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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Poison and the Popular Imagination: Representations, Iconographies, and Meanings in Media and Culture

Poison and the Popular Imagination: Representations, Iconographies, and Meanings in Media and Culture

Piatti-Farnell, Lorna

Hardcover

PhilosophyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1666946737
ISBN13: 9781666946734
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Jan 8 2026
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Bringing together the work of international scholars, this book investigates the well-known conceptualization of poison as connected to seemingly contrasting ideas of 'deviousness', 'insidiousness' and 'usefulness, ' demonstrating how these understandings manifest in a variety of culturally informed discourses and narrative contexts across popular culture.

Taking an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, contributors to this volume consider poison as a powerful metaphorical entity that recurrently appears across narrative formats and contexts, including film, television, comics, video games, children's literature, and boardgames. Through both historical and fictional accounts - which are explored in equal terms as part of the same cultural narrative - this book re-assesses the place occupied by poison in the popular imagination, establishing its presence as one that is simultaneously nefarious and culturally romanticized. Contributors demonstrate how discourses of poison in popular culture are often interconnected with representations of gender, ethnicity, class, cultural identity, and environmental discourses on an intersectional level.

Ultimately, through its recounting of tales about poison and poisoners, this book also reveals parallels to some of the deepest narratives about our societies, both historic and contemporary: what we fear, what we desire, and how we see ourselves at a specific moment in time.

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