Why Buffy Matters KINDLE MOBI by Rhonda V. Wilcox, Phd H.A

Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This accessible collection of academic essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer defends the artistic merit of the fantasy TV show with equal parts wit and insight. Wilcox, an English professor at Gordon College, is a fan of the series and doesn't condescend to other fans or disparage what she believes is "art, and deserves to be so studied. It is a work of literature, of language...of visual art...of music and sound." Wilcox looks at the big-picture narrative arc and at individual episodes, finding impressive, but sometimes tenuously connected, influences at work: Joseph Campbell's momo-myth, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, John Donne, Virgil and Charles Dickens. "One of the great themes of Dickens's Bleak House," she writes, "is our interconnection; and one of the great themes of Buffy is the virtue of community." Not surprisingly, the author has no patience for critics and academics who dismiss Buffy as mere "cult TV" on the basis of its genre and argues that fantasy can have more emotional resonance than realism. Though not convincing as a work of genuine scholarship, Wilcox's book is a serviceable addition to the canon of Buffy.

Rhonda V. Wilcox, Ph.D., is a professor of English at Gordon State College (Georgia) who has been writing about good television since the last century. She is the editor of Studies in Popular Culture and the coeditor of Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. She is the author of Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2005); she is the coeditor, with David Lavery, of Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002); with Tanya R. Cochran, of Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier (2008); and with Sue Turnbull, of Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (2011). She is also the coeditor of Reading Joss Whedon, forthcoming in spring 2014 from Syracuse University Press.