OUT NOW: Wounds in the Middle Ages, ed. Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr (Ashgate, 2014)

Wounds were a potent signifier reaching across all aspects of life in Europe in the middle ages, and their representation, perception and treatment is the focus of this volume. Following a survey of the history of medical wound treatment in the middle ages, paired chapters explore key themes situating wounds within the context of religious belief, writing on medicine, status and identity, and surgical practice. The final chapter reviews the history of medieval wounding through the modern imagination.

Adopting an innovative approach to the subject, this book will appeal to all those interested in how past societies regarded health, disease and healing and will improve knowledge of not only the practice of medicine in the past, but also of the ethical, religious and cultural dimensions structuring that practice.

Contents:

Part I: Medical Overview

1. The Management of Military Wounds in the Middle Ages
Jon Clasper

Part II: Miraculous Wounds and Miraculous Healing

2. Changing Stigmata
Cordelia Warr

3. Miracle and Medicine: Conceptions of Medical Knowledge and Practice in Thirteenth-Century Miracle Accounts
Louise Elizabeth Wilson

Part III: The Broken Body and the Broken Soul

4. The Solution of Continuous Things: Wounds in Late Medieval Medicine and Surgery
Karine van 't Land

5. Medicine for the Wounded Soul
M.K.K. Yearl

Part IV: Wounds as Signifiers for Romance Man and Civil Man

6. Christ's Wounds and the Birth of Romance
Hannah Priest

7. Wounding in the High Middle Ages: Law and Practice
Jenny Benham

Part V: Wound Surgery in the Fourteenth Century

8. Medicines for Surgical Practice in Fourteenth-Century England: The Judgement Against John le Spicer
Ian Naylor

9. The Medical Crossbow from Jan Yperman to Isaak Koedijck
Maria Patijn

Part VI: The Modern Imagination

10. The Bright Side of the Knife: Dismemberment in Medieval Europe and the Modern Imagination
Lila Yawn

About the Editor: Dr Anne Kirkham is a research associate at the University of Manchester. She obtained her PhD in 2007 and has published an article on St Francis of Assisi in Revival and Resurgence in Christian History (Studies in Church History, vol. 44, 2008). Since 2008, she has taught in the department of Art History and Visual Studies and researched, with Cordelia Warr, medieval wounds and has also co-supervised medical students researching dissertations in the history of medieval medicine.

Dr Cordelia Warr is senior lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She has published on Dressing for Heaven (2010), has co-edited two books on art in Naples with Janis Elliot (The Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina, 2004, and Art and Architecture in Naples, 1266-1714, 2010), and is currently working on the representation of stigmata between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries.

For more information about the book, please visit the publishers' website.

OUT NOW: K Bannerman, The Tattooed Wolf (Hic Dragones, 2014)

A fantastic new novel, edited by yours truly...

Caufield muttered as he slouched back in his seat and crossed his hands over his belly, smirking. “You’ve got my attention, Dan; I’ll humour you. Tell me, from the very beginning, how you got into this whole bloody mess.”

Morris Caufield thought he’d seen it all...

Until the moment Dan Sullivan walked into his office. Dan needs a divorce lawyer he can trust, and he thinks Morris is the man for the job. The thing is, Dan wants Morris to represent his wife. Who tried to kill him. Twice. And as if that wasn’t enough, Dan expects Morris to buy some crazy story about werewolves...

As Dan reveals the truth about his life and his marriage, Morris listens to a captivating tale of lycanthropy, love and betrayal. It’s lunacy, he’s sure of that, but there’s something about Dan Sullivan that makes it all very easy to believe.

Praise for The Tattooed Wolf:

“[K. Bannerman] displays unusual and sometimes uncomfortable characters, and I care about them all, the significant players and the extras. If you like reading stories about intriguing people, this story doesn’t disappoint... buy this book.”
- Joe Murphy, The Dragon Page

K Bannerman lives in a tiny house surrounded by forests on Vancouver Island, Canada, where she writes short stories, novels and plays. She is the author of four novels, including the historical murder mystery Bucket of Blood. Together with her partner-in-crime, Shawn Pigott, they run Fox&Bee Studio, where they have written, produced and directed over 100 short films.

For more information, please visit the publisher's website.

OUT NOW: Hannah Priest (ed.), The Female of the Species: Cultural Constructions of Evil, Women and the Feminine (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013)

Blurb:

From Alien Queens to prostitutes, 'phallic' mothers to child murderers, evil women proliferate across cultural productions that span millennia. This collections explores the perennial question of 'evil' and its relationship to women and femininity. Taking as their starting points material as diverse as Greek mythology, nineteenth-century medical texts, Elizabethan drama and contemporary cartoons, and informed by various theoretical perspectives, the authors scrutinise the construction of the feminine as evil, and vice versa. Throughout these essays, recurring anxieties of female agency, reproduction and the appropriation of patriarchal power are identified and explored. As the writers reveal, these anxieties are not always situated within the anatomically or genetically 'female' (or even human) body, but rather in culturally-constructed and pervasive concepts of femininity - which is at once recognisable and abject, necessary and disavowed. These essays reveal the strategies of construction and maintenance upon which the reification of feminine evil are based.

Contents

- Introduction, by Hannah Priest

Part I: Writing the Evil Woman

- Medea's Medicine: Women and Pharmaka in Greek Mythology, by Alison Innes
- The Representation of the Evil Woman in Elizabethan Literature, by Abdulaziz Al-Mutawa
- (De)centring Women in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, by Zubaidah Mohamed Shaburdin

Part II: Reproductive Evils

- Alien Queens and Monstrous Machines: The Conflation of the Out-of-Control Female and Robotic Body, by Simon Bacon
- The Ultimate Cold War Monster: Exploring 'Mother' in the Film The Manchurian Candidate, by Kathleen Starck
- The Tainted Birth in Lovecraft's Fiction, by Cécile Cristofari

Part III: The Evil That Women Do

- Sugar and Spice, But Not Very Nice: Depictions of Evil Little Girls in Cartoons and Comics, by Jacquelyn Bent, Helen Gavin and Theresa Porter
- A Wellspring of Contamination: The Transgressive Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse, by J. Shoshanna Ehrlich
- Myra: Portrait of a Portrait, by Shelley Campbell

For more information, please visit the publisher's website.

OUT NOW: Undead Memory: Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture (Peter Lang)

Edited by Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk
Foreword by Sir Christopher Frayling

Vampires have never been as popular in Western culture as they are now: Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and their fans have secured the vampire’s place in contemporary culture. Yet the role vampires play in how we remember our pasts and configure our futures has yet to be explored. The present volume fills this gap, addressing the many ways in which vampire narratives have been used to describe the tensions between memory and identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The first part of the volume considers the use of the vampire to deal with rapid cultural change, both to remember the past and to imagine possible futures. The second part examines vampire narratives as external cultural archives, a memory library allowing us to reference the past and understand how this underpins our present. Finally, the collection explores how the undead comes to embody memorial practice itself: an autonomous entity that gives form to traumatic, feminist, postcolonial and oral traditions and reveals the resilience of minority memory.

Ranging from actual reports of vampire activity to literary and cinematic interpretations of the blood-drinking revenant, this timely study investigates the ways in which the 'undead memory' of the vampire throughout Western culture has helped us to remember more clearly who we were, who we are, and who we will/may become.

Contents:

- Introduction - Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk

Part I: Death and Becoming: How the Human Past Becomes the Vampire Future

- Memento (non)mori: Memory, Discourse and Transmission during the Eighteenth-Century Vampire Epidemic and After - Leo Ruickbie

- Vampire Narratives as Juggling with Romanian History: Dan Simmons's Children of the Night and Elizaeth Kostova's The Historian - Marius Crişan

- André Gide, Nosferatu and the Hydraulics of Youth and Age - Naomi Segal

- Constitutional Amnesia and Future Memory: Science Fiction's Posthuman Vampire - Hadas Elber-Aviram

Part II: Vampiric Memorials: Place, Space and Objects of Undead Memory

- Archives of Horror: Carriers of Memory in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Katharina Rein

- Vampire Echoes and Cannibal Rituals: Undead Memory, Monstrosity and Genre in J.M. Grau's We Are What We Are - Enrique Ajuria Ibarra

- 'Old things, fine things': Of Vampires, Antique Dealers and Timelessness - Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

Part III: Memory Never Dies: Vampires as Human Memory and Trauma

- Pack versus Coven: Guardianship of Tribal Memory in Vampire versus Werewolf Narratives - Hannah Priest

- Death and the City: Repressed Memory and Unconscious Anxiety in Michael Almereyda's Nadja - Angela Tumini

- The Inescapable Moment: The Vampire as Individual and Collective Trauma in Let Me In by Matt Reeves - Simon Bacon

For more information about the book, please see the publisher's website.

OUT NOW: Blood and Water by Beth Daley (Hic Dragones, 2013)

Out now from Hic Dragones, the debut novel by Beth Daley: Blood and Water

Watch the trailer here:



Dora lives by the sea. Dora has always lived by the sea. But she won’t go into the water.

The last time Dora swam in the sea was the day of her mother’s funeral, the day she saw the mermaid. Now she’s an adult, a respectable married woman, and her little sister Lucie has come home from university with a horrible secret. Dora’s safe and dry life begins to fray, as she is torn between protecting her baby sister and facing up to a truth she has always known but never admitted. And the sea keeps calling her, reminding her of what she saw beneath the waves all those years ago… of what will be waiting for her if she dives in again.

Praise for Blood and Water:

A talented new author with a feel for details and how to make them count. Daley’s writing is a cumulation of neat touches that grab hold of you, persuade you to care, and drag you deep into a debut novel soaked in menace. Toby Stone

For more information, or to order a copy, please visit the publishers' website. Also available on Amazon.

OUT NOW: The Gothic World (Routledge, 2013)

Edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend

The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at:

• Gothic Histories
• Gothic Spaces
• Gothic Readers and Writers
• Gothic Spectacle
• Contemporary Impulses

The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.

Contents:

• Introduction, Dale Townshend

Part I: Gothic Histories
• The Politics of Gothic Historiography, 1660-1800, Sean Silver
• Gothic Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century, Rosemary Sweet
• Gothic and the New American Republic, 1770-1800, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
• Gothic and the Celtic Fringe, 1750-1830, James Kelly
• British Gothic Nationhood, 1760-1830, Justin D. Edwards
• Gothic Colonies, 1850-1920, Roger Luckhurst
• History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions, Jerrold E. Hogle

Part II: Gothic Spaces

• Gothic and the Architectural Imagination, 1740-1840, Nicole Reynolds
• Gothic Geography, 1760-1830, Benjamin A. Brabon
• Gothic and the Victorian Home, Tamara Wagner
• American Gothic and the Environment, 1800-present, Matthew Wynn Sivils
• Gothic Cities and Suburbs, 1880-present, Sara Wilson
• Gothic in Cyberspace, Bryan Alexander

Part III: Gothic Readers and Writers
• Gothic and the Publishing World, 1780-1820, Anthony Mandal
• Gothic and the History of Reading, 1764-1830, Katie Halsey
• Gothic Adaptation, 1764-1830, Diane Long Hoeveler
• Gothic Romance, 1760-1830, Sue Chaplin
• Gothic Poetry, 1700-1900, David Punter
• Gothic Translation: France, 1760-1830, Angela Wright
• Gothic Translation: Germany, 1760-1830, Barry Murnane
• Gothic and the Child Reader, 1764-1850, M.O. Grenby
• Gothic and the Child Reader, 1850-present, Chloe Buckley
• Gothic Sensations, 1850-1880, Franz J. Potter
• Young Adults and the Contemporary Gothic, Hannah Priest
• The Earliest Parodies of Gothic Literature, Douglass H. Thomson
• Figuring the Author in Modern Gothic Writing, Neil McRobert
• Gothic and the Question of Theory, 1900-present, Scott Brewster

Part IV: Gothic Spectacle
• Gothic and Eighteenth-Century Visual Art, Martin Myrone
• Gothic Visuality in the Nineteenth Century, Elizabeth McCarthy
• Gothic Theater, 1765-present, Diego Saglia
• Ghosts, Monsters and Spirits, 1840-1900, Alexandra Warwick
• Gothic Horror Film from The Haunted Castle (1896) to Psycho (1960), James Morgart
• Gothic Horror Film, 1960-present, Xavier Aldana Reyes
• Southeast Asian Gothic Cinema, Colette Balmain
• Defining a Gothic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Visual Art, Gilda Williams

Part V: Contemporary Impulses
• Sonic Gothic, Isabella van Elferen
• Gothic Lifestyle, Catherine Spooner
• Gothic and Survival Horror Videogames, Ewan Kirkland
• Rewriting the Canon in Contemporary Gothic, Joanne Watkiss
• Gothic Tourism, Emma McEvoy
• Gothic on the Small Screen, Brigid Cherry
• Post-Millennial Monsters: Monstrosity-No-More, Fred Botting

For more information, please visit the publishers' website.

OUT NOW: Impossible Spaces (Hic Dragones, 2013)

edited by Hannah Kate

Blurb:

It doesn’t have to be this way…

Sometimes the rules can change. Sometimes things aren’t how they appear. Sometimes you can just slip through the cracks and end up… somewhere else. What else is there? Is there somewhere else, right beside you, if you could only reach out and touch it? Or is it waiting to reach out and touch you?

Don’t trust what you see. Don’t trust what you hear. Don’t trust what you remember. It isn’t what you think.

A new collection of twenty-one dark, unsettling and weird short stories that explore the spaces at the edge of possibility.

For more information about the book, please visit the publisher's website.

Contents:

Introduction by Hannah Kate
The Carrier by Daisy Black
Trading Flesh by Simon Bestwick
Etherotopia by Christos Callow Jr.
Mistfall by Jeanette Greaves
The Return of the Curse by Arpa Mukhopadhyay
I'd Lock it with a Zipper by Rachel Yelding
Nepenthes by Keris McDonald
Mindswitch by Chris Galvin Nguyen
Skin Laura Brown
Sharpened Senses by Richard Freeman
The Place of Revelation by Ramsey Campbell
Great Rates, Central Location by Hannah Kate
The Meat House by Maree Kimberley
The Voice Withn by Steven K. Beattie
Shadow by Margrét Helgadóttir
Unfamiliar by Almira Holmes
The Hostel by Nancy Schumann
New Town by Jessica George
Multiplicity by Douglas Thompson
Bruises by Tej Turner
Looking for Wildgoose Lodge by Tracy Fahey

Trailer:

OUT NOW: Free to Write: Prison Voices Past and Present (Headland)

Foreword by Erwin James
Edited by Gareth Creer, Hannah Priest and Tamsin Spargo

Blurb:

"The Free to Write Project has demonstrated that the long, rich and resilient tradition of writing in prison is as vital and vibrant as ever. The poems and narratives withing these pages tell us of lives that are valuable and resilient." - Erwin James

Free to Write introduces new writing by prisoners as well as true stories of how writing helped men and women of the past imagine a better future after prison.

It is the outcome of a practical research project run by Liverpool John Moores University's Centre for Writing and Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History.

Essays by Tamsin Spargo, Helen Rogers, Hannah Priest and Adam Creed.

Poetry and prose from HMP Shrewsbury, HMP Frankland, HMP Styal, HMP Lancaster Farms and HMP Greenock.

Contents:

Editors’ Note by Gareth Creer, Hannah Priest and Tamsin Spargo

Foreword by Erwin James

Free to Learn? Reading and Writing in the Early Nineteenth-Century Prison by Helen Rogers

Mountain Bughouse 216: One Prisoner's Writing as Protest and Escape by Tamsin Spargo

Free to Write: Prison Voices by Hannah Priest

Prison Voices: Present (Poetry and prose from HMP Shrewsbury, HMP Frankland, HMP Styal, HMP Lancaster Farms and HMP Greenock with commentary by Adam Creed)

For more information about the book, please contact the publisher.

OUT NOW: Noir Carnival (Fox Spirit Books)

Edited by K.A. Laity

Blurb: Carnival: whether you picture it as a traveling fair in the back roads of America or the hedonistic nights of the pre-Lenten festival where masks hide faces while the skin glories in its revelation. It's about spectacle, artificiality and the things we hide behind the greasepaint or the tent flap.

Let these writers lead you on a journey into that heart of blackened darkness and show you what's behind the glitz.

Underneath, we're all freaks after all...

Contents:

Caravan: A Preamble by K.A. Laity
Family Blessings by Jan Kozlowski
In the Mouth of the Beast by Li Huijia
Idle Hands by Hannah Kate
The Things We Leave Behind by Christopher L. Irvin
She's My Witch by Paul D. Brazill
The Mermaid Illusion by Carol Borden
Natural Flavoring by Rebecca Snow
Madam Mafoutee's Bad Glass Eye by Chloe Yates
Buffalo Brendan and the Big Top Ballot by Allan Watson
Carne Levare by Emma Teichmann
Leave No Trace by A.J. Sikes
Fair by Robin Wyatt Dunn
Things Happen Here After Dark by Sheri White
Mister Know It All by Richard Godwin
Trapped by Joan De La Haye
The Price of Admission by Neal F. Litherland
Take Your Chances by Michael S. Chong
Mooncalf by Katie Young
The Teeth Behind the Beard by James Bennett

For more information, please visit the Fox Spirit website.

OUT NOW: The Modern Vampire and Human Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Edited by Deborah Mutch

Blurb: Why are we surrounded by vampires in the twenty-first century? From the global phenomena of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse, through films such as Underworld and Blade, television series such as the The Vampire Diaries and Being Human, to video games like Bloodrayne and Legacy of Kain, the reader, viewer and player has never had so many vampires to choose from. This collection considers the importance of the current flurry of vampires for our sense of human identity. Vampires have long been read as bodies through which our sense of ourselves has been reflected back to us. These essays offer readings of the modern vampire as a complex consideration of our modern human selves. Now that we no longer see the vampire as essentially evil, what does that say about us.

Editor: Deborah Mutch is a senior lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She has recently become interested in the modern Gothic and has published an article on the Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse series in Critical Survey. She has also published widely on fin-de-siecle British socialist fiction.

Contents:

1. Blood, Bodies, Books: Kim Newman and the Vampire as Cultural Text by Keith Scott
2. Buffy vs. Bella: Gender, Relationships and the Modern Vampire by Bethan Jones
3. 'Hell! Was I Becoming a Vampyre Slut?': Sex, Sexuality and Morality in Young Adult Vampire Fiction by Hannah Priest
4. Consuming Clothes and Dressing Desire in the Twilight Series by Sarah Heaton
5. Whiteness, Vampires and Humanity in Contemporary Film and Television by Ewan Kirkland
6. The Vampiric Diaspora: The Complications of Victimhood and Post-memory as Configured in the Jewish Migrant Vampire by Simon Bacon
7. Vampires and Gentiles: Jews, Mormons and Embracing the Other by Clare Reed
8. Transcending the Massacre: Vampire Mormons in the Twilight Series by Yael Maurer
9. The Gothic Louisiana of Charlaine Harris and Anne Rice by Victoria Amador
10. Matt Haig's The Radleys: Vampires for the Neoliberal Age by Deborah Mutch

OUT NOW: Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (Punctum Books, 2012)

Edited by Myra Seaman, Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro

A new title from open-access publisher, Punctum Books, Dark Chaucer: An Assortment is now available in both print and digital formats. The open-access eBook is available for free, and the paperback edition is priced at $15 - both are available direct from the publishers. If you download the eBook, please also consider making a donation to support the publishers in fostering and developing new and innovative scholarship.

About the book:

Although widely beloved for his playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer's poetry is also shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others... an assortment, if you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover in the dark.

Contents:

'and here we are as on a darkling plain' - Gary J. Shipley
'Dark Whiteness: Benjamin Brawley and Chaucer' - Candace Barrington
'Saturn's Darkness' - Brantley Bryant and Alia
'A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter' - Ruth Evans
'Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology' - Gaelan Gilbert
'Black Gold: The Former (and Future) Age' - Leigh Harrison
'Half Dead: Parsing Cecelia' - Nicola Masciandaro
'In the Event of the Franklin's Tale' - J. Allan Mitchell
'Black as the Crow' - Travis Neal and Andrew Richmond
'Unravelling Constance' - Hannah Priest
'L'O de V: A Palimpsest' - Lisa Schamess
'Disconsolate Art' - Myra Seaman
'Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye' - Karl Steel
'The Physician's Tale as Hagioclasm' - Elaine Treharne
'The Light Has Lifted: Trickster Pandare' - Bob Valasek
'Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies' - Lisa Weston
'The Dark is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir Thopas' - Thomas White

About the publisher:

Punctum Books is an open-access and print-on-demand independent publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. For more information, please visit the Punctum Books website.

OUT NOW: Feminism and Psychology, 22:4 (Nov 2012)

Table of Contents

Articles

Julie L Nagoshi, Stephan/ie Brzuzy, and Heather K Terrell
Deconstructing the complex perceptions of gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation among transgender individuals

Ursula Lau and Garth Stevens
Textual transformations of subjectivity in men’s talk of gender-based violence

Heather AK Jacques and H Lorraine Radtke
Constrained by choice: Young women negotiate the discourses of marriage and motherhood

Alexandra Gibson and Catriona Macleod
(Dis)allowances of lesbians’ sexual identities: Lesbian identity construction in racialised, classed, familial, and institutional spaces

Making a difference

Breanne Fahs
Breaking body hair boundaries: Classroom exercises for challenging social constructions of the body and sexuality

Brief reports

Katie M Edwards, Christina M Dardis, and Christine A Gidycz
Women’s disclosure of dating violence: A mixed methodological study

Daniela Petrassi
‘For me, the children come first’: A discursive psychological analysis of how mothers construct fathers’ roles in childrearing and childcare

Observation and commentaries

Virginia Braun
Petting a snake? Reflections on feminist critique, media engagement and ‘making a difference’

Petra Boynton
Getting the press we deserve: Opportunities and challenges for innovative media practice

Book reviews

Breanne Fahs
Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson, Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships, and Power

Elin Weiss
Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance, Polity Press: Cambridge

Wendy Hollway
Alison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Matt Murdoch and Jenna MacKay
Andrew McKinlay and Chris McVittie, Identities in Context: Individuals and Discourse in Action

Hannah Priest
Jacqueline Rose, The Jacqueline Rose Reader, ed. Justin Clemens and Ben Naparstek

Gemma Anne Yarwood
Rachel Thomson, Mary Jane Kehily, Lucy Hadfield and Sue Sharpe, Making Modern Mothers

Maria Papadima
Barbara Almond, The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood

Jennifer M Haley
Kim Q Hall (ed.), Feminist Disability Studies

Catriona Macleod
A Rutherford, R Capdevila, V Undurti and I Palmary (eds), Handbook of International Feminisms: Perspectives on Psychology, Women, Culture and Rights

Notices

Thank you to our reviewers

Call for papers

Call for papers

For more information, please visit the journal's website.

OUT NOW: Variant Spelling Kindle Edition

And also at long last... my debut poetry collection is now available on Kindle (UK and US)

I sigh, but it’s not from frustration
But because I think that you’ve forgotten
that sometimes punctuation
just reminds us when to breathe.

Hannah Kate is a North Manchester-based poet, author and editor. Her work has appeared in a number of local and national magazines, as well as an anthology published by Crocus Books. She is a freelance teacher of English, Maths and Creative Writing, and reviews genre fiction and academic writing for a number of organizations. This is her first full-length collection of poetry.

“Delicate and strong, Hannah’s words beautifully communicate the impossibilities of communication. She explores the subtexts of what we do with our language in ways that will resonate with anyone who finds their own feelings and intents too big for semi colons.”
Dominic Berry, Poet

“The poems in Variant Spelling evoke a North in revolt; a place of abandoned dyeworks, soot, winter, granite and grease. Through the ‘shifting vowels’ of the title poem they celebrate a world at odds with the imposed culture of the South. It is at its most rebellious in Praise God, where Hannah ‘praises the God of the North’, a place where the ‘air hangs with burning witches’.”
Rosie Lugosi, Poet and Performer

For more information, please visit the Hic Dragones website.

To order, visit Amazon UK or Amazon US.

OUT NOW: Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous, Vol. 1, No. 2 (September 2011)

Contents:

Freeing Woman from Truth and the Unknown: Using Kahlo and Irigaray to Liberate Woman from Haggard's She - Cameron Ellis

The Monstrification of the Monster: How Ceauşescu Became the Red Vampire - Peter Mario Kreuter

Monster as Victim, Victim as Monster: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Redemptive Suffering and the 'Undead' - Sarah Malik Bell

Digging Our Own Grave: Monster Trucks and America - Callie Clare

Monstrous Literature: The Case of Dacre Stoker's Dracula the Undead - Hannah Priest

Film Reviews:

The Dreamers of Dreams: Inception - Sarah Juliet Lauro

The Status is Not Quo: Reflections on Villains as Heroes in Despicable Me (2010), Megamind (2010) and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (2008) - Harvey O'Brien

Thirst - Colette Balmain

Book Reviews:

Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast - Lance Eaton

Monsters or Martyrs? A Review of Blood That Cries Out From the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism - John Donovan

Umwege in die Vergangenheit: Star Trek und die griechisch-römische Antike [Detours to the Past: Star Trek and the Greek-Roman Antiquity] - Peter Mario Kreuter

The Victorians and Old Age - C. Riley Augé

In a Glass Darkly - Lee Baxter

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Lee Baxter

Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film - Colette Balmain

For more information, or for subscriptions, please click here.



OUT NOW: Variant Spelling by Hannah Kate

My debut poetry collection is now available from Hic Dragones and Amazon, priced £6.99.

Here's what the publisher has to say about me:

Hannah Kate is a North Manchester-based poet, author and editor. Her work has appeared in a number of local and national magazines, as well as an anthology published by Crocus Books. She is a freelance teacher of English, Maths and Creative Writing, and reviews genre fiction and academic writing for a number of organizations. This is her first full-length collection of poetry.

And here's what the blurbs say:

“Delicate and strong, Hannah’s words beautifully communicate the impossibilities of communication. She explores the subtexts of what we do with our language in ways that will resonate with anyone who finds their own feelings and intents too big for semi colons.” Dominic Berry, Poet

“The poems in Variant Spelling evoke a North in revolt; a place of abandoned dyeworks, soot, winter, granite and grease. Through the ‘shifting vowels’ of the title poem they celebrate a world at odds with the imposed culture of the South. It is at its most rebellious in Praise God, where Hannah ‘praises the God of the North’, a place where the ‘air hangs with burning witches’.” Rosie Lugosi, Poet and Performer

I've blogged about the collection on my creative blog, and there's a sample poem up there. But here's another one - hope you enjoy!

Sir Ywain

On the wood on the bracket
of a cathedral seat,
there’s a picture of a knight
dressed for battle.

On second thoughts

he looks as if he’s already been fighting
for a long, long time.
He looks like he’s wounded his foe.

But the knight isn’t going to win this one,
because a portcullis has fallen,
missing his body
but carving his horse in half.

Poor knight.

Without a horse he won’t be able to fight.
Without a fight he won’t be able to win.
It looks like
he’s going to lose this battle.

But then again

the picture of the knight
on the wood on the bracket
of a cathedral seat
is just a picture of a man
sitting on half a horse.

Variant Spelling is available now, from Hic Dragones.