Showing posts with label Hannah Priest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hannah Priest. Show all posts

Monday 26 February 2018

OUT NOW: Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction, edited by Bernice M. Murphy and Stephen Matterson (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)

Contains a chapter by me on Stephenie Meyer's fiction (including The Host and the anniversary edition of Twilight)...


Blurb:
This groundbreaking collection captures the state of popular fiction in present day. It features twenty new essays on key authors associated with a wide range of genres and sub-genres, providing chapter-length discussions of major post-2000 works of contemporary popular fiction. The lively, accessible and academically rigorous essays presented here cover a wider range of established popular fiction genres such as fantasy, horror and the romance, as well as more niche areas such as Domestic Noir, Steampunk, the New Weird, Nordic Noir and Zombie Lit. The collection will primarily appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students but general readers may also find the focus on many of today’s most prominent and influential authors to be of interest.

Contents:
- Introduction: ‘Changing the story’: Popular Fiction Today
Bernice M. Murphy and Stephen Matterson

- Larry McMurtry’s Vanishing Breeds
Stephen Matterson

- ‘Time to Open the Door’: Stephen King’s Legacy
Rebecca Janicker

- Terry Pratchett: Mostly Human
Jim Shanahan

- From Westeros to HBO: George R.R. Martin and the Mainstreaming of Fantasy
Gerard Hynes

- Nora Roberts: The Power of Love
Jarlath Killeen

- The King of Stories: Neil Gaiman’s Twenty-first Century Fiction
Tara Prescott

- Jo Nesbø: Murder in the Folkhemmet
Clare Clarke

- ‘It’s a trap! Don’t turn the page.’ Metafiction and the Multiverse in the Comics of Grant Morrison
Kate Roddy

- Panoptic and Synoptic Surveillance in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Series
Keith O’Sullivan

- E.L. James and the Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomenon
Dara Downey

- Fact, Fiction, Fabrication: The Popular Appeal of Dan Brown’s Global Bestsellers
Ian Kinane

- ‘I Need to Disillusion You’: J.K. Rowling and Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Fantasy

Kate Harvey
- Jodi Picoult: Good Grief
Clare Hayes-Brady

- ‘We Will Have a Happy Marriage If It Kills Him’: Gillian Flynn and the Rise of Domestic Noir
Bernice M. Murphy

- ‘The Bastard Zone’: China Miéville, Perdido Street Station and the New Weird
Kirsten Tranter

- Sparkly Vampires and Shimmering Aliens: The Paranormal Romance of Stephanie Meyer
Hannah Priest

- ‘We needed to get a lot of white collars dirty’: The Apocalypse as Opportunity in Max Brooks’ World War Z
Bernice M. Murphy

- Genre and Uncertainty in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad Mysteries
Brian Cliff
- ‘You Get What You Ask For’: Hugh Howey, SF, and Authorial Agency
Stephen Kenneally

- Cherie Priest: At the Intersection of History and Technology
Catherine Siemann

For more information, or to buy a copy, please see the publisher's website.

Friday 6 October 2017

OUT NOW: TransGothic in Literature and Culture, ed. Jolene Zigarovich (Routledge, 2017)

A new academic edited collection on the Gothic, with a chapter from me on Horace Walpole, Twilight, Black Mirror, 17th-century politics and the meaning of romance...

This book contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which Gothic literature, visual media, and other cultural forms explicitly engage gender, sexuality, form, and genre. The collection is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of subject areas and methodologies. It is concerned with several questions, including: How can we discuss Gothic as a genre that crosses over boundaries constructed by a culture to define and contain gender and sexuality? How do transgender bodies specifically mark or disrupt this boundary crossing? In what ways does the Gothic open up a plural narrative space for transgenre explorations, encounters, and experimentation? With this, the volume’s chapters explore expected categories such as transgenders, transbodies, and transembodiments, but also broader concepts that move through and beyond the limits of gender identity and sexuality, such as transhistories, transpolitics, transmodalities, and transgenres. Illuminating such areas as the appropriation of the trans body in Gothic literature and film, the function of trans rhetorics in memoir, textual markers of transgenderism, and the Gothic’s transgeneric qualities, the chapters offer innovative, but not limited, ways to interpret the Gothic. In addition, the book intersects with but also troubles non-trans feminist and queer readings of the Gothic. Together, these diverse approaches engage the Gothic as a definitively trans subject, and offer new and exciting connections and insights into Gothic, Media, Film, Narrative, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Contents

- Foreword, Susan Stryker
- Introduction: 'Transing the Gothic', Jolene Zigarovich
- Chapter 1: 'Beyond Queer Gothic: Charting the Gothic History of the Trans Subject in Beckford, Lewis, Byron', Nowell Marshall
- Chapter 2: 'Go to Hell: William Beckford’s Skewed Heaven and Hell', Jeremy Chow
- Chapter 3: 'Transgothic Desire in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya', Jolene Zigarovich
- Chapter 4: 'That Dreadful Thing That Looked Like A Beautiful Girl: Trans Anxiety/Trans Possibility in Three Late Victorian Werewolf Tales', Ardel Haefele-Thomas
- Chapter 5: 'Monster Trans: Diffracting Affect, Reading Rage', Harlan Weaver
- Chapter 6: 'More Than Skin Deep: Aliens, Fembots, and Trans-Monstrosities in Techno-Gothic Space', April Miller
- Chapter 7: 'Gothic Gender in Skin Suits, or The (Transgender) Skin I Live In', Anson Koch-Rein
- Chapter 8: 'The Media of Madness: Gothic transmedia and the Cthulhu mythos', Jason Whittaker
- Chapter 9: 'Black Weddings and Black Mirrors: Gothic as Transgeneric Mode', Hannah Priest
- Chapter 10: 'The State of Play: Transgressive Caricature and Transnational Enlightenment', Ian McCormick

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

OUT NOW: Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, ed. Robert McKay and John Miller (University of Wales Press, 2017)

A new academic edited collection on werewolves from University of Wales Press, featuring a chapter by me on bad dads, painful transformations and the embarrassment of morning-after nudity...

Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic.

This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.

Contents

- Introduction, Robert McKay and John Miller
- Like Father Like Son: Wolf-Men, Paternity and the Male Gothic, Hannah Priest
- Wicked Wolf-Women and Shaggy Suffragettes: Lycanthropic Femme Fatales in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras, Jazmina Cininas
- Postcolonial Vanishings: Wolves, American Indians, and Contemporary Werewolves, Michelle Nicole Boyer
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ubernatural: The Other(ed) Werewolf in Twilight, Roman Bartosch and Celestine Caruso
- ‘Becoming woman’/Becoming Wolf: Girl Power and the Monstrous Feminine in the Ginger Snaps Trilogy, Batia Boe Stolar
- ‘Something that is either werewolf or vampire’: Interrogating the Lupine Nature of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Kaja Franck
- Saki, Nietzsche and the Superwolf, John Miller
- A Vegetarian Diet for the Were-wolf Hunger of Capital: Leftist and Pro-animal Thought in Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris, Robert McKay
- Everybody Eats Somebody: Angela Carter’s Wolfish Ecology, Margot Young
- ‘But by Blood No Wolf Am I’: Language and Agency, Instinct and Essence – Transcending Antinomies in Maggie Steifvater’s Shiver Trilogy, Bill Hughes
- Transforming the Big Bad Wolf: Redefining the Werewolf through Grimm and Fables, Matthew Lerberg

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

Monday 25 September 2017

Gothic to Goth: a weekend course in London

Come and take a trip to the dark side…



This October, I’ll be running Gothic to Goth, a weekend course at the V&A in London. With lectures over two days, the course will cover everything from Bram Stoker to Robert Smith… from Sweeney Todd to Edward Cullen… from Strawberry Hill to Silent Hill.

Gothic to Goth will be on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd October, 11-4pm. I’ll be giving lectures on penny dreadfuls, Gothic romance and horror literature/film, and there’ll be some other wonderful lecturers giving talks on Gothic architecture, Dracula, Goth music and Alexander McQueen.

You can register for the course via the V&A website (info about course fees can also be found here), but here’s a little taste of what the programme will look like…

Saturday 21st October


Session 1. The Gothic Past
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 2. Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill
Lecturer: tbc
Session 3. Penny Dreadfuls and Victorian Pulp Fiction
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 4. Enter Dracula
Lecturer: Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, MMU

Sunday 22nd October


Session 1. Goodbye Romance, Hello Horror
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest
Session 2. Dark, Punk and Goth
Lecturer: Professor Isabella van Elferen, Kingston University
Session 3. Gothic Style and Alexander McQueen
Lecturer: Claire Wilcox, V&A
Session 4. The Gothic Future
Lecturer: Dr Hannah Priest

Weekend courses at the V&A give you the opportunity to spend a couple of days immersing yourself in a topic, learning from experts, and enjoying the splendour of the V&A building.

To find out more about Gothic to Goth, or to register for the course, please click here for details.

Thursday 6 July 2017

OUT NOW: She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Paperback Edition)

My edited collection She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves is now available in paperback from Manchester University Press! Essays on lady-lycanthropes in folklore, history, witchcraft trials, literature, cinema, television and gaming, by Merili Metsvahi, Rolf Schulte, Jay Cate, Jazmina Cininas, Shannon Scott, Carys Crossen, Willem de Blécourt, Peter Hutchings, Barbara Creed, Laura Wilson, and me!


She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves
Edited by Hannah Priest
Price: £14.99


She-Wolf explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. The book includes contributors from various disciplines, and offers a cross-period, interdisciplinary exploration of a perennially popular cultural production. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day with chapters on folklore, history, witch trials, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and gaming. Considering issues such as religious and social contexts, colonialism, constructions of racial and gendered identities, corporeality and subjectivity - as well as female body hair, sexuality and violence - She-wolf reveals the varied ways in which the female werewolf is a manifestation of complex cultural anxieties, as well as a site of continued fascination.

Contents:

- Introduction: A History of Female Werewolves - Hannah Priest

- Estonian Werewolf Legends Collected from the Island of Saaremaa - Merili Metsvahi

- 'She transformed into a werewolf, devouring and killing two children': Trials of She-Werewolves in Early Modern French Burgundy - Rolf Schulte

- Participatory Lycanthropy: Female Werewolves in Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Jay Cate

- Fur Girls and Wolf Women: Fur, Hair and Subversive Female Lycanthropy - Jazmina Cininas

- Female Werewolf as Monstrous Other in Honoré Beaugrand's 'The Werewolves' - Shannon Scott

- 'The complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul': Conflict Between Societal Expectations and Individual Desires in Clemence Housman's 'The Werewolf' and Rosamund Marriott Watson's 'A Ballad of the Were-wolf' - Carys Crossen

- I was a Teenage She-Wolf: Boobs, Blood and Sacrifice - Hannah Priest

- The Case of the Cut Off Hand: Angela Carter's Werewolves in Historical Perspective - Willem de Blécourt

- The She-Wolves of Horror Cinema - Peter Hutchings

- Ginger Snaps: The Monstrous Feminine as Femme Animale - Barbara Creed

- Dans Ma Peau: Shape-shifting and Subjectivity - Laura Wilson

For more information, or to buy a copy, please visit the publisher's website.

Wednesday 16 March 2016

My Social Media



I've been told this week that all my social media aliases are a bit difficult to keep track of. (Tell me about it.) So here's a little list of all my social media profiles and what they do.

Personal/Professional

For my academic, personal, political and personal-is-politcal posts, I have this blog, a Twitter account and an Academia.edu page. I don't have a personal Facebook profile, so if you think you've found me on there... it's just an illusion.

My husband Rob and I have an occasionally-updated travel blog called About Our Isles, and a (very quiet) Twitter account to go with it.

Creative

I write creatively as Hannah Kate, and I have a blog and Twitter devoted to my creative stuff.

Radio

My radio show, Hannah's Bookshelf, is on North Manchester FM on Saturdays. I blog about it here and tweet about it from my Hannah Kate Twitter. The show has a Facebook page, and a Mixcloud page.

Medieval Studies

I'm treasurer and webmaster for the Manchester Medieval Society, and run the society's blog and Twitter account.

Publishing

Rob and I run Hic Dragones, a dark fiction micropress. We have a website and an oft-neglected Tumblr. Hic Dragones is also on Facebook and Twitter.

We also publish a line of digitized Victorian penny dreadfuls, and these can be found on the Hic Dragones website. DigiDreadfuls has its own Facebook page and Twitter account.

Freelance

For all our freelance work (editing, indexing, web design and eBook conversion), we call ourselves Creative Cats and have a website, blog, Facebook and Twitter.

Avon

If you're in Manchester and would like to buy Avon cosmetics from me, you can find my online store here.

Community

I'm currently running the Twitter accounts for a couple of local community projects - the Friends of Crumpsall Park and the (new) Keep Crumpsall Clean campaign.

And that's it. If you find any other accounts that you think might be me, do let me know. Every so often one of my aliases goes feral and I have to track it down.

Thursday 18 June 2015

An update from me...

Life has been a bit hectic for the last few months, so I've fallen behind a bit with blogging and tweeting. As I'm wrapping up a couple of big pieces of work and then working at Glastonbury with Oxfam Stewards for a week, normal service isn't going to be resumed until July. In the meantime, here are some updates on the things I would've tweeted and blogged about more if I'd had the chance. Sorry if this starts to sound like a Round Robin newsletter, but I guess you can just pretend it's the festive season and I've overshared in a Christmas card.

Work

I've finished teaching at Manchester Met (for now?) after a couple of great terms - my first time working at MMU and my first job purely teaching film (rather than literature and film). I'm still working at the University of Manchester, in Art History and Visual Studies, on a digitization project involving the Early Printed Medical Collection at the John Rylands Library. This has turned out to be a really fascinating project, and I'm looking forward to sharing the final product when it's done in the next few months. I'm also still an Honorary Research Associate at Swansea Uni, so the life of an itinerant academic continues. And, of course, it's that time of year when I do a bit of work for one of the GCSE exam boards. But I can't say much about that because of strict confidentiality - but I'm sure you can guess what's been keeping me busy for the last few weeks.

Publications

The big thing for me this year has been the publication of my edited collection She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Manchester University Press). Way back in 2010, I started this blog as a conference website for the She-Wolf conference (held at the University of Manchester), which I organized with Carys Crossen. The book was a few years in development, but this allowed me to include a lot of really interesting female werewolves that I wouldn't have been able to in 2010 (would you believe, Nina hadn't even been scratched when I first pitched the book to MUP). Since the conference, all the postgrad contributors have received their doctorates, including my co-organizer Carys Crossen (whose PhD was on the post-1800 literary werewolf) and the very talented Jazmina Cininas (an Australian artist whose practice-based doctorate was entitled The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame and is definitely worth checking out). Following the publication of She-Wolf, I was asked to contribute a short article to History Today (published earlier this month), which was great because I got to write about a 1591 broadsheet ('The She-Wolves of Jülich') that I wasn't able to include in the book.

On the creative side, it's also been quite a lycanthropic year. Despite saying that I wasn't going to write another werewolf story for a while, I was lured back to the hairy side by the editors of European Monsters (Margrét Helgadóttir and Jo Thomas) last year. My story 'Nimby' was included in the book, and it's a humorous (but, according to one reviewer, venomous) story set in Heaton Park an unnamed large municipal park in an unnamed northern city and featuring a really horrible protagonist.

My plans for the rest of this year include another book chapter (about werewolves) and another short creative piece (about werewolves), working on 3 edited collections (only a little bit about werewolves) and finally making some progress with 2 monographs (sort of about werewolves). If I ever earn enough money to pay the bills and stop working 15-hour days, I'm also planning to actually do something about my novel (100% not about werewolves).

Hic Dragones

Rob and I are still working away at Hic Dragones - our most recent publication was Psychic Spiders!, Toby Stone's awesome follow-up to Aimee and the Bear. We were so happy to be able to publish Toby's second novel, and we love working with him. Although we've been concentrating on a couple of other projects for the past few months, once I'm back from Glastonbury we'll be announcing two new open-call anthologies and two conferences, as well as a couple of cool competitions. If you don't already, follow Hic Dragones on Twitter or like us on Facebook for updates. And, in case you haven't already seen it, all our paperbacks are now available with free UK shipping.

Digital Periodicals

You probably already know this, but Digital Periodicals is the Victorian wing of Hic Dragones. Since last June, we've been publishing Victorian penny bloods and penny dreadfuls as serialized eBooks. All our editions are re-transcribed, edited and formatted - I estimate I've transcribed around 1.5m words of early Victorian terror since we started - and the eBook conversions we do mean that, for the first time, these texts are fully searchable. So if you want to know how many times the word 'ejaculated' appears in Varney the Vampyre, we can help. We've now published complete runs of Varney the Vampyre, The String of Pearls (Sweeney Todd), Vileroy; or, the Horrors of Zindorf Castle, Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, Clement Lorimer; or, the Book with the Iron Clasps (which is BRILLIANT), Angelina; or, the Mysteries of St Mark's Abbey and (my personal favourite) The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist. George Reynolds' Mysteries of London will be coming to a close at the end of this month, and at some point when I get back, we'll be launching The Life of Richard Palmer (Dick Turpin), George Reynolds' Faust and The Mysteries of the Madhouse; or, the Annals of Bedlam. At the moment, all our full collections (every issue plus a couple of bonus stories) are just £3.99, or you can enjoy the Victorian experience and read them in serial form for £1 per 10 chapters.

Not going to say too much about it now, but one of the conferences we'll be announcing will be connected to the penny bloods/dreadfuls, and it's going to be part of an exciting new collaboration for us. Follow Digital Periodicals on Twitter or like us on Facebook for updates.


Hannah's Bookshelf

You might have seen something about this already, as I have tweeted a bit about it. Hannah's Bookshelf is my new(ish) radio show on North Manchester FM. It's a literature show, on every Saturday 4-6pm, where I talk books, writing and related stuff with my guest for the week. I've been really lucky with guests so far, who've included Toby Stone, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Andy Hickmott (from the Ancoats Dispensary Trust), Daisy Black, Nancy Schumann, Chris Monk, Bernadette Hyland, Tony Walsh, Cate Gardner, Emma Marigliano (from the Portico Library) and Mike Whalley (from Manchester's Monday Night Group). I've also done shows with my lovely husband Rob (where we talked about small press publishing), my mum (where we talked Burns Night and Scottish literature) and my brother (where we discussed RPGs and how to be a good gamesmaster). When I don't have a guest on the show, you get two hours of me musing on whatever weird and wonderful topic has caught my interest that week - so far, this has included my favourite literary dystopias and my favourite experimental fiction. Future guests lined up include Rosie Garland and Simon Bestwick, but I'm always on the lookout for others so if you're in the Manchester area and would like to come on the show, please do drop me a line. I tweet and blog about the show from my Hannah Kate accounts, so that's where you'll find up-to-date info about the show.

My favourite bit of the show so far has definitely been Apocalypse Books. This is the section of the show where I ask my guests: in the event of an apocalypse, which 3 books would you save, and why? The responses to this question have been serious, surreal, personal and pragmatic. Books have been selected for their content or their worth as an artefact, but also for their practical use in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. (One of my guests, Daisy Black, made the very sensible point that selections would actually depend on what sort of apocalypse we were facing, as I guess you'd want different reading material in the zombie apocalypse than during the Rapture.) You can see all the selections that have been made so far in The Library at the End of Days.



Creative Cats

Recently, Rob and I decided we should bring all our freelance work under one umbrella so it's easier for us to market our services. We've called that umbrella The Creative Cats, and we have a shiny new website that lists all the freelance work that we do. Rob's side of things is web design (bespoke Wordpress themes, CSS editing, eBook conversion and corrections). We also have a free Wordpress theme available - a minimalist Bootstrap theme called Bertie, which was designed with academic and creative bloggers in mind. My side is editing and research services. I've been doing more and more freelance editing recently (fiction and academic), and am also available for indexing, research assistance and fiction fact-checking. Our prices are very competitive and we're trying to avoid charging people extra for things that we think should be standard (SEO, responsive web design, 2-pass editing), because we can't be arsed trying to sell snake oil. Check out our website for more info, or follow us on Twitter - if you're interested, of course.

Tutoring

I've massively cut down the amount of private tuition I'm doing. I put myself through the PhD by tutoring 20-25 students a week, but I've now only got two pupils (one Maths/English Yr 9 and one Maths/English/Science GCSE). One of them is actually my first ever pupil; she was just 6 when I started tutoring her, and she's now nearly 16 and about to go into her final year at school - and I promised her a long time ago (like a sort of slightly Gothy Mary Poppins) that I wouldn't leave until the wind changes she finishes her GCSEs, so I guess I'm going to be doing this for a little bit longer. I'm not taking on any new pupils at the moment. In case you're curious, I interviewed my two pupils on my radio show in March, and I was really proud of how well they did (I particularly enjoyed Steph's comments on Twilight and sparkly vampires): you can listen again here.

Avon

I'm still an independent Avon rep, ably assisted by Avon Boy (or Rob, as he prefers to be known). I know a lot of people find it hard to reconcile this bit of my life with the others, but I really enjoy being my neighbourhood's Avon Lady. There's something nice and traditional about the role and I've got to know all my neighbours and their cats. Plus I get a good discount on the insane amount of black eyeliner I get through. If you're in Manchester and you want to buy stuff from me, feel free to have a look at my Personal Online Brochure.

Cat in a Spitfire

Ha ha! I just put this in to intrigue you. This is a new project that I'll be unveiling later in the year. I had hoped to make some progress with this over the last couple of months, but it's still a work-in-progress. Coming soon...

Anyway, that's all the self-promotion/waffling I can bring myself to do tonight. I'm off to Glastonbury on Monday, so will be covered in mud and incommunicado for a week. It's quite an exciting year for me, as it's my 20th year of volunteering for Oxfam and 18 years since I first signed up to work with Oxfam Stewards. Which means, of course, that I have now been stewarding as long as the new stewards have been alive. I fully intend to spend most of Glastonbury talking like an old woman. "I remember when all this was fields..."



PS Albert is doing fine.

Tuesday 21 April 2015

OUT NOW: She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Manchester University Press, 2015)

edited by Hannah Priest

http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719089343


She-Wolf explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. The book includes contributors from various disciplines, and offers a cross-period, interdisciplinary exploration of a perennially popular cultural production. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day with chapters on folklore, history, witch trials, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and gaming. Considering issues such as religious and social contexts, colonialism, constructions of racial and gendered identities, corporeality and subjectivity – as well as female body hair, sexuality and violence – She-Wolf reveals the varied ways in which the female werewolf is a manifestation of complex cultural anxieties, as well as a site of continued fascination.

Contents:

Introduction: a history of female werewolves
Hannah Priest

Estonian werewolf legends collected from the island of Saaremaa
Merili Metsvahi

‘She transformed into a werewolf, devouring and killing two children’: trials of she-werewolves in early modern French Burgundy
Rolf Schulte

Participatory lycanthropy: female werewolves in Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Jay Cate

Fur girls and wolf women: fur, hair and subversive female lycanthropy
Jazmina Cininas

Female werewolf as monstrous other in Honoré Beaugrand’s ‘The Werewolves’
Shannon Scott

‘The complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul’: conflict between societal expectations and individual desires in Clemence Housman’s ‘The Werewolf’ and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’
Carys Crossen

I was a teenage she-wolf: boobs, blood and sacrifice
Hannah Priest

The case of the cut off hand: Angela Carter’s werewolves in historical perspective
Willem de Blécourt

The she-wolves of horror cinema
Peter Hutchings

Ginger Snaps: the monstrous feminine as femme animale
Barbara Creed

Dans Ma Peau: shape-shifting and subjectivity
Laura Wilson

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

Tuesday 4 November 2014

#lycanthrovember

As some of you might have seen, Hic Dragones have been talking a bit about #lycanthrovember, so I thought I'd do a quick blog post about it. #lycanthrovember was my idea, as basically a month-long version of #WerewolfWednesday. (And yes, I did come up with the name. And no, it's not my best work.) It's shaping up to be quite a werewolf-y month for me, so I thought it would be cool to share the lycanthropic love on social media - if you have any werewolf related projects, artwork, books or films, feel free to add the hashtag so we can share them.

To kick off, then, at Hic Dragones are running a November-long offer on K Bannerman's wonderful Canadian werewolf novel The Tattooed Wolf: order the paperback or eBook from the Hic Dragones website and get our short collection Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny absolutely free!


Also from Hic Dragones, if you fancy a bit of Victorian Gothic werewolf fiction, Digital Periodicals is currently serializing George Reynolds' Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf. New instalments are published every fortnight in eBook formats, and are available for the princely sum of £1.


On a personal note, I have a werewolf short story entitled 'Nimby' coming out in the Fox Spirit Books' European Monsters anthology. I'll be blogging a bit more about that as the publication date gets closer. And my academic book on female werewolves (with Manchester University Press) finally has a wonderful cover and a publication date: She-Wolf: a Cultural History of Female Werewolves will be out in April 2015.

Now it's over to you... what werewolf-y things would you like to plug this month?

Happy #lycanthrovember!

Thursday 30 October 2014

OUT NOW: Journal of Popular Romance Studies (Issue 4.2)

Contents:

Special Issue: The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (Editor’s Introduction)
by Hsu-Ming Teo

The Private and Public Life of Nellie Stewart’s Bangle
by Annita Boyd

“We have to learn to love imperially”: Love in Late Colonial and Federation Australian Romance Novels
by Hsu-Ming Teo

A Masculine Romance: The Sentimental Bloke and Australian Culture in the War- and Early Interwar Years
by Melissa Bellanta

Marriage, Romance and Mourning Movement in Cherie Nowlan’s Thank God He Met Lizzie
by Mark Nicholls

After Happy Ever: Tender Extremities and Tangled Selves in Three Australasian Bluebeard Tales
by Lucy Butler

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks?: Romance, Ethics and Human-Dog Relationships in a Rural Australian Novel
by Lauren O’Mahony

Writing the Happy Ever After: An Interview with Anne Gracie
by Lisa Fletcher

Editor’s Note: Issue 4.2

Genre, Author, Text, Reader: Teaching Nora Roberts’s Spellbound
by Beth Driscoll

“I’m a Feminist, But…” Popular Romance in the Women’s Literature Classroom
by Julie M. Dugger

Reading the Romance: A Thirtieth Anniversary Roundtable, Editor’s Introduction
by Eric Selinger


To My Mentor, Jan Radway, With Love
by Deborah Chappel Traylor

The Politics of Popular Romance Studies
by Lynn S. Neal

Radway Roundtable Remarks
by Katherine Larsen

Studying the Romance Reader, Then and Now: Rereading Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance
by Jessica Matthews

Love’s Laborers Lost: Radway, Romance Writers, and Recuperating Our Past
by Heather Schell

From Reading the Romance to Grappling with Genre
by Stephanie Moody

We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: Reflecting Thirty Years after Reading the Romance
by Mallory Jagodzinski

Review: Deconstructing Twilight: Psychological and Feminist Perspectives on the Series, by Donna M. Ashcraft
Reviewed by Catherine Coker

Review: Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema. Cliché, Convention and the Final Couple, by James MacDowell
Reviewed by Zorianna Zurba

Review: Romance: The History of a Genre, edited by Dana Percec
Reviewed by Hannah Priest

Review: The Princess Story: Modeling the Feminine in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film, by Sarah Rothschild
Erin E. Bell

Review: Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture, by Lisa Zunshine
Karen J. Renner

For more information, please visit the journal website.

Tuesday 30 September 2014

OUT NOW: Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain (D.S. Brewer, 2014)

Edited by Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse and Cory James Rushton



It is often said that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, and perhaps no type of "doing" is more fascinating than sexual desires and behaviours. Our modern view of medieval sexuality is characterised by a polarising dichotomy between the swooning love-struck knights and ladies of romance on one hand, and the darkly imagined and misogyny of an unenlightened "medieval" sexuality on the other. British medieval sexual culture also exhibits such dualities through the influential paradigms of sinner or saint, virgin or whore, and protector or defiler of women. However, such sexual identities are rarely coherent or stable, and it is in the grey areas, the interstices between normative modes of sexuality, that we find the most compelling instances of erotic frisson and sexual expression.

This collection of essays brings together a wide-ranging discussion of the sexual possibilities and fantasies of medieval Britain as they manifest themselves in the literature of the period. Taking as their matter texts and authors as diverse as Chaucer, Gower, Dunbar, Malory, alchemical treatises, and romances, the contributions reveal a surprising variety of attitudes, strategies and sexual subject positions.

About the Editors:

Amanda Hopkins teaches in English and French at the University of Warwick; Robert Allen Rouse is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Cory James Rushton is Associate Professor of English at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Contents:

Introduction: A Light Thrown upon Darkness: Writing about Medieval British Sexuality
Robert Allen Rouse and Cory James Rushton

1. ‘Open manslaughter and bold bawdry’: Male Sexuality as a Cause of Disruption in Malory’s Morte Darthur
Kristina Hildebrand

2. Erotic (Subject) Positions in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale
Amy S. Kaufman

3. Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance
Megan G. Leitch

4. ‘Naked as a nedyll’: The Eroticism of Malory’s Elaine
Yvette Kisor

5. ‘How love and I togedre met’: Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the Confessio Amantis
Samantha J. Rayner

6. ‘Bogeysliche as a boye’: Performing Sexuality in William of Palerne
Hannah Priest

7. Fairy Lovers: Sexuality, Order and Narrative in Medieval Romance
Aisling Byrne

8. Text as Stone: Desire, Sex, and the Figurative Hermaphrodite in the Ordinal and Compound of Alchemy
Cynthea Masson

9. Animality, Sexuality and the Abject in Three of Dunbar’s Satirical Poems
Anna Caughey

10. The Awful Passion of Pandarus
Cory James Rushton

11. Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance
Amy N. Vines

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

Saturday 26 July 2014

OUT NOW: Prison Service Journal (July 2014, No. 214)

Special Edition: The Prison and the Public

Contents

Editorial Comment: The Prison and the Public
Dr Alana Barton and Dr Alyson Brown

Review of ‘The Prison and the Public’ Conference, Edge Hill University, Wednesday 27 March 2013
Holly White, Lindsey Ryan, Chris Wadsworth and Phil Williams

Chapter and Verse: The Role of Creating Writing in Reducing Re-offending
Michael Crowley

Free to Write: A Case Study in the Impact of Cultural History Research and Creative Writing Practice
Dr Tamsin Spargo and Dr Hannah Priest

Talking Justice: Building Vocal Public Support for Prison Reform
Katy Swaine Williams and Janet Crowe

Challenging Perceptions: Considering the Value of Public Opinion
Rachel Forster and Liz Knight

Repression and Revolution: Representations of Criminal Justice and Prisons in Recent Documentaries
Dr Jamie Bennett

How the Public Sphere was Privatized and Why Civil Society Could Reclaim it.
Mary S Corcoran

Artist or Offender?: Braving the Mirror
Robin Baillie

Civic Re-engagements Amongst Former Prisoners
Gill Buck

Film review: Everyday (2012)
Dr Jamie Bennett

Book Review: Critique and Dissent: An Anthology to Mark 40 Years of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control; Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social?; Criminal Justice and Neoliberalism; Why Prison?
Dr Jamie Bennett

For more information, please see the journal website. To download this issue of the PSJ, please click here.

Monday 9 June 2014

OUT NOW: Unraveling Resident Evil: Essays on the Complex Universe of the Games and Films, ed. by Nadine Farghaly (McFarland, 2014)



About the book:

Resident Evil is a multidimensional as well as multimedia universe: Various books, graphic novels, games and movies (the fifth one came out in 2012) all contribute to this enormous universe. The new essays written for this volume focus on this particular zombie manifestation and its significance in popular culture. The essayists come from very different fields, so it was possible to cover a wide range and discuss numerous issues regarding this universe. Among them are game theory, the idea of silence as well as memory, the connection to iconic stories such as Alice in Wonderland, posthumanism and much more. A lot of ground is covered that will facilitate further discussions not only among Resident Evil interested persons but also among other zombie universes and zombies in general. Most of these essays focus on the female figure Alice, a character revered by many as a feminist warrior.

Contents:

Introduction: Unraveling the Resident Evil Universe
Nadine Farghaly

From Necromancy to the Necrotrophic: Resident Evil's Influence on the Zombie Origin Shift from Supernatural to Science
Tanya Carinae Pell Jones

Survival and System in Resident Evil (2002): Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through
David Müller

Why They Keep Coming Back: The Allure of Incongruity
Adam M. Crowley

Opening Doors: Art-Horror and Agency
Stephen Cadwell

Survival Horror, Metaculture and the Fluidity of Video Game Genres
Broc Holmquest

The Strong, Silent Type: Alice's Use of Rhetorical Silence as Feminist Strategy
Suzan E. Aiken

'My name is Alice and I remember everything!': Surviving Sexual Abuse in the Resident Evil Films
James Stone

The Woman in the Red Dress: Sexuality, Femmes Fatales, the Gaze and Ada Wong
Jenny Platz

Chris Redfield and the Curious Case of Wesker's Sunglasses
Nicolas J. Lalone

Through the Looking-Glass: Interrogating the 'Alice-ness' of Alice
Hannah Priest

Thank You for Making Me Human Again: Alice and the Teaching of Scientific Ethics
Kristine Larsen

Zombies, Cyborgs and Wheelchairs: The Question of Normalcy Within Diseased and Disabled Bodies
J.L. Schatz

'I barely feel human anymore': Project Alice and the Posthuman in the Films
Margo Collins

'Six impossible things before breakfast': Living Memory and Undead History
Simon Bacon

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

Wednesday 30 April 2014

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.

Wednesday 17 July 2013

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.

Monday 6 May 2013

Contributors Wanted for Two Academic Collections

So, some of you may have seen Twitter. Two contributors have recently withdrawn from a collection I'm putting together, and I thought I'd put out a more general request to make contact with interested writers. I would appreciate it if people could pass this information on to colleagues who might be interested/available to contribute to the collections.

A couple of things to mention: these are academic collections, and I am looking to hear from people whose research interests mesh with the collections' focus. The collections are at the proposal stage, and will be pitched to an established UK academic publisher once the contents are finalized (details to follow). The majority of the collections' contents are already finalized, so it may be that I already have a chapter on your proposed subject. If you have any questions, it's best just to get in touch with me.

Afterlife of Alice edited collection

A collection of essays exploring interpretations and adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice novels. This collection is inspired by the Hic Dragones Afterlife of Alice conference, which ran in December 2011. 

What I'm looking for: essays on adaptations, interpretations or the use of elements from Carroll's novels in 'popular' or 'high' culture. For instance, John Logan's Peter and Alice, psychedelic Alices, Alice merchandise and collectibles, Fifty Shades of Alice in Wonderland, fan fic, non-Anglophone Alices (except Japanese).
What I'm not looking for: essays on Carroll's novels or translations, essays on adaptation theory (though more than happy for essays to use this as a framework), essays on Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, essays on Gothic subcultures and fashions, essays on Disney.
Timescale: I'll need an abstract of 300-500 words ASAP, and then deadline for full chapter (7000 words) can be negotiated.

Afterlife of Dorothy edited collection

A collection of essays exploring interpretations and adaptations of L. Frank Baum's Oz novels. This collection is inspired by the Hic Dragones Afterlife of Dorothy conference, which ran in February 2013.

What I'm looking for: essays on adaptations, interpretations, revisions or the use of elements from Baum's novels in 'popular' or 'high' culture. For instance, The Wiz (I would really like a chapter on this!) , fan fic, graphic novels, non-Anglophone Dorothys.
What I'm not looking for: essays on Baum's novels, essays on the MGM film adaptation, essays on Gregory Maguire's Wicked novels and the musical adaptation, essays on Return to Oz or Oz: The Great and Powerful.
Timescale: I'll need an abstract of 300-500 words ASAP, and then deadline for full chapter (7000 words) can be negotiated.

If you're interested in contributing to either collection, please email me (Hannah Priest) in the first instance. Just introduce yourself, give me an idea of your research background/interests and let me know what your proposed chapter would focus on. We can take it from there.

Saturday 2 March 2013

Registration Open: Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture

Kanaris Lecture Theatre and Conference Room
Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

Thursday 25th April – Friday 26th April 2013

Registration is now open for the Hic Dragones Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture conference. For information about how to register, please visit the conference website.

Conference Programme

Thursday 25th April

9.15-9.45am: Registration

9.45-10.00am: Welcome and Opening Remarks (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)

10.00-11.30am: Session 1: Cultural/Cannibal Encounters (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC

(i) Sarah-Louise Flowers (University of Manchester): Consuming Local Tradition: How Outsiders Have Left the Amazon’s Dead Cold and Lonely
(ii) Ruth (Meg) Oldman (Indiana University of Pennsylvania): Preying Upon Blood: Depictions of Catholics in Early Modern Literature
(iii) Michelle Green (University of Nottingham): The Wendigo Cannibal and the ‘Myth’ of Diabetes in Native American Groups

11.30-12.00am: Coffee

12.00-1.30pm: Parallel Sessions

Session 2a: Theorizing Cannibal Culture (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC

(i) Sandra Bowdler (University of Western Australia): ‘Cannibalism is Bad’
(ii) Kamil Łacina and Dagna Skrzypinska (Jagiellonian University, Krokow): Bon Appetit! A Concise Defense of Cannibalism
(iii) Suzanne Stuart (University of South Wales, Australia): A Very Particular ‘Consumer Culture’: Theorising Cannibalism in Cultural Discourse

Session 2b: Consuming Women (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC

(i) Jennifer Bowes (Leeds Metropolitan University): Devouring the Self: Eating Disorders as Cannibalism of the Psyche in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Universe and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman
(ii) Nancy Schumann (Books With Bite): Pardon My Bite: Vampire Women Who Kill Children From Ancient Folklore to Post-Modern Literature
(iii) Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): Fine Young Cannibals: Cannibalism, Psychoanalysis and the Ethics of Consumption in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series and Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls

1.30-2.30pm: Lunch

2.30-3.30pm: Film Screening and Round Table: Babysitting and the Child Cannibal (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
A screening of Babysitting (dir. Lucas Masson, 2012), followed by a round table discussion about children, horror and cannibalism
Chair: Hannah Priest
Panel: TBC

3.30-4.00pm: Coffee

4.00-5.00pm: Session 3: Cannibalism in Fiction (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC

(i) Abby Bentham (University of Salford): Let Us Prey: Cannibalism, Capitalism and Culture in Jim Thompson’s The Getaway
(ii) Nela Roxana Gheorghica (Independent Scholar): Faber’s Under the Skin and the Cannibal Within Us All

5.00pm: Sessions End

*****

Friday 26th April

9.00-10.30am: Parallel Sessions

Session 4a: Consuming Knowledge, Consuming Christ (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC

(i) Matthew Graham (Leeds Metropolitan University): The Devouring of Knowledge: Consumption and Philosophy in Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure
(ii) Daisy Black (University of Manchester): ‘Smiting a Cake’: Preparing and Cooking Christ in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament
(iii) Sara Williams (Independent Scholar): ‘The Soul is Like an Infant That Still Nurses When at its Mother’s Breast’: Oral Fixation and Fantasies of Kleinian Cannibalism in Female Hagiography

Session 4b: On Serial Murder (Conference Room)
Chair: John Wallen

(i) Helen Gavin (University of Huddersfield): Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Inside the Mind of the Cannibal Serial Killer
(ii) Emilia Musumeci (University of Catania): Love Me, Kill Me, Eat Me. Serial Killers, Sexual Behaviour, and Voluntary Cannibalism
(iii) David McWilliam (University of Lancaster): ‘Help Me, I am in Hell’: Necrophiliac, Necrophagic Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Limits of Empathy

10.30-11.00am: Coffee

11.00-12.30pm: Parallel Sessions

Session 5a: Empire and Machine (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC

(i) Jessica George (Cardiff University): ‘The War Ate my Boy, Damn Them All’: Food Chain and Fantasy in Lovecraft
(ii) James Collinge (Leeds Metropolitan University): Rethinking the Martian: British ‘New Imperialism’ as a Cannibal Cyborg in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds
(iii) Franziska E. Kohlt (Independent Scholar): Horrid King Besmear’d with Blood of Human Sacrifice: Man-Consuming Machinery and Moloch as Dystopic Metaphor in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

Session 5b: Cannibalism and Textuality (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC

(i) Barbara Laner (University of Innsbruck): Incorporating Media: Cannibalism in Film as a Metaphor for Intermediality
(ii) Ellie Dobson (University of Birmingham): Flesh-Eaters in London: Cosmopolitan Cannibals in Late Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Press
(iii) John Wallen (University of Nizwa, Oman): The ‘Cannibal Club’ and the Roots of British Racism and Pornography

12.30-1.30pm: Lunch

1.30-3.00pm: Parallel Sessions

Session 6a: Cannibals and the Other (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC

(i) Savi Munjal (University of Leeds): ‘’Tis Human Flesh They Gnaw’: The French Revolution and Cannibalism in Gillray’s Un Petit Souper à La Parisienne
(ii) Joanne Ella Parsons (Bath Spa University): ‘Bone Soup’: Cannibalism, Civilisation, and Racism in The Frozen Deep and the Franklin Expedition

Session 6b: Of Aliens and Monsters (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC

(i) Matthias Stephan (Aarhus University, Denmark): How Other is the Cannibal? – Ontological Blurring in SF Cannibal Scenes
(ii) Franziska Burstyn (University of Siegen): Wicked Witches and Gruesome Giants: Parental Infanticide in Children’s Literature

3.00-3.30pm: Coffee

3.30-5.00pm: Session 7: Cannibals and Popular Culture (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC

(i) Karley Adney (ITT Technical Institute): A Carnivalesque Cannibal: ‘Mein Teil’ and Representations of Homosexuality
(ii) Hannah Priest (Hic Dragones/University of Manchester): ‘Killing for Sport… Eating All the Bodies’: Richard the Lionheart, Eric Cartman, Hollywood Superstar Shia Leboeuf
(iii) Edward Powell (University of Leeds): ‘SuperUndeadMassacreFPS!’: Cannibalism and Consuming Commodified Violence in Call of Duty: Zombies

5.00pm: Conference Close

To register for this two-day event, please visit the conference website or email the conference convenors.

Tuesday 19 February 2013

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

Friday 18 January 2013

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.

Thursday 15 November 2012

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.