Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This accessible collection of essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer defends the artistic merit of the fantasy TV show with equal parts wit and insight. Wilcox, an English professor at Gordon College, is a fan of the series and doesn't condescend to other fans or disparage what she believes is ""art, and deserves to be so studied. It is a work of literature, of language...of visual art...of music and sound."" Wilcox looks at the big-picture narrative arc and at individual episodes, finding impressive, but sometimes tenuously connected, influences at work: Joseph Campbell's momomyth, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, John Donne, Virgil and Charles Dickens. ""One of the great themes of Dickens's Bleak House,"" she writes, ""is our interconnection; and one of the great themes of Buffy is the virtue of community."" Not surprisingly, the author has no patience for critics and academics who dismiss Buffy as mere ""cult TV"" on the basis of its genre and argues that fantasy can have more emotional resonance than realism. Though not convincing as a work of genuine scholarship, Wilcox's book is a serviceable addition to the canon of Buffy.