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This chapter explores the role of postmodern intertextuality in Neil Jordan’s 2012 vampire film Byzantium. This intertextuality serves to place the film in dialogue with earlier vampire fiction, in particular the 1970s cycle of British and European erotic vampire films such as Daughters of Darkness and The Vampire Lovers from Hammer Films. Byzantium recalls these earlier texts structurally and thematically, both through direct reference and more oblique allusions.

While Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodern intertextuality as mere nostalgia and the imitation of ‘dead styles’, feminist postmodern theorists such as Linda Hutcheon contend argue for the political potential of postmodernism. This chapter proposes that the postmodern intertextuality of Byzantium is a critical intertextuality, and that the foregrounding of storytelling, writing, and rewriting in the film draws attention to the ways in which the intertextuality of Byzantium is not merely a return to past forms but also a reworking of them.

Taking up the work of Linda Hutcheon and Catherine Constable, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which Byzantium critically reworks aspects of earlier vampire fiction in order to critique and expand the representation of the female vampire and through this explore issues relating to female subjectivity and community.

This chapter suggests that the unsettling reconfiguration of ‘home’ in works of post-colonial literary adaptation has an affective impact on non-Indigenous readers, contributing, potentially, to processes of decolonisation. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, in their book Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, argue that Australian texts which seek to disturb readers by pursuing modes of post-colonial ‘unsettlement’ can activate new discourses and, thereby, inspire social change (1998). Focussing upon undergraduate student responses to two works of Aboriginal Australian literary adaptation, Melissa Lukashenko's short story ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Land’ (2013) and Leah Purcell's stage play, The Drover's Wife (2016), this chapter draws upon ideas pertaining to ‘affect’ to reveal how, through the subversive reimagining of tropes and structures commonly associated with Western dwelling, works of Indigenous literary adaptation elicit emotional responses in non-Indigenous readers and, in so doing, open up new spaces for listening within existing frameworks of white possession.

Purpose: This paper examines a promotional exhibit for the Broadway musical Wicked, entitled “The World of Wicked,” to better understand the ways in which art marketers continue to hail new and existing consumers. Eco’s concept of hyperreality and its relationship to remediation and cultural sustainability are brought to bear upon this phenomenon. As producers utilize new media platforms to reach the consumer, they make the experience of their shows more immediate. Set in the context of a shopping mall, the hyperreality of the exhibit is unpacked and analyzed.

Design: This is an interpretive study using direct observation, participant observation, depth interviews, narrative analysis, and artifact analysis.

Findings: By facilitating embodiment, encouraging intense emotional arousal, and providing a sense of community, “The World of Wicked” is a metonym for Wicked itself. The hyperreal context of the shopping mall facilitates the consumption of fantasy as well as material goods.

Originality and value: The findings of this paper extend theories of hyperreality, adaptation, and remediation into the context of arts. This contribution is foundational to building a larger theory of cultural sustainability.

A lot has been written on zombies lately and on the rather conservative US-American TV Show The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–) in particular. A lot less has been written on the SyFy-Show Z Nation (2014–), although it is a sophisticated feminist take on the zombie lore. Centring around a group of survivors, who escort a human–zombie–cyborg across the US and Mexico, the show not only undermines the patriarchalism of its archetype, but also raises questions of post-humanism by the means of Donna Haraway or Rosi Braidotti. With the help of media-self-reflexive parody and pastiche, the series comments on its extradiegetic world as much as on its own genre and offers a deconstruction of stereotypical (gendered) tropes and conventions. In the following chapter, I use a selective close reading of the text and its representation politics to demonstrate how a feminist deconstruction of zombie-horror can come into being and how an (academic) distinction between Quality and Trash TV can be just as regressive as productive in this process.