Product Description

Hugely enjoyable, long awaited book by top world authority on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Buffy is still on screens and on DVD in home television libraries of a wide array of TV watchers and fans. This is also the student text for TV and cultural studies at colleges and universities where Buffy is widely taught. Rhonda Wilcox is a world authority on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", who has been writing and lecturing about the show since its arrival on our screens. This book is the distillation of this remarkable body of work and thought, a celebration of the series that she proposes is an aesthetic test case for television. Buffy is enduring as art, she argues, by exploring its own possibilities for long-term construction as well as producing individual episodes that are powerful in their own right. She examines therefore the larger patterns that extend through many episodes: the hero myth, the imagery of light, naming symbolism, Spike, sex and redemption, Buffy Summers compared and contrasted with Harry Potter. She then moves in to focus on individual episodes, such as the "Buffy musical Once More, with Feeling", the largely silent Hush and the dream episode "Restless" (T.S. Eliot comes to television). She also examines Buffy's ways of making meaning - from literary narrative and symbolism to visual imagery and sound. Combining great intelligence and wit, written for the wide Buffy readership, this is the worthy companion to the show that has claimed and kept the minds and hearts of watchers worldwide.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55004 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
CRITICAL STUDIES IN TELEVISION 'Insightful and often illuminating to one's understanding of the series... a convincing argument' - Stacey Abbott

About the Author
Rhonda Wilcox is an English professor and television scholar. She is co-editor of 'Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and of 'Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies'. She has been described by CNN as 'the Mother of Buffy studies'.

Customer Reviews

A must for both dedicated Buffyologists and fans!
It is interesting that, at the time of writing, Amazon are offering Anne Billson's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" from BFI as the `perfect partner' for Rhonda Wilcox's "Why Buffy Matters". In some ways, they are, curiously enough, perfect partners. Billson's book is, regrettably, one of the more disappointing of the host of academic/ critical texts to have been published on BtVS, while Wilcox's book is one of the best. Wilcox is one of the founders of Slayage, an online academic journal dedicated to Buffy Studies, and this is a collection of essays mainly based on the many papers she has given at conferences around the world. I heard the conference version of "Pain Bright as Steel" (chapter 2 here) at the first Buffy conference at the University of East Anglia in 2002, and was struck then by the clarity of her insights and the positively poetic, sensitive and often wryly humorous way in which she reads the Vampire Slayer and her universe. It is this aspect of Wilcox's writing in this volume that gives the book such wide appeal . Her writing is not traditionally academic (which is often dry and overloaded with jargon), but is full of humour and genuine affection for the series and its characters, which makes it very approachable for any reader who loves the Buffyverse, be they academic or fan; and her insights, her identification and articulation of themes and undercurrents in the way the series has been constructed gives the work a critical depth that make it an important contribution to the literature on BtVS.
Given that the book is a collection of different conference papers and essays, and was not originally conceived as a book, it hangs together as a narrative remarkably well, and makes a good job of tackling the entire series and all its major characters. In the first half of the book, each chapter tackles a particular theme in the context of the series as a whole, looking at symbol and language; the use of light as an image for pain that counters the traditional binary construction of light=good, dark=evil; the significance of names; a comparison of Buffy with Harry Potter; and sex and redemption in the Buffyverse, focusing on Buffy and Spike. In the second half, each chapter focuses on a particular episode. The "big three" - the genre-based episodes "Hush", "The Body" and "Once more, with feeling" - have a chapter each, as well as the paired episodes "Surprise" and "Innocence" from season 1, "The Zeppo" from season 3 and "Restless" from season 4 (season 2 is the only one not to have a particular episode chapter).
Overall, not only an important contribution to the literature and extremely interesting read, but a fun one too!