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Law and Society, Violence and Sacrifice in The Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Meditation on Just Violence

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Zusammenfassung

Zombies are everywhere. This is not the opening to a bad contribution to the everexpanding universe of zombie apocalypses, but rather an observation that as these visions of the end of society proliferate, the ways that they are analyzed are becoming more numerous as well. As Kelly J. Baker argues in The Zombies are Coming !, zombies are everywhere partly because of the flexibility that the monster offers and partly because of a latent element of American culture that lends itself to what Michael Barkun calls » pervasive millennialism. « Zombies, she shows, are the latest popular vehicle for exploring apocalypse in all of its ambivalent glory – as revelation, as a combination of dystopian fear and utopian longing, as social critique or imaginary reset button, and as expressions of fundamental conceptions of justice as the current world is destroyed, thus presenting the opportunity to build a new one in its place.

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Correspondence to Anthony Santoro .

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Santoro, A. (2015). Law and Society, Violence and Sacrifice in The Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Meditation on Just Violence. In: Ahrens, J., Brinkmann, F., Riemer, N. (eds) Comics - Bilder, Stories und Sequenzen in religiösen Deutungskulturen. Kulturelle Figurationen: Artefakte, Praktiken, Fiktionen. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-01428-5_13

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