while her research interests include representations of the monstrous, the construction of criminality (especially serial killers) in fiction, and early English literature. Kyle William Bishop is a professor of English and film studies and serves as the English department chair at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. He has presented and published on a number of zombie-related texts and has authored two monographs with McFarland.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface: A Note from the Undeaditors
Introduction: Are We Living in a ­Post-Zombie World Yet?
C. Wylie Lenz, Kyle William Bishop and Angela Tenga
Rebel for Life: Has Our Obsession with Zombies Prepared Us for the Reality of Ecological Collapse?
Jamie Russell
Alpine Winter Tourism, Global Warming and Viral Outbreaks: ­Re-Watching Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies During the ­Covid-19 Pandemic
Michael Fuchs
Trump Zombies
Randy Laist
Virtue Politics and Zoon Zombikon: From Laws with Teeth to Grinding Us
Bruce Peabody
“Real” Hunger: Santa Clarita Diet and the Capitalocene
Sharon Diane King
Sentient Slaves: Fido and Deadgirl Out of Pleasantville
Gloria Pastorino
You Are Who You Eat: iZombie, Passing and the Role of Food in Modern Zombie Television
Charla Strosser and Kyle William Bishop
Roamers: Z Nation, Black Summer and Generic Expansion Through Geography
Cory James Rushton
Neither Human nor Monster: The Rise of the ­K-Superzombie
Paul Scott
Undead, with an MFA: The ­Post-Genre Literary Zombie
C. Wylie Lenz
“I am dead, yet I live”: Twin Peaks: The Return as Resurrected, Relentlessly Aggressive, ­Undead-Infested, ­Counter-Nostalgic Noir
Elizabeth Aiossa
Afterward: The Afterword
Sarah Juliet Lauro
Filmography
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

The Post-Zombie is the shot in the arm that zombie studies has needed to understand how our visions of the undead have transformed in the face of the many ongoing calamities of a tumultuous 21st century. Highly recommended.”—Gerry Canavan, Marquette University

From the Publisher