Through sources from literature and film to comics, music and the built environment across the globe, this work studies the enduring legacy of Cold War culture in current debates and concerns around risk, security, borders, environmental justice, inequality and apocalypse.

Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies.

Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand C line and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus of modernism, he asserts, it is necessary to acknowledge the attraction that medieval forms and motifs held for modernist literature and theory. By pairing the writings of the postwar German dramatist and novelist Peter Weiss with Dante's Commedia, and Christine de Pizan with Virginia Woolf, Pike argues for a new level of complexity in the relation between medieval and modern poetics.

Pike's supple and persuasive reading of the Commedia resituates that text within the contradictions of medieval tradition. He contends that the Dantean allegory of conversion, altered to suit the exigencies of modernism, maintains its hold over current literature and theory. The postwar writers Pike treats--Weiss, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott--exemplify alternate strategies for negotiating the legacy of modernism. The passage through hell emerges as a way of disentangling images of the past from their interpretation in the present.

Award-winning author David L. Pike offers a unique focus on the crucial quarter-century in Canadian filmmaking when the industry became a viable force on the international stage. Pike provides a lively, personal, and accessible history of the most influential filmmakers and movements of both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois cinema, from popular movies to art film and everything in between.

Along with in-depth studies of key directors, including David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema and Denys Arcand, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Robert Lepage, L a Pool, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s reflects on major themes and genres and explores the regional and cultural diversity of the period. Pike positions Canadian filmmaking at the frontlines of a profound cinematic transformation in the age of global media and presents fresh perspectives on both its local and international contexts. Making a significant advance in the study of the film industry of the period, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s is also an ideal text for students, researchers, and Canadian film enthusiasts.

In Metropolis on the Styx, David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike details the emergence of a vertical city in the imagination of nineteenth-century Paris and London, a city overseen by hosts of devils and undermined by subterranean villains, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below. Metropolis on the Styx brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition.Highly original in subject matter, methodology, and conclusions, Metropolis on the Styx synthesizes a number of critical approaches, periods of study, and disciplines in the analysis of a single category of space--the underground. Pike studies the built environments and the textual and visual ephemera (including little-known or unknown archival material) of Paris, London, and other cities in conjunction with canonical modern literature and art. This book integrates a rich visual component--photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined subterranean spaces--into the fabric of the argument.

The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which technology and heavy industry transformed urban life.The metropolis had long been considered a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday life of the contemporary city. Writers and artists from Felix Nadar and Charles Baudelaire to Charles Dickens and Alice Meynell, Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo, George Gissing and Emile Zola, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into their portrayals of the anatomy of modern society. Illustrated with photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined urban spaces, Subterranean Cities documents the emergence of a novel space in the subterranean obsessions and anxieties within nineteenth-century urban culture. Chapters on the subways, sewers, and cemeteries of Paris and London provide a detailed analysis of these competing centers of urban modernity. A concluding chapter considers the enduring influence of these spaces on urban culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which technology and heavy industry transformed urban life.The metropolis had long been considered a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday life of the contemporary city. Writers and artists from Felix Nadar and Charles Baudelaire to Charles Dickens and Alice Meynell, Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo, George Gissing and Emile Zola, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into their portrayals of the anatomy of modern society. Illustrated with photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined urban spaces, Subterranean Cities documents the emergence of a novel space in the subterranean obsessions and anxieties within nineteenth-century urban culture. Chapters on the subways, sewers, and cemeteries of Paris and London provide a detailed analysis of these competing centers of urban modernity. A concluding chapter considers the enduring influence of these spaces on urban culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades.

Award-winning author David L. Pike offers a unique focus on the crucial quarter-century in Canadian filmmaking when the industry became a viable force on the international stage. Pike provides a lively, personal, and accessible history of the most influential filmmakers and movements of both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois cinema, from popular movies to art film and everything in between.

Along with in-depth studies of key directors, including David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema and Denys Arcand, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Robert Lepage, Léa Pool, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s reflects on major themes and genres and explores the regional and cultural diversity of the period. Pike positions Canadian filmmaking at the frontlines of a profound cinematic transformation in the age of global media and presents fresh perspectives on both its local and international contexts. Making a significant advance in the study of the film industry of the period, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s is also an ideal text for students, researchers, and Canadian film enthusiasts.

In Metropolis on the Styx, David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike details the emergence of a vertical city in the imagination of nineteenth-century Paris and London, a city overseen by hosts of devils and undermined by subterranean villains, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below. Metropolis on the Styx brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition.Highly original in subject matter, methodology, and conclusions, Metropolis on the Styx synthesizes a number of critical approaches, periods of study, and disciplines in the analysis of a single category of space--the underground. Pike studies the built environments and the textual and visual ephemera (including little-known or unknown archival material) of Paris, London, and other cities in conjunction with canonical modern literature and art. This book integrates a rich visual component--photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined subterranean spaces--into the fabric of the argument.