none 10.5040/9781350120099 Bloomsbury Academic Bloomsbury Academic 2984 121460181 3669754 20221209160050 10.5040 2023-10-13T21:18:28Z 2020-11-22T00:23:35Z 2 Lindsay Steenberg Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media 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. 1 2021 9781350120099 9781350189317 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 10.5040/9781350120099 https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350120099 https://www.screenstudies.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350120099 https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350120099