Journal for Religion, Film and Media
The Journal for Religion, Film and Media is a peer-reviewed, open access, online publication. It offers a platform for scholarly research in the broad field of religion and media, with a particular interest in audio-visual and interactive forms of communication. It engages with the challenges arising from the dynamic development of media technologies and their interaction with religion in an interdisciplinary key. It is published twice a year, in May and November.
JRFM is edited by a network of international experts in film, media and religion with professional experience in interdisciplinary research, teaching and publishing, linking perspectives from the study of religion and theology, film, media, visual and cultural studies, and sociology. It is published in cooperation between different institutions in Europe and the USA, particularly the University of Graz, the University of Munich and Villanova University, in cooperation with the Schüren publishing house in Marburg. JRFM is published also as a print-on-demand.
Journal for Religion, Film and Media
Chief editors
Stefanie Knauss, Villanova University
Alexander Darius Ornella, University of Hull
Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati, University of Munich
Christian Wessely, University of Graz
Heft 10.1 ab 15. Mai online!
Fiction, Religion and Politics in The Handmaid’s Tale
Issue Editors: Natalie Fritz and Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati
Since its publication in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel by Margaret Atwood, has had an enormous impact on different media productions, from opera to graphic novel to a much-acclaimed TV series. The novel develops a disturbing vision of the theocratic, totalitarian state Gilead. The narrator records fragments of her everyday life as a “handmaid”, one of the women assigned as slaves to the elite’s families for reproductive purposes. Atwood’s novel points out how religious and political fanaticism fuel social violence, inequality, and the abolishment of individual rights. With its clear articulation of widespread fears concerning contemporary democracy and its future – dystopian – developments, The Handmaid’s Tale has become a global cultural phenomenon.
The articles gathered in this issue approach the complex interdependence of fiction, religion and politics in the Handmaid’s Tale in light of the novel of 1985 and the Hulu series that started in 2017. The articles by Friedhelm Hartenstein, Ann Jeffers, and Bina Nir offer a close reading of the use of biblical references in the novel, analysing the ambivalent role of religion in the (de-)legitimation of a destructive political power. Simon Spiegel focuses on the TV series and explores the transformation of the dystopian novel into a serial drama, and the paradoxical challenges of the serie’s success. The articles of the thematic section are introduced by the editors’ contribution that describes the processes of the narrative’s diffusion across media and contexts, and the hermeneutical power of this dystopian universe to address the interplay of religion and politics.
The issue can be downloaded at JRFM or can be ordered in print from Schüren.