Heroic Girls as Figures of Resistance and Futurity in Popular Culture

Simon Bacon is a writer and film critic based in Poznań, Poland. He has written and edited 30+ books on various subjects including Gothic: A Reader (2018), Horror: A Companion (2019), Eco-Vampires (2020), Nosferatu in the 21st Century (2023), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2023), The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (2024), and The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (forthcoming). He is Kasi the editor of the book series ‘Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead’ at https://www.peterlang.com/series/vsu.

Part I: Theoretical Approaches; 1. The Narratives of Survival: Final Girls in Videogames; 2. Fighting Fate: Representations of a ‘New Order’ in Beautiful Creatures; 3. The Shadow Self and the New Girl: Breaking Down the Old Worlds in Ursula Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan and N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky; 4. ‘She would never fall, because her friend was flying with her’: Gothic Hybridity, Queer Girls and Exceptional States in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts (2014); 5. Cheerleaders, Orphans, School Girls: The Persistent Sounding Riot(Grrrl) in the (Televisual) Apocalypse; Part II: Cross-Cultural Heroes; 6. Tranquilas: Monstrous Resistance and Feminist Storytelling; 7. Sister-matic Cannibalism in the Dying Breed: Heterotopic Representations of Australia’s Lingering Colonial Connectivity; 8. Seeking Resistance in Tropes: a Reading of the Final Girl Trope’s Used in NH10 and Stree and its Socio-Cultural Significance; 9. Gothic Agent of Revolt: The Rebel Female Hero in Pan’s Labyrinth; 10. From Vancouver Island to the City of Troy: Prophecy, Heroism, and Indigenous Classical Reception in Catherine Knutsson’s Shadows Cast by Stars; Part III: Resistance, Revenge, Reimagining; 11. Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017) and the Rape-Revenge Action Hero; 12. ‘What about you, Maxine? What’s your American Dream?’: X and Pearl Radically Refit the Final Girl with an Axe and Hack Apart the American Pastoral; 13. After The Credits Roll: Jade Daniels, Trauma and the Postmodern Final Girl; 14. Killer Girls: Red Riding Hood, Girlhood and the Final Girl; 15. The Witcher and Ciri of Cintra as the Heroic Final Girl; Part IV: Into the Future; 16. Persephone Distorted: From Teen Witch to Queen of Hell — The Evolution of Sabrina; 17. ‘The Witch Forever Lives’: Redefining the Path for Empowered Final Girls in the Trilogy Fear Street; 18. First Girl, Last Jedi, Final Girl: Rey, Resistance, and the Future of Star Wars; 19. The Environmental Context of Hope in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts