Are You Not Entertained?: Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media

By Lindsay Steenberg

Anglo-American culture is marked by a gladiatorial impulse: a deep cultural fascination in watching men fight each other. The gladiator is an archetypal character embodying this impulse and his brand of violent and eroticised masculinity has become a cultural shorthand that signals a transhistorical version of heroic masculinity. Frequently the gladiator or celebrity fighter - from the amphitheatres of Rome to the octagon of the Ultimate Fighting Championships - is used as a way of insisting that a desire to fight, and to watch men fighting, is simply a part of our human nature. This book traces a cultural interest in stories about gladiators through twentieth and twenty-first-century film, television and videogames.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1350120073
• ISBN13: 9781350120075
• Release Date: November 2020
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Length: 320 Pages