Includes bibliographical references and index.

Spectacle. 'This is Sparta!': the reinvention of the epic in Zach Snyder's 300 / Monica Silveira Cyrino -- 'Philip never saw Babylon': 360 degree vision and the historical epic in the digital era / Kirsten Thompson -- Heroic chivalry, heroic sacrifice: 'martial arthouse' as epic cinema / Leon Hunt -- -- Bare life and sovereignty in Gladiator / Robert Burgoyne -- Center and periphery -- Rise of the rest: globalizing epic cinema / Dina Iordanova -- Signs of the times: the semiotics of time and event in Sirk's Sign of the pagan / Bettina Bildhauer -- The fall of the Roman Empire: on space and allegory / Tom Conley -- An Italianmade spectacle film dubbed in English: cultural distinctions, national cinema and the critical reception of the postwar historical epic / Mark Jancovich -- Red cliff: the Chinese-language epic and diasporic Chinese spectators / Ruby Cheung -- Remembering the nation. Passing through nightmares: Cecil B. DeMille's The plainsman and the epic discourse in New Deal America / Philip Wagner -- Epos indigenized: the New Zealand wars film from Rudall Hayward to Vincent Ward / Bruce Babington -- The family epic. Epic melodrama, or cine-maps of the global South / Bhaskar Sarkar -- Black blood: There will be blood / Anne Gselvik -- The body in the epic. The monstrous epic: deciphering Mel Gibson's The passion of the Christ / Alison Griffiths -- Reading the black body in epic cinema / Saer Ba.