The Emancipation of the Soul: Memes of Destiny in American Mythological Television

This book analyzes the mythological content of five television franchises within the genre of science fiction, fantasy and horror: The X-Files & Millennium, Babylon 5 & Crusade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel, Stargate and Star Trek. The central themes are errand into the wilderness, emancipation from larger powers, individual responsibility, prophecy, apocalyptic scenarios, fundamentalism, artificial intelligence, as well as hybridity, gender roles, psychotic narration, and others. The theoretical basis for this work are both a conventional cultural studies perspective as well as memetics, an evolutionary perspective of culture and literature that is utilized in this volume as an approach to studying genre at the example of the five case studies.