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This essay emerges from the author’s ongoing attempts to explore the implications of the postmodern condition on the activity called public administration. The approach is unorthodox; mixing current international events with history of science, administrative theory, and ending with an intriguing science fiction novel. The central theme of the essay is the myth of progress connected with Michael Spicer’s excellent analysis of competing theories of state. Whatever else might be said of the essay, the argument comes full circle. It begins with the idea that governing is hard work and ends on the same note.

Dark Souls heralded a shift from the dichotomy of survival horror, and instead, thrust the player into a world where narrative was everywhere (if only you dared to look). This chapter explores the reimagination of Gothic narrative and narrative engagement in the cryptic and fragmented nested narratives of the iconic FromSoftware, Inc. series. In doing so, this chapter highlights the emergence of a hybrid ludo-narrative form within the Gothic genre, and examines the ways in which the series presents said narratives to the player as it shifts the onus of narrative engagement from the storyteller to the one now living the experience. The chapter explores video-ludic interpretations of death, play, and experientiality through the lens of video game studies, and posits the value of the series as a defining moment in the Japanese action role-playing game genre.

Brooker’s mini-series Dead Set displays numerous representations of British masculinity in crisis. Released just as the zombie narrative was regaining momentum, the series uses the threat of an apocalypse to expose British men as weak, cowardly and ultimately monstrous. Initially set within the confines of the Big Brother house, the characters have willingly come under scrutiny for the delectation of a scandal-hungry public. The men are seen to self-consciously perform their own brands of masculinity. However, when people quickly descend from figuratively devouring each other into actually devouring each other, these masculine ideals are left in tatters, and without them, the surviving men are in constant peril.

For the purposes of this chapter, I will look specifically at three characters within the series and how their representations adhere to the ideas put forward by Anthony Clare, among others – that contemporary masculinity is in a period of crisis. I also wish to uncover how representations of masculinity within the series reflect contemporary social and political concerns within British society – a distrust of state apparatus and the rise of a particularly malicious, right wing ideology are both prevalent here. The zombie has long been acknowledged as an allegory for society’s ills – but this chapter asks: what can those fighting (or failing) against the zombie threat tell us?

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.

In this chapter, I utilize insights from symbolic interaction to analyze the identity work processes of larp subculture participants to construct and perform their in-game identities. I extend the research on larp subcultures in two ways. First, I place larping within the larger context of leisure subcultures and society by arguing that larping is representative of changes in leisure and subcultures in postmodern society. Second, I draw upon ethnographic data collected among the New England Role-playing Organization (NERO) to analyze larpers character identity performances. RPG and Larp researchers have developed several theories about the relationship between larp participants and their character performances. While these concepts provide a helpful framework for understanding the participant-character relationship, they undertheorize the in-game constructed performance of identity. Using symbolic interaction theory, I analyze the identity work processes larpers use to construct and perform their larp identities extending our understanding of the similarities between everyday identity and larpers' character identity performances.

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.