Batman and the Shadows of Modernity: A Critical Genealogy on Contemporary Hero in the Age of Nihilism

This book aims to study the Batman narrative, or Bat-narrative, from the point of view of its nodal relationship to modern narrative. To this end, it offers for the first time a new type of methodology adequate to the object, which delves both into materials scarcely studied in this context and well-known materials seen in a new light. This is a multidisciplinary work aimed at both the specialist and the global reader, bringing together comic studies, philosophical criticism, and literary criticism in a debate on the fate of our current global civilization.

Rafael Carrión Arias is professor of Philosophy and Literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). He is also a specialist in cinema and comics. He has been a visiting researcher at numerous internationally renowned research institutions (Stanford University, UCLA, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Cape Town, Moscow Lomonosov University, Taras Shevchenko Universitet Kiev, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, etc.). He has collaborated with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences on the critical edition in German of the complete works of Marx and Engels (MEGA II) and has been a research associate at the Marc-Bloch Center (CNRS/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). He has been a regular contributor to the M. Gorki Institute of International Literature of the Moscow Academy of Sciences. He has translated Nietzsche into Spanish.