Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Legend Area

Monsters in America

2012-01-22T20:06:00.000-05:00

Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting
By W. Scott Poole

Imprint: Baylor University Press
Hardback, 295 pages $29.95
Published: 15th October 2011
ISBN: 9781602583146
Format: 9in x 6in
24 b/w illustrations
Subjects: Cultural Studies, History, American History

About the Book:
Salem witches, frontier wilderness beasts, freak show oddities, alien invasions, Freddie Krueger. From our colonial past to the present, the monster in all its various forms has been a staple of American culture. A masterful survey of our grim and often disturbing past, Monsters in America uniquely brings together history and culture studies to expose the dark obsessions that have helped create our national identity.

Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche, historian Scott Poole explains, but are concoctions of the public imagination, reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events. Conflicting anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, science, and politics manifest as haunting beings among the populace. From Victorian-era mad scientists to modern-day serial killers, new monsters appear as American society evolves, paralleling fluctuating challenges to the cultural status quo. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Poole adroitly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous "other" not only reflects society's fears but shapes actual historical behavior and becomes a cultural reminder of inhuman acts.

Monsters in America is now online at www.monstersinamerica.com. Visit the new website for more about the book, upcoming events, and to keep up with Scott Poole's blog.

Contents:
Introduction: The Bloody Chords of Memory

1. Monstrous Beginnings
2. Goth Americana
3. Weird Science
4. Alien Invasions
5. Deviant Bodies
6. Haunted Houses
7. Undead Americans

Author Biography:

W. Scott Poole grew up in love with monsters. Now a tenured professor of American History at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, he teaches popular courses on America and its monsters as well as on the image of the Devil in religion and popular culture. He is the author of several books including Satan in America: The Devil We Know and is a regular contributor to www.popmatters.com, an international magazine of cultural criticism.

CFP History of Video Games

2011-12-30T02:23:00.001-05:00

From the H-Film List:

CFP: Call for Papers on History of Video Games

Date Written: Wed, 7 Dec 2011 11:58:59 -0600
Date Posted: Thu, 07 Dec 2011 12:58:59 -0500

We are seeking chapters for a new interdisciplinary collection addressing the representation and depiction of history in video games. In a 2005 article discussing the simulation of history through video games, William Uricchio observes that the opportunities for mediation through play pose new and difficult questions about narrative authority and representation. “What happens”, he asks, “if we push the notion of mediation beyond language, to the domain of game, enactment, or simulation? Does this allow us to slip out of the well-critiqued trap of representation? And if so, where does it land us?” As of 2011, his questions remain unanswered.

Amid a world of SIMs, first-person warfare games, strategy, MMO and MMORPs in which players can influence the outcome of battles, campaigns, and even entire civilisations, such questions about the means by which history is delivered to new generations gain increasing importance. When history can be simulated,
recreated, subverted and rewritten on a variety of levels, new questions arise about the relationship between video games and the history they purport to represent, questions which traditional historical approaches cannot properly address.

The proposed edited collection thus seeks to examine representations of history through video and computer games from a multidisciplinary perspective. Our aim is to avoid criticisms of inaccuracy and betrayal or descriptions of games which purportedly ‘get things wrong’, but to look instead at the ways in which
contemporary players actually can and do engage with the past, and what effect this has on the period depicted.

Suggested topics may include (but are not limited to):

• The representation of historical battles, wars and campaigns (e.g. Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Command & Conquer, Battlefield)
• The role of play in the recreation, retelling and representation of key events in history (e.g. Anno 1404, Anno 1701, Sid Meier’s Colonization)
• The representation of historical personages (Caesar, Napoleon, Victoria, Sun Tzu)
• The ways in which non-western histories are depicted (e.g. Seven States, Pharaoh, Age of Empires: Asian Dynasties, East India Company, Total War: Shogun, Assassin’s Creed)
• The role of the player and designer in subverting the “master narratives of history” (Sim City, Sim Earth, Populous, Age of Empires, Deus Ex)
• Games which rewrite histories across eras (e.g. Civilization, Empire Earth, Europa Universalis, Pride of Nations )
• Instances of alternative history or future history (e.g. Alpha Centauri, Masters of Orion, World of Warcraft, Galactic Civilizations, Homeworld)

While we welcome proposals which adopt unusual approaches to representations of the past, we hope to focus on games with a wide fan base in order to appeal to a wide readership of both non-gamer historians and non-historian gamers alike. Likewise, we would encourage essays which address a single topic or theory (such as World War I or the Great Man theory of history) across a number of games. Proposals are sought from both experienced researchers and doctoral students alike, and co-authored submissions which seek to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries are especially welcome.

Abstracts of 300 words, along with a brief CV or publication list, should be sent to the editors at
simulatehistory@gmail.com by January 16th 2012. At this stage we are expecting to receive draft essays of 5-6,000 words by late May 2012. For informal enquiries, please contact either Matthew Kapell or Andrew Elliott at simulatehistory@gmail.com.

-matthew
____________________
Matthew Wilhelm Kapell
Swansea University
American Studies
matthewkapell.com
____________________

CFP Anomalous Ethnographies

2011-12-30T02:09:00.000-05:00

CALLS FOR PAPER

Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural invites articles for a special issue called Anomalous Ethnographies: Wild Wonders, Diminutive People and Reticent Races, scheduled for publication in fall 2012.

We are seeking academic articles from any discipline and period. Topics might include (but are not limited to) Abatwa, Bloody Mary, Boogieman, djinn, elves, elementals, fairies, fauns, goblins, gremlins, hauntings, Homo Floresiensis, incubi/succubi, mermaids, mummies, Plinian races, reptilians, Sasquatch, selkie, the undead, werewolves, wild men and wild women, Yaksa, and all other alternate forms of humanity, as represented in anthropologies, fiction, folk-lore, medias, mythologies, sermons, travel literatures, and urban legends. Contributions should highlight their construction, cultural role, or historical significance in popular narrative or academic discourse.

For more on the journal, please consult <www.preternature.org>.

Abstracts of 500 words are due on April 1, 2011. Final contributions should be roughly 8,000 - 12,000 words (with the possibility of longer submissions in exceptional cases), including all documentation and critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, manuscripts will be required to adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing footnotes).

Preternature also welcomes original editions or translations of texts related to the topic that have not otherwise been made available in recent editions or in English.

Queries about submissions, queries concerning books to be reviewed, or requests to review individual titles may be made to the Editors:

Kirsten C. Uszkalo
CIRCA Scholar
University of Alberta, Canada
circe@ufies.org

Richard Raiswell
Department of History
University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
rraiswell@upei.ca

CFP Monstrophy

2011-12-30T02:06:00.001-05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR PRETERNATURE 2.2. MONSTROPHY: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF MONSTERS

Preternature 2.2.

Monstrophy: The Academic Study of Monsters

''Monstrophy'' is a term referring to the academic study of monsters as representational and conceptual categories, which has gained recent currency in several related fields of study (literary and cultural history, sociological theories of identity and difference, et al.), as well as in a number of recent books and articles about monsters as subjects of theoretical interpretation. Etymologically derived from Latin ''mōnstrum'' (meaning prodigy, ominous sign, monstrous creature or person, abomination) and Greek ''sophia'' (σοφία, wisdom), hybrid compounding of monstrophy is not uncommon in disciplinary names, e.g. [[sociology]], another Greek and Latin compound.) Monstrophy literally means "wisdom about monsters," and in academic usage refers to the broader study of monsters in society and history.

Monsters have been widely catalogued in their historical and ethnographic contexts, and have been commonly included in cultural products such as epic, folktale, fiction, and film, but have only begun to be studied seriously as semiological markers indicating the seams of internal cultural tension. Interpreters commonly note the "monstrous" as occupying space at the borders of a society's conceptual categories, such as those relating to sexual and behavioral transgression, or to inherent prejudice and internal conflict (for instance, in race, gender, politics, and religion). Monsters are rarely fully distinct from the "human," but are often comprised of hybrid features of the human and non-human. This issue of Preternature invites contributions that explore how the category of "monster" is used to define and articulate what a certain group of people articulates to itself to be properly human.

Contributions are welcome from any discipline, time period, or geographic provenance, so long as the discussion highlights the cultural, literary, religious, or historical significance of the topic.

Contributions should be roughly 8,000 - 12,000 words (with the possibility of longer submissions in exceptional cases), including all documentation and critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, manuscripts will be required to adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing footnotes).

Preternature also welcomes original editions or translations of texts related to the topic that have not otherwise been made available in recent editions or in English. Submissions are made online at: <www.preternature.org>.

Final Papers are due February 15, 2012

Queries about submissions, queries concerning books to be reviewed, or requests to review individual titles may be made to the Editor:

Kirsten C. Uszkalo: kirsten@uszkalo.com

Inquiries about book reviews should be sent to the Book Review Editor:

Richard Raiswell: rraiswell@upei.ca

For more on the journal, please consult <www.preternature.org>.

CFP Speculative Dimensions of Divination

2011-12-30T02:01:00.001-05:00

CFP: Speculative Dimensions of Divination
A Special Issue of Femspec

Deadline: Feb. 15 2012

Femspec (a peer reviewed journal dedicated to critical and creative works that challenge gender through speculative means in a variety of genres) is seeking submissions on speculative aspects of divination through any means including Tarot – particularly representations of Tarot and other readings in film, speculative literature, art, poetry, and popular culture.

Submissions that focus on the divination reading process and the spiritual medium reader using whatever tools at hand are particularly welcome and may include:

critical analysis as well as short stories, poetry, and excerpts from longer works
personal accounts of experiences working as a reader
memoirs and autobiographical accounts of spiritual and divination readers
scholarly papers about fiction, cultural products or ethnographies
participant observation and commentaries on representations of the spiritual reading in any aspect of popular culture, including evolution of contemporary decks in the women's spirituality movement, the practice ofpalmists or phone psychics, art, film, the phenomenon of internet readers, Tarot reading shops, booths on boardwalks or at carnivals and festivals such as Renaissance Fairs.

Papers collected will be reviewed individually or as a special section or special issue of the journal, depending on the volume received and on what is timely for publication. The journal is double anonymously peer reviewed. All copyrights will be maintained by Femspec. All submitters must have active subscriptions throughout the submission, review, and publication process. The cover artist will receive two free copies of the issue.

MLA format required. See the Femspec website (femspec.org) for paper submission format. For more information, contact femspec@aol.com.

Techno-Orientalism in SF CFP

2011-12-30T01:25:00.001-05:00

CFP Edited Collection: Techno-Orientalism in Science Fiction Film, Media and Literature
Call for Papers Date: 2012-03-15
Date Submitted: 2011-12-01
Announcement ID: 190163

Edited Collection: Techno-Orientalism in Science Fiction Film, Media and Literature
Editors: David Roh, Greta Niu, and Betsy Huang

Deadline: March 15, 2012

We seek submissions for an edited collection on techno-Orientalism, dubbed by David Morley and Kevin Robins and refined by Greta Niu as the practice of ascribing, erasing, and/or disavowing relationships between technology and Asian subjects. From Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu in the early twentieth-century to William Gibson’s late twentieth-century cyber adventures, figurations of Asian people and landscapes have been uncannily linked to societal desires and fears in speculative discourses of science and technology. Fu Manchu, for instance, embody the onset of American techno-Orientalist anxieties through his occult-like ability to co-opt Western knowledge, while Gibson’s Asian landscapes and ninja bodyguards play upon late-capitalist fears of faceless, mechanical, de-individuated Japanese sarariman (Salarymen) who threaten American economic dominance. This volume aims to establish techno-Orientalism as a crucial and compelling cross-genre critical field, and to provide critical insight into the problematically persistent trope of the technologized Asian in science fiction literature, film, and new media.

Articles may address techno-Orientalist tropes in multiple media, including literature, film, digital games, and electronic texts in which the Asian subject, technological proxy, or cultural representation plays a central, contextual, or peripheral role. We welcome submissions that examine, for example, the literary works of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Ted Chiang; cinematic examples of the Fu Manchu films, Johnny Mnemonic, Goonies, Gung-Ho, The Matrix Triology, Bladerunner, Kill Bill, Robot Stories, Battlestar Galactica, and the heavily Sino-influenced futures of Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity; televisual media such as a series of Verizon commercials featuring Asian American subjects; and electronic games/media such as World of Warcraft, Homefront, or Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries.

The editors invite articles (approximately 6,000 words) that respond to the focus of the volume. General inquires and article abstracts (300-400 words), along with a brief C.V., should be submitted by March 15, 2012, to David Roh at droh@odu.edu, while completed essays must be submitted by September 28th, 2012, following MLA formatting guidelines.

David Roh
Old Dominion University
Department of English
Batten Arts & Letters 5032
Phone (757) 683-4770
Fax (757) 683-3241
Email: droh@odu.edu

CFP Supernaturally Grimm: Fairy Tales on TV

2011-12-30T01:12:00.000-05:00

CFP: Essay Collection Tentatively Titled Supernaturally Grimm: Fairy Tales on TV, proposals due January 15, 2012

full name / name of organization:
Pauline Greenhill/University of Winnipeg and Jill Terry Rudy/Brigham Young University

contact email:
jill_rudy@byu.edu and p.greenhill@uwinnipeg.ca

Pauline Greenhill and Jill Rudy are soliciting proposals for a book project which will gather new, original, previously unpublished essays covering a range of aspects of fairy tales on television. Submissions may address such areas as: specific series, like the current Grimm and Once Upon a Time shows or Nickelodeon’s animated Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics, which use fairy tales as organising themes; fairy-tale themed episodes in series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Muppet Babies, and Rocky and Bullwinkle’s “Fractured Fairy Tales;” made-for-television feature-length fairy tale adaptations, like Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard; uses in made-for-television films of fairy tale images and themes as in The Red Riding Trilogy; television auteurs who often use fairy tales like Joss Whedon or Rob Tapert; fairy tale television fandom; themes in fairy tale television including crime and vampirism; fairy-tale premised reality television shows like the Canadian LGBT Fairy Tale; made-for-television mini-series like The 10th Kingdom; specials, like holiday presentations of The Nutcracker; and other topics. We are interested in live-action and animated material for children and adults and will be happy to consider additional ideas not specified here.

Anticipating a wide readership, we prefer projects that would be accessible, yet challenging, for an upper-level undergraduate audience as well as graduate students and specialists in a variety of fields.

Please send a 250-500 word (strict limit) abstract with title to both Jill Rudy and Pauline Greenhill by January 15, 2012. Please also send a 1-2 page c.v., with current position and relevant publications.
Please send as an e mail attachment in Word. Decisions will be made by January 31, 2012 and confirmations sent shortly thereafter. Quality drafts of 8-10,000 words including notes and bibliography (Chicago online author-date style) will be expected for May 31, 2012.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us both:

Pauline Greenhill: p.greenhill@uwinnipeg.ca

Jill Rudy: jill_rudy@byu.edu

New Bradbury Scholarship

2011-12-30T00:36:00.000-05:00

The New Ray Bradbury Review, No. 2
William F. Touponce (ed.)

2010, 92 pp
ISBN 978-1-60635-037-9
Paper, $25.00
Shipping Status: Available
Courtesy of our partner, Atlas Books

An annual dedicated to the life and writings of one of America’s most prolific and popular authors

Like its pioneering predecessor, the one-volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but has a much broader scope, including a thematic focus for each issue. Since Nolan composed his slim volume at the beginning of Bradbury’s career, Bradbury has birthed hundreds of stories and half a dozen novels, making him one of this country’s most anthologized authors. While his effect on the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction is still being assessed (See Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, Kent State University Press, 2004), there is no doubt of his impact, and to judge from the testimony of his readers, many of them now professional writers themselves, it is clear that he has affected the lives of five generations of young readers.

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed primarily to study the impact of Ray Bradbury’s writings on American culture. It is the central publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, a newly established archive of Bradbury’s writings located at Indiana University. This review is designed principally to study the impact of Ray Bradbury’s writings on American culture. In this second number, scholars discuss Bradbury’s view of the role of art and aesthetics in our modern technological lives. Included are Bradbury’s correspondence with renowned Renaissance art historian and aesthetician Bernard Berenson, a fragment from Bradbury’s screenplay “The Chrysalis,” a review of Now and Forever, and insightful essays by Jon Eller and Roger Lay.

Fans and scholars will welcome The New Ray Bradbury Review,as it will add to the understanding of the life and work of this recently honored author, who received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Interested in learning more about this and future projects with theThe Center for Ray Bradbury Studies? Click here listen to William F. Touponce address these issues.

The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition: Volume 1, 1938–1943

William F. Touponce, and Jonathan R. Eller (eds.)

Description
2010, c. 332 pp
ISBN 978-1-60635-071-3
Cloth, $65.00
Shipping Status: Available
Courtesy of our partner, Atlas Books

In the past, collections of Bradbury’s works have juxtaposed stories with no indication as to the different time periods in which they were written. Even the mid- and late-career collections that Bradbury himself compiled contained stories that were written much earlier—a situation that has given rise to misconceptions about the origins of the stories themselves. In this new edition, editors William F. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller present for the first time the stories of Ray Bradbury in the order in which they were written. Moreover, they use texts that reflect Bradbury’s earliest settled intention for each tale. By examining his relationships with his agent, editor, and publisher, Touponce and Eller’s textual commentaries document the transformation of the stories—and Bradbury’s creative understanding of genre fiction—from their original forms to the versions known and loved today.

Volume 1 covers the years 1938 to 1943 and contains thirteen stories that have never appeared in a Bradbury collection. For those that were previously published, the original serial forms recovered in this volume differ in significant ways from the versions that Bradbury popularized over the ensuing years. By documenting the ways the stories evolved over time, Touponce and Eller unveil significant new information about Bradbury’s development as a master of short fiction.

Each volume in the proposed three-volume edition includes a general introduction, chronology, summary of unpublished stories, textual commentary for each story, textual apparatus, and chronological catalog. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury is edited to the highest scholarly standards by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and bears the Modern Language Association’s seal of approval for scholarly editions.

American Literature Special Issue

2011-12-30T00:27:00.002-05:00

I've been meaning to post this for a while:

American Literature
Volume 83, Number 2 (June 2011)

Speculative Fictions

Contents
Gerry Canavan and Priscilla Wald
Preface 237

Mark Chia-Yon Jerng
A World of Difference: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren and the Protocols of Racial Reading 251

Nathaniel Williams
Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba: Dime-Novel Technology, U.S. Imperialism, and the “American Jules Verne” 279

Aaron Bady
Tarzan’s White Flights: Terrorism and Fantasy before and after the Airplane 305

David M. Higgins
Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction 331

Ramzi Fawaz
“Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!” Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America 355

Robert F. Reid-Pharr
Clean: Death and Desire in Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand 389

Everett Hamner
The Predisposed Agency of Genomic Fiction 413

Latin American SF

2011-12-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction
Rachel Haywood Ferreira

Series: Early Classics of Science Fiction

Wesleyan University Press
2011 • 320 pp. 15 illus. 6 x 9"
Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Science Fiction
( Cloth edition is un-jacketed. Cover illustration is for paperback edition only)
$29.95 Paperback, 978-0-8195-7082-6
$80.00 Hardcover, 978-0-8195-7081-9
$23.99 Ebook, 978-0-8195-7083-3

A fantastic voyage through the early science fiction of Latin America

Early science fiction has often been associated almost exclusively with Northern industrialized nations. In this groundbreaking exploration of the science fiction written in Latin America prior to 1920, Rachel Haywood Ferreira argues that science fiction has always been a global genre. She traces how and why the genre quickly reached Latin America and analyzes how writers in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico adapted science fiction to reflect their own realities. Among the texts discussed are one of the first defenses of Darwinism in Latin America, a tale of a time-traveling history book, and a Latin American Frankenstein. Latin American science fiction writers have long been active participants in the sf literary tradition, expanding the limits of the genre and deepening our perception of the role of science and technology in the Latin American imagination. The book includes a chronological bibliography of science fiction published from 1775 to 1920 in all Latin American countries.

Contents

List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Latin American Science Fiction Discovers Its Roots
• DISPLACEMENT IN SPACE AND TIME: THE LATIN AMERICAN UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA
• Fósforos-Cerillos, “Mexico in the Year 1970”
• Joaquim Felício dos Santos, Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2
• Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, The Marvelous Journey of Mr. Nic-Nac . . .
• Eduardo de Ezcurra, In the Thirtieth Century
• Godofredo Barnsley, S<>o Paulo in the Year 2 . . .
• Eduardo Urzaiz, Eugenia
• THE IMPACT OF DARWINISM: CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM MEET EVOLUTION AND DEVOLUTION
• Augusto Emílio Zaluar, Doctor Benignus
• Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, Two Factions Struggle for Life
• Leopoldo Lugones, “Essay on a Cosmogony in Ten Lessons,” “The Origin of the Flood,” “Yzur”
• Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, “The End of the World”
• Aluísio Azevedo, “Demons”
• Amado Nervo, “The Last War”
• Martín Luis Guzmán, “How the War Ended in 1917”
• STRANGE FORCES: EXPLORING THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE
• Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, Two Factions Struggle for Life [coda]
• Carlos Olivera, “Death at a Fixed Hour”
• Leopoldo Lugones, “The Omega Force,” “Psychon,” “An Inexplicable Phenomenon,” “Viola Acherontia,” “Metamusic”
• Miguel Cané, “The Harmonies of Light”
• Juana Manuela Gorriti, “He Who Listens May Hear—To His Regret: Confidence of a Confidence”
• Pedro Castera, “A Celestial Journey,” Querens
• Amado Nervo, The Soul-Giver, “The Sixth Sense”
• THE DOUBLE: FROM SCIENCE TO TECHNOLOGY
• Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, “Horacio Kalibang or The Automatons”
• Alejandro Cuevas, “The Apparatus of Doctor Tolimán”
• Horacio Quiroga, The Artificial Man, “The Portrait,” “The Vampire”
• Conclusion: A Global Genre in the Periphery
• Chronology: Latin American Science Fiction through 1920
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Primary Texts
• Secondary Sources
• Index

CFP ORU Conference on Science and Science Fiction

2011-12-29T23:48:00.005-05:00

Call For Papers
For the ORU Conference on Science and Science Fiction
April 12 & 13, 2012

When Worlds Collide: Science, Faith, and the Imagination
Download the call for papers (doc) (pdf)

This two-day interdisciplinary conference - sponsored by the colleges of Arts and Cultural Studies and Science and Engineering at Oral Roberts University - will examine the relationships between science and science fiction, social science and science fiction, and theology and science fiction in all forms of science and science fiction, including science fiction stories, film, television, radio, graphic novels, and theoretical physics.

Potential contributors are invited to submit an abstract or paper for this conference on themes related to any of the following conference tracks:

Science Fiction and Theology. Investigating the relationship between and metaphors in science fiction and theology.
Science in Science Fiction. Discussing the plausibility of fantastical science fiction concepts such as time travel, warp drives, cloaking devices, and (quantum) teleportation.
Hard Science Fiction. Examining scientific rigor in science fiction.
Social Sciences in Science Fiction. Investigating psychological, sociological, and cultural issues in science fiction.
The Relationship between Science and Science Fiction. Exploring how science drives science fiction and/or how science fiction drives science.
Original Science Fiction Short Stories. Submitting creative and original short stories (8-10 pages) over various science fiction themes and subjects.

Papers on the above themes are invited. However, papers on other subjects related to the above topics will also be considered.

Please submit an abstract or a full paper by January 31, 2012. Presentations are welcome in any format and style, including PowerPoint, and will depend upon the traditions of your discipline, but if you submit a paper to be read, it should be 8-10 pages (double-spaced, 12 point font) and needs to be an original work that has not been read at any previous conferences. Regardless of the presentation format, participants will be held to a twenty minute presentation limit.

E-mail all abstracts/papers to the following individual:
Dr. Andrew S.I.D. Lang, Conference Director
alang@oru.edu
Phone: 918-495-6692

To insure prompt notification, please include your e-mail address on your submission. If you are willing to chair a section, please note this at the top of your abstract/paper.

We are pleased to announce our two keynote speakers, Paul Davies and Joan Slonczewski.

Plenary Speakers

Paul Davies is an award-winning theoretical physicist and best-selling author of popular science books such as God and the New Physics and The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? Davies is British and has a PhD in physics from University College London. His postdoctoral work was at Cambridge under Fred Hoyle. His academic awards include the Eureka Prize, the Kelvin Medal, the Royal Society's Faraday Prize, and the Templeton Prize for making an "exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works."

Davies has published over 100 research papers in the fields of black holes, cosmology, and quantum field theory in curved spacetime. His monograph on Quantum Fields in Curved Space, remains a seminal text in the field of quantum gravity. Davies is the founder and director of BEYOND: The Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. Davies is a lifelong fan of science fiction and many of his books, like How to Build a Time Machine, deal with the scientific plausibility of the technology found in science fiction.

Joan Slonczewski is a Science Fiction author and Chair of Biology at Kenyon College where she teaches both biology and science fiction. Slonczewski has a PhD in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University, is a National Professor of the Year Silver Medalist, and has been awarded funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to improve science instruction for minority students.

Slonczewski is a world renowned hard science fiction author, her novel A Door Into Ocean winning the prestigious Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. Slonczewski is known for dealing with issues of theology, gender, and science through her writing.

New Book on Supernatural

2011-12-29T23:36:00.001-05:00

TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road Map of Supernatural
David Lavery and Stacey Abbott

Published: October 2011
ISBN-10: 1-77041-020-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-77041-020-6

General / trade - 250 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9 in
Format: Paperback (BC)
$16.95 CAD

As a natural heir to the long-running television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer,Supernatural has risen to prominence with a strong cult following, and this collection of essays from contributors around the globe investigates the genre-bending series’ cultural footprint both in North America and abroad.

The book explores topics such as folklore, religion, gender and sexuality, comedy, music, and much more, and offers a brief guide to all the episodes as well.

Supernatural follows brothers Dean and Sam Winchester as they encounter and battle evil beings such as vampires, shapeshifters, ghouls, and ghosts from a multitude of genres including folklore, urban legends, and religious history.

Contributors to the collection come from the U.S., the UK, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Spain, and Austria.

Wrath of the Titans Trailer

2011-12-29T22:37:00.000-05:00

Coming this March, a sequel to 2010's Clash of the Titans. The first film wasn't bad, but this looks really jumbled from the cutting of the trailer (and the rock score is a no go for me).

CFP Wagner Conference

2011-12-29T21:37:00.000-05:00

Call for papers
WagnerWorldWide2013: America
University of South Carolina, Columbia
January 31-February 2, 2013

In recognition of Richard Wagner’s bicentennial in 2013, the University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences and School of Music are hosting a conference for Wagner scholars from all disciplines. The conference is part of a multi-year global initiative by the University of Bayreuth (www.fimt.uni-bayreuth.de ) under the heading WagnerWorldWide 2013 which will examine Wagner and his significance through five core areas:

Environment and Nature
Gender and Sexuality
Media and Film
History and Nationalism
Globalization and Markets

Submissions are encouraged that address one or more of these topics. All conference sessions will be plenary, and divided between panels with three 20-minute talks, and roundtable discussions with up to 10 participants, each with a 5-minute position paper.

The conference proceedings will be broadcast via live-stream on the internet and later as podcasts. There are plans for a live audience in Bayreuth and possibly elsewhere to be linked via video-conference. All lectures will be given in English. Additional discussions, questions, and suggestions may be added through Facebook (WagnerWorldWide 2013).

Abstracts of max 250 words for talks and/or position papers must be uploaded via the conference website (www.cas.sc.edu/www2013/call_for_papers ) no later than February 15, 2012. Abstracts should include contact information (mail, email and telephone) and institutional affiliation. Group submissions are also welcome. The group organizer should upload a single document. Advanced graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply. Three $500 graduate student travel stipends will be offered on a competitive basis.

Submit abstract

For more information about the multi-year project, please visit: www.cas.sc.edu/www2013

Questions and correspondence, including inquires concerning the graduate student travel stipends, should be directed to Nicholas Vazsonyi (vazsonyi@sc.edu).

CFP Neo-Victorian Studies

2011-12-29T21:32:00.001-05:00

NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES CALLS FOR PAPERS

Note: Neo-Victorian Studies accepts submissions for forthcoming general issues throughout the year. Please see the general CFP that follows the special issue CFPs below. For forthcoming special issues, please observe the relevant posted deadlines.

permanent Call for Papers (General Issue):

NVS invites creative and scholarly submissions from established and early career researchers and creative artists on any topic related to the exploration of the nineteenth century from a twentieth/twenty-first century perspective. Contributions on the period’s cultural legacies in non-British contexts, e.g. Asian, African, North and South American frameworks, are equally welcome. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

- theorising the neo-Victorian novel
- intertextual / intervisual negotiations with the past
- cultural traumas and practices of commemoration
- refracting or ‘queering’ narratives of nation and empire
- tracing patterns of environmental impact and destruction
- the legacies of nineteenth century sexual politics
- the heritage of Victorian law and social policy
- rewriting histories of science and medicine
- the biographical imagination/bio-fiction
- re-conceptualising children and childhood
- the fascinations of criminality
- spectrality, spiritualism, and the occult
- the space of cultural memory / the sense of place

Submissions may include:

- scholarly theoretical/critical articles of 6000-8000 words (plus bibliography)
- creative pieces (any genre of creative writing or creative arts)
- polemical pieces
- interviews
- notices of work in progress
- reviews of relevant critical/creative publications in the field
- (for future issues) critical/creative responses to previous contributions

Please direct enquiries and send electronic submissions via email with Word Document attachment to the General & Founding Editor, Marie-Luise Kohlke, at neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult our submission guidelines, prior to submission.

Special Issue 5:1 (2012)
The Child in Neo-Victorian Arts and Discourse: Renegotiating Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Childhood
Guest Editors: Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey

Neo-Victorianism has become a major trend in contemporary literature and culture. Novels, motion pictures, documentaries and TV series have all contributed to the persistent re-imagination of the nineteenth century. While neo-Victorianism in fiction and film has sparked off a lively academic industry, its impact on children’s literature and contemporary discourses on childhood has not yet been fully addressed. The Victorians were obsessed with the Romantic ideal of the innocent child of nature, an innocence that was thought to be perennially at risk; witness the centrality of the child victim in Victorian melodrama and the astonishing popularity of orphan narratives. Victorian constructions of childhood were also intimately linked to empire. Pauper children were frequently orientalised as ‘street Arabs’, while the indigenous inhabitants of the colonies were often portrayed as children, imposing various forms of maternalism and paternalism upon the coloniser. Both pauper children at the metropolitan centre and indigenous children at the outskirts of empire were frequently construed as orphans, even if their parents were still alive. Orphan narratives framed trafficking in children from the outskirts of empire to the centre and vice versa, as pauper children were sent abroad to the settler colonies as cheap labour hands, while ‘orphans’ in the colonies were removed from their parents in order to be raised at missionary homes or by Anglo-parents who could not conceive themselves.
This special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies will explore how Victorian constructions of childhood are re-mediated and renegotiated in contemporary arts and discourse, from neo-Victorian children’s literature and/or fiction featuring children, heritage film and television, the media, social policy making and family politics, to present-day legal frameworks. In particular, how do revisionary fiction and other contemporary cultural discourses for/about children and/or young adults rejuvenate, modify, and assist us in re-thinking the Victorians and associated themes of temporality, cross-generational continuities, and urgent social issues such as child labour, trafficking and paedophilia?  Contributions, both academic articles and creative pieces, are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• rewrites and film adaptations of Victorian children’s/young adults’ classics and/or child-focused fictions (The Little Princess, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, The Turn of the Screw, etc.)
• re-imaginings of stock child characters from Victorian melodrama and other popular genres (orphans, street Arabs, innocent angels, feral and criminal children, etc.)
• re-inventions of Victorian narrative and dramatic genres for children (e.g. the adventure story, fairytale, moral tract, Bildungsroman, puppet play, and pantomime)
• adaptations of neo-Victorian genres for juvenile audiences (cf. steampunk or graphic novels for children and adolescents)
• continuities/discontinuities between contemporary narratives about adoption and migration and nineteenth-century orphan narratives
• imagined child readers/viewers
• child illness/death; children and medicine
• neo-Victorian vs. neo-Edwardian children’s fiction and other art forms
• the child victim in socio-legal and political discourse
• colonial vs. postcolonial representations of the child

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors Claudia Nelson at claudia_nelson@tamu.edu and Anne Morey at amorey@tamu.edu by 31st January 2012, including a 200 word proposal with draft bibliography and brief biographical details. Completed articles and/or creative pieces will be due 1st April 2012 and should be sent via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (submission guidelines) for further guidance.

Special Issue 5:2 (2012)
The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation
Guest Editors: Elodie Rousselot and Charlotte Boyce

As part of the bicentenary celebrations of Dickens's birth, the editors of a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on 'The Other Dickens: Neo-Victorian Appropriation and Adaptation' invite contributors to consider the 'other' Dickens - those aspects of Dickens's life and work that have been the subject of recent revision, reappraisal, and transformation in contemporary culture. The special issue will aim to critically assess our persisting fascination with this canonical Victorian figure and, more generally, the 'Dickensian' cultural legacy of the Victorian age in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We would especially welcome papers and creative pieces which address the continued influence of Dickens on neo-Victorian studies, in literature, in bio-fiction, as well as in film and television adaptations of his novels. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Dickens and adaptation/re-writings
• Dickens and the legacies of Empire
• International/trans-cultural Dickens in the age of globalisation
• Dickens and contemporary politics (social reforms, the 'Big Society', philanthropy)
• Dickens and twenty-first-century material/commodity culture and consumerism
• Dickens and revisions of gender in the private and public spheres
• Dickens and neo-Victorian nostalgia
• Gothicised Dickens/Dickens's ghosts
• Dickens and Dickens's women in bio-fiction
• Dickens and (self-)performance/performing the past

Please send a 500 word proposal for a 6,000-8,000 word chapter to the guest editors Elodie Rousselot (Elodie.Rousselot@port.ac.uk) and Charlotte Boyce(charlotte.boyce@port.ac.uk) by 29 February 2012, adding a short biographical note. Completed articles and/or creative pieces will be due by 15 July 2012 and should be sent as a Word.doc attachment via email to the guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (submission guidelines) for further guidance.

2011-12-29T21:17:00.000-05:00

That's All Folks? Ecocritical Readings of American Animated Features
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

hardcover
2011. 296 pp.
978-0-8032-3512-0
$50.00

Read an Excerpt (pdf)

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Although some credit the environmental movement of the 1970s, with its profound impact on children’s television programs and movies, for paving the way for later eco-films, the history of environmental expression in animated film reaches much further back in American history, as That’s All Folks? makes clear.

Countering the view that the contemporary environmental movement—and the cartoons it influenced—came to life in the 1960s, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann reveal how environmentalism was already a growing concern in animated films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. From Felix the Cat cartoons to Disney’s beloved Bambi to Pixar’s Wall-E and James Cameron’s Avatar, this volume shows how animated features with environmental themes are moneymakers on multiple levels—particularly as broad-based family entertainment and conveyors of consumer products. Only Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated Fritz the Cat and R-rated Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, with their violent, dystopic representation of urban environments, avoid this total immersion in an anti-environmental consumer market.

Showing us enviro-toons in their cultural and historical contexts, this book offers fresh insights into the changing perceptions of the relationship between humans and the environment and a new understanding of environmental and animated cinema.

CONTENTS:

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: A Foundation for

Contemporary Enviro-toons 1

1 Bambi and Mr. Bug Goes to Town: Nature with or without Us 29

2 Animal Liberation in the 1940s and 1950s: What Disney Does for the Animal Rights Movement 49

3 The upa and the Environment: A Modernist Look at Urban Nature 79

4 Animation and Live Action: A Demonstration of Interdependence? 91

5 Rankin/Bass Studios, Nature, and the Supernatural: Where Technology Serves and Destroys 115

6 Disney in the 1960s and 1970s: Blurring Boundaries between Human and Nonhuman Nature 135

7 Dinosaurs Return: Evolution Outplays Disney’s Binaries 161

8 DreamWorks and Human and Nonhuman Ecology: Escape or Interdependence in Over the Hedge and Bee Movie 183

9 Pixar and the Case of WALL-E: Moving between Environmental Adaptation and Sentimental Nostalgia 201

10 The Simpsons Movie, Happy Feet, and Avatar: The Continuing Influence of Human, Organismic, Economic, and Chaotic Approaches to Ecology 229

Conclusion: Animation’s Movement to Green? 241

Filmography 251

Works Cited 265

Index 277

AUTHORS:

Robin L. Murray is a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Joseph K. Heumann is a professor emeritus at Eastern Illinois University. They are the coauthors of Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge.

CFP Folklore and Fantasy Conference (UK)

2011-12-29T21:02:00.001-05:00

(There is no posting date, so this may be a repeat to the blog.)

FOLKLORE AND FANTASY CONFERENCE 2012

The Folklore Society and the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy are delighted to announce a joint conference on “Folklore and Fantasy” at the University of Chichester on Friday 13th to Sunday 15th April 2012.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline 27 January 2012

Many folktales are closely related to the fantastic – through subject matter, content and impulse. Folklore often deals with the fantastic, or turns to the supernatural to provide explanations for extraordinary events. Similarly, folklore has long been a major source of inspiration for fantasy literature, from authors like Kevin Crossley-Holland and Angela Carter and graphic novelists like Neil Gaiman and Bill Willingham who take on and re-present traditional stories, to authors like Lloyd Alexander Susan Cooper, Kate Thompson who draw on established tropes, to authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Susanna Clarke and Terry Pratchett who invent their own folk traditions. This three-day conference will explore, investigate and celebrate the relationship between folklore and fantasy. We welcome papers on all aspects of folklore and fantasy from the medieval to the modern and the post-modern. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Folklore of the fantastic

Invented Folklore in Epic Fantasy

Graphic novels

Urban Legends

Superstitions

The Gothic Tradition

Monsters, Bogies and Boggarts

Real and invented folk history

Medieval and Modern Travellers’ Tales

Folklore in Children’s Literature

World Folklore in American Fantasy

Celtic folklore in Popular Culture

Folklore on the Stage or on the Screen

The Commodification and ‘Disneyfication’ of Traditional Stories

Folklore in Art

Abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sent by 27 January 2012 to enquiries@folklore-society.com and to b.gray@chi.ac.uk

CFP Fairy Tales Conference (UK)

2011-12-29T20:56:00.002-05:00

‘AFTER GRIMM: FAIRY TALES AND THE ART OF STORY TELLING’ CONFERENCE 2012

6th – 8th SEPTEMBER 2012, Kingston University

CALL FOR PAPERS:

2012 is the bicentenary of the publication of the first volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Tales] by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. As this groundbreaking collection moves into its third century, this conference explores the trajectory of the Grimm phenomenon in Britain and the English-speaking world. Examining the varied and colourful reception history of this collection of tales, this conference will discuss the most recent fairy- tale scholarship, as well as looking forward to possible future developments. The Grimm bicentenary will also be celebrated through story-telling events, readings, a creative writing prize, and an exhibition of illustrations.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professor Donald Haase, Neil Philip, Professor Marina Warner and Professor Jack Zipes

Previously this conference was billed as two distinct events. Now Kingston University and the Sussex Centre for Folklore Fairy Tales and Fantasy at the University of Chichester are delighted to announce that they will be collaborating on a single event. Proposals for conference papers are invited on any aspect of fairy tale and storytelling over the last two-hundred years, but particularly in the following subjects:

The Oral Tradition within Grimms’ Tales

The literary origins of the Grimms’ ‘folktales’

Translations of Grimms’ tales into English

The influence of Grimm upon British collectors of fairy tales

The impact of Grimms’ tales upon world literatures in English

Uses of Grimms’ tales in English-language visual media

Grimms’ tales and Romanticism

Grimms’ tales in Victorian Britain

Grimms’ tales in colonial and post-colonial contexts

Illustrations and art works relating to Grimms’ tales

Grimms’ tales in the electronic age

Memes, Tropes and Unchanging Elements

Telling Stories with Pictures

Songs as Stories

Reading Aloud

Performing Grimm

Packaging Grimm (illustrations, book covers, merchandising etc)

Fairy tales in (popular) culture

Retellings, Revisions and Reworkings

Adapting to New Audiences

New Fairy Tales a Fairy Tales on Stage and on Screen

Gossip, Slander, Rumour and News

This multi-disciplinary conference will welcome contributions from any disciplinary perspective including proposals to read creative work, screen films, mount performances and exhibit visual work.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION:

Please submit an abstract of approximately 300 words, and a brief contributor’s bio online at: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/activities/conferences/abstracts/

DEADLINE: January 31 2012.

ENQUIRIES:

Prof Bill Gray (Sussex Centre for Folklore Fairy Tales and Fantasy, University of Chichester) e: bgray@chi.ac.uk

Dr Andrew Teverson (Kingston University) e: fass-conferences@kingston.ac.uk

CFP Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

2011-12-29T20:50:00.005-05:00

PLANET OF THE APES AND PHILOSOPHY: CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Deadline for abstract submission: January 15, 2012

Editor: John Huss

The editor encourages contributions from philosophers and other intellectuals that explore topics connected to the Planet of the Apes franchise, from Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La Planète des singes to the 1968 politically charged blockbuster starring Charlton Heston, through the sequels and TV series to the 2011 reboot/prequel, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The prequel, which was released at roughly the same time as the documentary Project Nim, has recently received attention from philosophers and animal rights activists, including Peter Singer. Much public discussion ofRise of the Planet of the Apes has centered on ethical and philosophical issues.

Of particular interest for the volume are popular essays addressing current debates in philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, animal rights, political philosophy, and environmental ethics. Authors who would like to try their hand at engaging a non-academic audience in philosophical dialogue using the Planet of the Apes films as a touchstone are especially encouraged to submit an abstract.

Email abstracts and a c.v. to: huss.john@gmail.com.

Deadlines: Abstracts due by January 15, 2012; notification of abstract acceptance by February 15, 2012. First drafts due by June 15, 2012; final drafts due by August 15, 2012.

The fine print: Contributors will not be paid in cash, but in copies of the book, worldwide fame and prestige.

CFP Conference on French Science Fiction

2011-12-29T20:46:00.001-05:00

From SFRA-L:

POW! IN THE EYE OF THE MOON!
Conference on French Science Fiction
University of Regina
November 2nd and 3rd, 2012

The organizing committee of the conference invites you to send proposals for papers on any topic regarding French science fiction.

French science fiction is as old as the French language. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote about a trip to the moon that was published in 1657. So did Jules Verne in 1865, this time using scientific hard facts. The first movie showing a trip to the moon was made by Georges Méliès in 1902. In the comic format, Hergé had Tintin walk on the moon in 1954, 15 years before Armstrong. These are just a few of many unique French contributions to science fiction that rightly deserves to be better known. The conference wants to recognize the contribution of French science fiction to world science fiction but also wants to engage in multi-disciplinary exchanges. Science fiction is a genre embracing many different media, which are traditionally the respective domains of the Arts and Fine Arts.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

- French science fiction literature

- French science fiction cinema

- French science fiction on television

- French science fiction in comics and graphic novels

- International reception of French science fiction

Papers presented at the conference will be refereed and published into electronic proceedings.

* Paper submission:

- Submissions are welcome in either French or English.

- Proposals should be 250 words maximum and should include a descriptive title.

- Audio-visual equipment available upon request.

- A $25 registration fee will be levied upon acceptance.

- Proposals must be submitted by e-mail no later than January 1st, 2012 to:

Philippe Mather

Email: philippe.mather@uregina.ca

Phone: (306) 359-1229

Campion College

University of Regina

3737 Wascana Parkway

Regina, Saskatchewan S4S 0A2

CANADA

CFP Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space

2011-12-29T20:37:00.000-05:00

Another belated post from IAFA-L:

The Science Fiction Foundation announces:
Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space: The Fantastika and the Classical
World. A Science Fiction Foundation Conference

28 June – 1 July 2013

At The Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool

Guests of Honour/Plenary Speakers: Edith Hall, Nick Lowe, and Catherynne M. Valente

Call for papers

The culture of the Classical world continues to shape that of the modern West. Those studying the Fantastika (science fiction, fantasy and horror) know that it has its roots in the literature of the
Graeco-Roman world (Homer’s Odyssey, Lucian’s True History). At the same time, scholars of Classical Reception are investigating more aspects of popular culture, and have begun looking at science fiction.
However, scholars of the one are not often enough in contact with scholars of the other. This conference aims to bridge the divide, and provide a forum in which SF and Classical Reception scholars can meet
and exchange ideas.

We invite proposals for papers (20 minutes plus discussion) or themed panels of three or four papers from a wide range of disciplines (including Science Fiction, Classical Reception and Literature), from academics, students, fans, and anyone else interested, on any aspect of the interaction between the Classical world of Greece and Rome and science fiction, fantasy and horror. We are looking for papers on Classical elements in modern (post-1800) examples of the Fantastika, and on science fictional or fantastic elements in Classical
literature. We are particularly interested in papers addressing literary science fiction or fantasy, where we feel investigations of the interaction with the ancient world are relatively rare. But we also welcome papers on film, television, radio, comics, games, or fan culture.

Please send proposals (preferably by e-mail) to conferences@sf-foundation.org, or to Antony Keen, 48 Priory Street, Tonbridge, TN9 2AN, to arrive by 30 September 2012. Paper proposals should be no more than 300 words. Themed panels should also include an introduction to the panel, of no more than 300 words. Please include the name of the author/panel convener, and contact details.

Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space is organised by the Science Fiction Foundation, with the co-operation of the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool.

CFP Performing the Fantastic

2011-12-29T20:29:00.000-05:00

From the IAFA-L:

Call for Papers

“Performing the Fantastic” — special issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Jen Gunnels, Drama Critic/ New York Review of Science Fiction <jengunnels@gmail.com>

Isabella van Elferen, Musicologist/ Utrecht University <i.a.m.vanelferen@uu.nl>

The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (JFA) is inviting contributions for a special issue on “Performing the Fantastic.” Performance in this context encompasses any of the performing arts, broadly defined, such as theatre, music, dance, magic, and/or ritual.

Articles between 5,000–9,000 words might address, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• Critical analyses of fantastic influenced production designs of traditional forms of performance (theatre, dance, opera)

• Critical analyses of adaptations of fantastic narratives for the stage (from eighteenth-century Gothic melodrama to Wagnerian opera to musical fantasy)

• Performance analyses of staged productions (theatre, music, dance) utilizing fantastic subjects or motifs

• Fantastic use of performative conventions in non-staged (e.g., literary or interactive) narratives

• Utilization of the fantastic in musical subcultures and their aesthetics (including Goth, metal, neofolk)

• Fantastic influences on avant-garde and postmodern performance

• Fantastic performance as social and/or cultural commentary

• Evocations of the fantastic in magic, ritual, and liturgical performance

In accordance with the journal’s policy, all contributions will be peer-reviewed by JFA and subject to their acceptance. JFA uses MLA style as defined in the latest edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: The Modern Language Association). For more details, please see the journal’s “Submission Guidelines” section online at http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/iafa/jfa/submission.html, or e-mail jfaeditor@gmail.com to request a copy of JFA’s style sheet.

Please e-mail your contributions and/or any queries to the guest editors Jen Gunnels jengunnels@gmail.com) and Isabella van Elferen (i.a.m.vanelferen@uu.nl) by 1 August 2012.

Odyssey 2012

2011-12-22T00:46:00.003-05:00

The Odyssey Writing Workshop is now accepting applications for its next workshop to be held from June 11 through July 20, 2012. Deadlines as follows:

Applications for Early Admission due Jan. 31, 2012

Regular Application Deadline April 7, 2012

Further details at http://www.sff.net/odyssey/.

2011 In Memoriam

2011-12-20T17:17:00.001-05:00

As the year draws to a close, we often reflect on events of the past twelve months, and the latest issue of the Science Fiction Book Club catalog includes a listing of genre authors lost this year. It was a surprising list, as it includes both authors I was not familiar as well as one's whose work I had enjoyed but did not know that had passed on. Those featured were:

Leslie Esdalie Banks
Sara Douglass
Brian Jacques
Joel Rosenberg
Joanna Russ
William Sleator
Diana Wynne Jones

A noticeable omission, perhaps she died after press-time, is the recent death of Anne McCaffrey last month.

TV Update

2011-12-11T22:42:00.001-05:00

I'm behind, but SyFy recently premiered the new season of Sanctuary and BBC America a new season of Primeval. In addition, SyFy has recently aired holiday episodes of Eureka, Haven and Warehouse 13. More to follow ASAP.

New Trailers from Warner Bros. Pictures

2011-12-11T22:20:00.001-05:00

Coming Soon:

New Trailers from Walt Disney Pictures

2011-12-11T21:47:00.001-05:00

Out Now:

Coming Soon:

New to DVD

2011-12-11T21:31:00.001-05:00

Now out on DVD/Blu-Ray:

Being Human (US): The Complete First Season
Captain America: First Avenger (based on the long-running comic)
Cowboys and Aliens (based on the comic)
Doctor Who: The Complete Sixth Season
Dylan Dog (based on the comic)
Green Lantern (based on the long-running comic)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 and 2
Super 8
Thor (based on the long-running comic)
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
X-Men: First Class (based on the long-running comic)

Coming Soon:

Apollo 18
Contagion
Falling Skies: Complete First Season
Game of Thrones: Complete First Season
Merlin: Complete Third Season
Primeval: Volume Three
Real Steel
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The Thing
Torchwood: Miracle Day

Doctor Who Returns

2011-12-11T21:27:00.001-05:00

The Doctor returns (briefly) for this year's Christmas special:

SilverHawks on DVD

2011-12-06T18:44:00.001-05:00

The classic 1980s animated series SilverHawks (1986) is now complete on DVD from Warner Bros. Home Video. Part one was released in 2008, and part two, with the remainder of season one, released just this week.

China Miéville Conference (UK)

2011-11-28T23:31:00.001-05:00

I had thought I had posted this before:

Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville

Saturday 15th September 2012
School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London

Sponsored by Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher, Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Lincoln
Part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers series

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Sherryl Vint (Brock University)
Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck, University of London)

Response and Q&A from China Miéville

Papers are invited for the first academic conference dedicated to the work of China Miéville. The winner of multiple awards, Miéville has developed a distinguished body of fictional work since the publication of his first novel, King Rat, in 1999. In addition to nine published novels (with his next forthcoming in May 2012) as well as a collection of short stories, Miéville is also a respected literary critic, political activist and legal scholar. His post-Suvinian working through of the “Fantastic” as a generic category encompassing SF, fantasy and the Gothic, as well as avant-garde traditions such as Surrealism, has been influential in cutting across received boundaries of genre. Miéville’s monograph Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law was published in 2005 and he has written and edited articles for a variety of journals; from Historical Materialism and the philosophical journal Collapse, to the Harvard International Law Journal.

Influenced by, among others, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century pulp traditions and New Wave SF – especially the work of M. John Harrison – Miéville has recently been credited as “leading revolutions in fantasy as both a writer and a critic” (in a 2009 special edition of SF journal Extrapolation dedicated to his work). His fiction spans a wide variety of themes, contexts and genre-blurring literary traditions, which metaphorically explores, among other things, the implications of lived cultural, racial and geographical boundaries, collective struggle, and bodily affect.

Despite the critical acclaim of Miéville’s fictions – as well as his prominence as a literary and cultural critic – there is little scholarly work on Miéville’s already substantial oeuvre. The organisers welcome papers on any topic related to Miéville’s writing from any disciplinary position. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Miéville and his literary contexts – the New Weird, the British SF Boom, London Gothic, steampunk, post-cyberpunk, post-genre fiction, slipstream
utopian and dystopian thinking
class, social mobility, poverty and social inequality
the critique of racism
revolution and the critique of capitalist modernity
spaces of alterity
urban and spatial phantasmagorias
Marxist theory and aesthetics
Metaphor vs. Allegory
teratology and hybridity
noir and crime
gender, sexuality, and feminism
religion and religious cults
posthumanism
Young Adult literature
post-Suvinian SF criticism
political writing and activism
hierarchies of high and low culture
fan subcultures and geek aesthetics
comics and role playing games
affinities with key figures in the British fantastic tradition (e.g. Mervyn Peake and M. John Harrison)

The conference welcomes proposals for individual papers and panels from any discipline and theoretical perspective. Submissions are welcome from both research students and academics. Please send a title and 300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper along with your name, affiliation and 100 word professional biography to mieville@gylphi.co.uk by 1st March 2012.

The conference is organised by Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in English, Department of English, University of Lincoln and Tony Venezia, PhD candidate and tutor, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London.

http://ulincoln.academia.edu/CarolineEdwards

http://birkbeck.academia.edu/TonyVenezia

The conference is sponsored by Gylphi Arts and Humanities Publisher, the Department of English, University of Lincoln and the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. Selected papers from the conference proceedings will be published as China Miéville: Critical Essays, with a contribution by Miéville, as part of Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series (Series Editor: Dr Sarah Dillon). For more information regarding the Series see:

http://www.gylphi.co.uk/criticalessays/index.php

The Miéville conference website will launch in autumn 2011: see the Gylphi website for more details: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/index.php.

Caroline Edwards
Department of English
University of Lincoln
Brayford Pool
Lincoln, LN6 7TS
United Kingdom
Email: mieville@gylphi.co.uk

Miscellaneous from McFarland

2011-11-28T00:21:00.001-05:00

New and recent from one of our favorite publishers:

The Galaxy Is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television

Edited by R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-5875-2
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8801-8
notes, bibliographies, index
292pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $40.00

About the Book
Through spaceships, aliens, ray guns and other familiar trappings, science fiction uses the future (and sometimes the past) to comment on current social, cultural and political ideologies; the same is true of science fiction in children’s film and television.

This collection of essays analyzes the confluences of science fiction and children’s visual media, covering such cultural icons as Flash Gordon, the Jetsons and Star Wars, as well as more contemporary fare like the films Wall-E, Monsters vs. Aliens and Toy Story. Collectively, the essays discover, applaud and critique the hidden--and not-so-hidden--messages presented on our children’s film and TV screens.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Horizons of Possibility: What We Point to When We Say Science Fiction for Children 1
SANDY RANKIN AND R.C. NEIGHBORS

PART 1. D IS FOR DEVIANCE
ONE. Monsters Among Us: Construction of the Deviant Body in Monsters, Inc. and Lilo & Stitch 15
ELIZABETH LEIGH SCHERMAN
TWO. Susan Murphy, Ginormica, and Gloria Steinem: Feminist Consciousness-Raising as Science Fiction in Monsters vs. Aliens 31
HOLLY HASSEL
THREE. Performing Gender, Performing Romance: Pixar’s WALL-E 53
CAROL A. BERNARD
FOUR. Last in Space: The “Black” Hole in Children’s Science Fiction Film 64
DEBBIE C. OLSON
FIVE. A Few Beasts Hissed: Buzz Lightyear and the Refusal to Believe 83
DANIEL KENNEFICK

PART 2. S IS FOR STRUCTURES OF POWER
SIX. Forward to the Past: Anti-Fascist Allegory and “Blitz Spirit” Revisionism in Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. 97
DANIEL O’BRIEN
SEVEN. The Search for a “More Civilized Age,” or the Failure of Utopian Desire in the Star Wars Franchise 111
R.C. NEIGHBORS
EIGHT. Inexplicable Utterances: Social Power and Pluralistic Discourse in Transformers 123
JACQUELINE WIEGARD
NINE. “Population: Us”: Nostalgia for a Future that Never Was (Not Yet) in The Iron Giant 138
SANDY RANKIN
TEN. Doctor Who: A Very British Alien 161
J.P.C. BROWN

PART 3. F IS FOR FUTURE SHOCK
ELEVEN. No Future Shock Here: The Jetsons, Happy Tech, and the Patriarchy 183
BRIAN COWLISHAW
TWELVE. “No One’s Lazy in LazyTown”: The Making of Active Citizens in Preschool Television 195
LYNN WHITAKER
THIRTEEN. Flash Gordon: Remembering a Childhood Hero (Past, Present, Future) 217
PATRICK D. ENRIGHT
FOURTEEN. Toys, a T-Rex, and Trouble: Cautionary Tales of Time Travel in Children’s Film 228
KRISTINE LARSEN
FIFTEEN. “Manmade Mess”: The Critical Dystopia of WALL-E 248
ALEXANDER CHARLES OLIVER HALL
SIXTEEN. A Bumbling Bag of Ball Bearings: Lost in Space and the Space Race 262
JONATHAN COHN

About the Contributors 279
Index 283

About the Author
R.C. Neighbors holds degrees in psychology, English and film from the University of Arkansas, Northeastern State University and Hollins University. He serves as a reviewer for the journal Callaloo, published at Texas A&M University.

Sandy Rankin is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas. Her publications include poetry, fiction, and essays in such periodicals as Journal of Popular Culture.

The Buffyverse Catalog: A Complete Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in Print, Film, Television, Comics, Games and Other Media, 1992-2010

Don Macnaughtan

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-4603-2
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8787-5
appendices, bibliography, index
326pp. softcover (7 x 10) 2011
Price: $45.00

About the Book
This bibliographic guide covers the "Buffyverse"--the fictional worlds of the acclaimed television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and its spinoff Angel (1999-2004), as well as the original Buffy feature film of 1992. It is the largest and most inclusive work of its kind. The author organizes and describes both the original texts of the Buffyverse (episodes, DVDs, novels, comic books, games, and more) and the secondary materials created about the shows, including books, essays, articles, documentaries, dissertations, fan production and websites. This vast and diverse collection of information about these two seminal shows and their feature-film forebear provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive survey of the subject.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Preface 1
Introduction 3
User’s Guide 5

I. LICENSED (PRIMARY) MATERIALS

Section 1. Buffy the Movie 10
A. Film 11
B. DVDs 11
C. Movie Script 11
D. Reviews 11

Section 2. Television Episodes 13
A. Buffy Seasons 1–7 14
B. Angel Seasons 1–5 23
C. Trailers 31
D. Undeveloped Productions 31
E. Reviews 31

Section 3. Television DVD Sets 37
A. North American DVD Sets 39
B. European, Australian and Asian DVD Sets 41
C. Reviews 43

Section 4. Television Scripts 44
A. Published Scripts 45
B. Shooting Script Reprints 45
C. Unpublished Scripts 47

Section 5. Novels 48
A. Buffy and Angel Novels 49
B. Foreign Language Editions 51
C. Reviews 56

Section 6. Short Stories 57
A. Short Story Collections 58
B. Individual Short Stories 58
C. Foreign Language Editions 59

Section 7. Comic Books 59
A. Dark Horse Comics 62
B. IDW Comics 73
C. Other Licensed Comics 79
D. Comic Book Art 79
E. Foreign Language Editions 81
F. Reviews 83

Section 8. Audio 85
A. Audiobooks 85
B. Soundtrack CDs 85
C. Reviews 87

Section 9. Games 88
A. Board Games 89
B. Card Games 89
C. DVD Game 89
D. Role-Playing Games 89
E. Video Games 90
F. Unpublished Projects 91
G. Reviews 91

Section 10. Fan Magazines 92
A. MVP Official Magazines 93
B. Titan Official Magazines 94
C. Other Genre Fan Magazines 103
D. Celebrity Magazines 109
E. Partworks 110
F. Foreign Language Magazines 111

Section 11. Other Licensed Materials 111
A. Books 112
B. Promotional Posters 113
C. Trading Cards 114
D. Miscellaneous Materials 116

II. UNLICENSED (SECONDARY) MATERIALS

Section 12. Books 120
A. General Books 120
B. Essay Collections 121
C. Reference, Companion, and Guide Books 122
D. Biographies of Actors 125
E. Miscellaneous and Special Interest Books 125
F. Foreign Language Books 126
G. Reviews and Review Essays 127

Section 13. Essays and Book Chapters 131
A. Reference Book Articles 132
B. Essays and Book Chapters 133
C. Foreign Language Essays 190

Section 14. Journal Articles 191
A. English Language Articles 192
B. Foreign Language Articles 222

Section 15. Magazine Articles 222

Section 16. News Articles 235

Section 17. Broadcasts and Documentaries 250
A. Broadcast Segments 250
B. Documentaries 251
C. Reviews 252

Section 18. Interviews 252
A. Joss Whedon 253
B. Television Writers and Producers 257
C. Actors 258
D. Television Talk and Comedy Shows 260
E. Other Creators 261
F. Collected Interviews and Panel Discussions 261

Section 19. Dissertations and Theses 262
A. English Language Dissertations 263
B. Foreign Language Dissertations and Theses 266

Section 20. Conference Papers and Reports 267
A. Academic Conferences and Symposia 267
B. Conference and Research Papers 268

Section 21. Derivative Works and Parodies 272
A. Art and Graphic Design 274
B. Comic Books and Strips 274
C. Fan Fiction 275
D. Fan Vids 277
E. Live Theatre, Poetry, and Events 279
F. Movies 279
G. Music 279
H. Podcasts and Online Audio 280
I. Scientific and Technical References 280
J. Television 281

Section 22. Websites 282

Section 23. Bibliographies 284

Appendix A: Wikipedia 285
Appendix B: Cast and Creator 292
Appendix C: Episode Title Index 294
Index 297

About the Author
Don Macnaughtan was raised and educated in Auckland, New Zealand. His many written works include the first published discography of New Zealand popular music. He is a reference librarian and teacher at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.

The Martians Have Landed! A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes

Robert E. Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-648-2
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8671-7
13 photos, notes, bibliography, index
254pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2012
Price: $40.00

About the Book
History is replete with examples of media-created scares and panics. This book presents more than three dozen studies of media scares from the 17th century to the 21st century, including hoaxes perpetrated via newspapers, radio, television and cyberspace. From the 1835 batmen on the Moon hoax to more recent bird flu scares and Hurricane Katrina myths, this book explores hoaxes that highlight the impact of the media on our lives and its tendency to sensationalize. Most of the hoaxes covered occurred in the United States, though incidents from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia are featured as well. Several are global in scope, revealing the power global media wields.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Section One : It Came from the Airwaves—Radio
1. The London Riot Hoax 13
2. Radio Daze—The Martian Invasion Broadcast 16
3. The Martians Return 23
4. Infamous Disc Jockey Hoaxes 27
5. Playing with Fire: Nuclear Scares 30

Section Two : It Came from the Small Screen—Television
6. “This Just In...” NBC Frightens Viewers 37
7. “Look! Up in the Sky!” Asteroid Panic 40
8. Pokémon Panics and Creepy Crawley Scares 44
9. The “Documentary” That Fooled England 49
10. Hurricane Katrina Mythmaking 53
11. Chicken Little and the Bird Flu Panic 59
12. The Russians Are Coming! 64
13. The Video Nasties Scare (Peter Hassall) 67

Section Three : It Came from Ink—Newspapers
14. The Batmen on the Moon Hoax 79
15. The Central Park Zoo Panic 84
16. The Halley’s Comet Scare of 1910 87
17. How the Press Created an Imaginary Terrorist 92
18. The Hook Hoax 98
19. The Ghost Slasher of Taiwan 101
20. The Phantom Clown Panic 105

Section Four : It Came from Cyberspace—The Internet
21. Chemtrails and Conspiracies 113
22. Morgellons: The First Internet Disease? 117
23. Katrina Evacuee Myths 120
24. The E-mail Virus Panic (Bill Ellis) 123

Section Five : It Came from a Friend of a Friend—Media-Spread Urban Legends
25. Urban Legends and the Media 131
26. The Curse of the Crying Boy (David Clarke) 134
27. Photos of the Gods (David Clarke) 146

Section Six : It Came from Everywhere
28. The Satanic Cult Scare 157
29. Halloween Panics 162
30. Stranger Danger and the Predator Next Door 170
31. The School Safety Panic 176
32. “Out of the Water!” Media Shark Frenzy 179
33. The Great Puerto Rican Chupacabra Panic 182
34. YouTube, Popcorn and the Killer Cell Phones 187
35. Someone Stole My Kidney! Organ Theft Scares 192
36. Killer Vaccines (Felicity Goodyear-Smith and Helen Petousis-Harris) 197

Notes 213
Bibliography 229
Index 241

About the Author
Robert E. Bartholomew has taught sociology in Australia at The Flinders University of South Australia and James Cook University in Queensland. Also a former broadcast journalist and contributor to news organizations such as the Associated Press and United Press International, he is the author of several books and lives in Whitehall, New York.

Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of the science magazine The Skeptical Inquirer. The author of several books, he has also written numerous articles on a variety of topics including urban legends, the paranormal, critical thinking, films, and media literacy. He has appeared on CNN, the History Channel, and the National Geographic Channel.

Murray Leinster: The Life and Works

Billee J. Stallings and Jo-an J. Evans

Foreword by James Gunn

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6504-0
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8715-8
42 photos, appendices, bibliography, index
227pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $40.00

About the Book
Will F. Jenkins, known to science fiction fans by his penname Murray Leinster, was among the most prolific American writers of the 20th century. "The Dean of Science Fiction," as he was sometimes known, published more than 1,500 short stories and 100 books in a career spanning more than fifty years. This biography, written by his two youngest daughters, chronicles Murray Leinster’s private and literary life from his first writings for The Smart Setand early pulp magazines such as Argosy, Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories, through the golden age of science fiction in the 1930s through the 1950s, to his death in 1975. Included as appendices are his famous 1946 story "A Logic Named Joe" and 1954 essay "To Build a Robot Brain."

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v
Foreword: The Dean Revisited by James Gunn 1
Preface 3

1. The Beginning: 1909 5
2. A Southern Family 13
3. The Early Days: 1910–1919 22
4. Entering Science Fiction: 1919–1921 33
5. Marriage: The 1920s 38
6. The 1930s 61
7. The New York Years: The 1940s 86
8. The 1950s 117
9. The 1960s 132
10. After Mary’s Death 152
11. On Writing 164

Appendix A. “A Logic Named Joe” 175
Appendix B. “To Build a Robot Brain” 187
Bibliography 195
Index 215

About the Author
Billee J. Stallings lives in Moorestown, New Jersey, where she is active in historical preservation.

Jo-an J. Evans has written previously about fashion and design. She lives in London.

Ridley Scott: A Critical Filmography

William B. Parrill

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-5866-0
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8593-2
23 photos, filmography, bibliography, index
189pp. softcover (7 x 10) 2011
Price: $45.00

About the Book
Ridley Scott, the director of such seminal films as Blade Runner, Alien and Thelma & Louise, is one of the most important directors of the last fifty years. Unlike many directors, Scott has been remarkably transparent about his craft, offering the audience glimpses into his creative process. This book explores Scott’s oeuvre in depth, devoting a chapter to his 22 primary works, from his first effort, Boy and Bicycle (1962), through Robin Hood (2010). Topics discussed include the critical reception of the films, and the ways in which Scott’s works function as cinematic mediators of issues such as religion, women’s rights and history.

Table of Contents

Preface 1
Introduction 3

1. Boy and Bicycle (1962): Playing Hooky 25
2. Adam Adamant Lives! (1966): The League of Uncharitable Ladies 28
3. The Duellists (1977): En Garde! 30
4. Alien (1979): Ripley on Call 36
5. Blade Runner (1982): At the Thanhauser Gate 43
6. Legend (1985): I Only Wanted to Touch One. Where’s the Harm in That? 58
7. Someone to Watch Over Me (1987): Is It Love, Mike? 63
8. Black Rain (1989): One Big Gray Area 68
9. Thelma & Louise (1991): On the Road: One Insult Too Far 74
10. 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992): I Think We Have Returned to Eden 85
11. White Squall (1996): A Meterological Phenomenon of the Imagination 91
12. G. I. Jane (1997): Wild Thing 94
13. Gladiator (2000): There Was Once a Dream That Was Rome 100
14. Black Hawk Down (2001): Bird Down in the City 108
15. Hannibal (2001): Hannibal the Cannibal 116
16. Matchstick Men (2003): Mean Street Men in Bright Colors 125
17. All the Invisible Children (2005): “Jonathan”: The Rediscovery of Life Through Childhood 129
18. Kingdom of Heaven (2005): Jerusalem: The Center of the World for Forgiveness 131
19. A Good Year (2006): Postcards from Provence 138
20. American Gangster (2007): Cops Kill Cops They Can’t Trust 142
21. Body of Lies (2008): Closing Time 150
22. Robin Hood (2010): The Outlaw Returns to History 154

Filmography 161
Bibliography 165
Index 173

About the Author
William B. Parrill is an emeritus professor of English and communication at Southeastern Louisiana University. He is a founding editor of the journal Louisiana Literature and has written extensively on films and contemporary literature.

Classic Home Video Games, 1989-1990: A Complete Guide to Sega Genesis, Neo Geo and TurboGrafx-16 Games

Brett Weiss

Foreword by Leonard Herman

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-4172-3
121 photos, glossary, appendices, bibliography, index
344pp. hardcover (7 x 10) 2011
Price: $55.00

About the Book
The third in a series about home video games, this detailed reference work features descriptions and reviews of every official U.S.-released game for the Neo Geo, Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16, which, in 1989, ushered in the 16-bit era of gaming. Organized alphabetically by console brand, each chapter includes a description of the game system followed by substantive entries for every game released for that console. Video game entries include historical information, gameplay details, the author’s critique, and, when appropriate, comparisons to similar games. Appendices list and offer brief descriptions of all the games for the Atari Lynx and Nintendo Game Boy, and catalogue and describe the add-ons to the consoles covered herein--Neo Geo CD, Sega CD, Sega 32X and TurboGrafx-CD.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Foreword by Leonard Herman 1
Preface 3

Neo Geo 7
Samurai 26
Sega Genesis 36
BubsyII 62
Mortal Kombat 145
TurboGrafx-16 251
Pac-Land 273

Appendix I. Neo Geo CD 285
Appendix II. Sega CD 288
Appendix III. Sega 32X 293
Appendix IV. TurboGrafx-CD 295
Appendix V. Atari Lynx 297
Appendix VI. Nintendo Game Boy 299
Glossary 311
Bibliography 323
Index 325

About the Author
Former comic shop owner Brett Weiss lives in Fort Worth, Texas area. In addition to his reference books about classic home video games, he has written for numerous industry magazines.

Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword and Sandal Film

Edited by Michael G. Cornelius

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6162-2
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8902-2
notes, bibliographies, index
218pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $40.00

About the Book
Few movie genres have highlighted the male body more effectively than the "sword-and-sandal" film, where the rippling torso and the bulging muscle are displayed for all to appreciate. Carrying his phallic sword and dressed in traditional garb calculated to bring attention to his magnificent physique, the sword-and-sandal hero is capable of toppling great nations, rescuing heroines, defeating monsters, and generally saving the day. Each of these essays examines the issues of masculinity and utility addressed in the sword-and-sandal genre. The contributors offer insights on a film form which showcases its male protagonists as heroic, violent, fleshy, and, in the end, extremely useful.

Table of Contents

Introduction—Of Muscles and Men: The Forms and Functions of the Sword and Sandal Film
MICHAEL G. CORNELIUS 1

Hercules, Politics, and Movies
MARIA ELENA D’AMELIO 15
Hero Trouble: Blood, Politics, and Kinship in Pasolini’s Medea
KRISTI M. WILSON 28
“To do or die manfully”: Performing Heteronormativity in Recent Epic Films
JERRY B. PIERCE 40
From Maciste to Maximus and Company: The Fragmented Hero in the New Epic
ANDREW B. R. ELLIOTT 58
Reverent and Irreverent Violence: In Defense of Spartacus, Conan, and Leonidas
JOHN ELIA 75
“Civilization ... ancient and wicked”: Historicizing the Ideological Field of 1980s Sword and Sandal Films
KEVIN M. FLANAGAN 87
Homer’s Lies, Brad Pitt’s Thighs: Revisiting the Pre-Oedipal Mother and the German Wartime Father in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy
ROBERT C. PIRRO 104
An Enduring Logic: Homer, Helen of Troy, and Narrative Mobility
LARRY T. SHILLOCK 124
“By Jupiter’s Cock!” Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Video Games, and Camp Excess
DAVID SIMMONS 144
Beefy Guys and Brawny Dolls: He-Man, the Masters of the Universe, and Gay Clone Culture
MICHAEL G. CORNELIUS 154
Developments in Peplum Filmmaking: Disney’s Hercules
CHRIS PALLANT 175
Hercules Diminished? Parody, Differentiation, and Emulation in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules
DANIEL O’BRIEN 187

About the Contributors 203
Index 207

About the Author
Award-winning novelist Michael G. Cornelius is the author or editor of numerous books. He serves as chair of the department of English and Mass Communications at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

The Boy Detectives: Essays on the Hardy Boys and Others

Edited by Michael G. Cornelius

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6033-5
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-6198-1
notes, bibliographies, index
220pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2010
Price: $35.00

About the Book
Much has been written about the girl sleuth in fiction, a feminist figure embodying all the potential wit and drive of girlhood. Her male counterpart, however, has received much less critical attention despite his popularity in the wider culture. This collection of 11 essays examines the boy detective and his genre from a number of critical perspectives, addressing the issues of these young characters, heirs to the patriarchy yet still concerned with first crushes and soda shop romances. Series explored include the Hardy Boys, Tow Swift, the Three Investigators, Christopher Cool and Tim Murphy, as well as works by Astrid Lindgren, Mark Haddon and Joe Meno.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Nomenclature of Boy Sleuths
MICHAEL G. CORNELIUS 1

1. A Hardy Boys’ Identity Narrative and The Tower Treasure
LARRY T. SHILLOCK 19
2. Hardy Camaraderie: Boy Sleuthing and Male Community in the Hardy Boys Mysteries
C. M. GILL 35
3. Terminal Immaterial: The Uncertain Subject of the Hardy Boys Airport Mysteries
CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG 51
4. Strategies of Adaptation: The Hardy Boys on Television
BRIAN TAVES 62
5. Natural Detective Work: Ideas About Nature in the Early Tom Swift Books
ELIZABETH D. BLUM 86
6. Tim Murphy: Superhero Without a Cape
FRED ERISMAN 108
7. Adventures and Affect: The Character of the Boy Detective and Orphan in Astrid Lindgren’s Rasmus and the Tramp
CHARLOTTE BEYER 120
8. The Power of Three: Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators Series
ALAN PICKRELL 132
9. Clashing Genres: (No) Sex and (No) Violence in the Christopher Cool, TEEN Agent Series
MICHAEL G. CORNELIUS 143
10. “The Perfect Hero for His Age”: Christopher Boone and the Role of Logic in the Boy Detective Narrative
NICOLA ALLEN 167
11. Has the World Outgrown the Classic Boy Detective?
JOHN FINLAY KERR 180

About the Contributors 199
Index 203

About the Author
Award-winning novelist Michael G. Cornelius is the author or editor of numerous books. He serves as chair of the department of English and Mass Communications at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

The Wind Is Never Gone: Sequels, Parodies and Rewritings of Gone with the Wind

M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-5927-8
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8636-6
notes, bibliography, index
216pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $35.00

About the Book
More than seventy years after its publication in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Windhas never been out of print. An icon of American culture, it has had similar success abroad, popular in Japan, Russia, and post-World War II Europe, among other places and times. This work analyzes the continuations of Mitchell’s novel: the authorized sequels, Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley and Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig; the unauthorized parody The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall and a politically correct parody; and the many fan fiction stories posted online. The book also explores Gone with the Wind’s ambiguous ending, the perceived need to publish an authorized sequel, and the legal battle to determine who may re-write Gone with the Wind.

Table of Contents

Preface 1
Introduction: I Have Been Unfaithful to Thee, Scarlett! 3

1. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 15
2. To Be Continued: Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley and the Failed Sequels Commissioned to Emma Tennant and Pat Conroy 36
3. Copyright Not Gone with the Wind 55
4. The Gone with the Wind Parodies: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall and “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn” by Beverly West and Nancy Peske 79
5. Rhett Butler’s Side of the Story: Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig 107
6. Gone with the Wind Fan Fiction 124
7. The Gone with the Wind Canon 155

Conclusion: Is It Gone with the Wind? 173
Bibliography 183
Index 203

About the Author
M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo’s work has appeared in Ad Americam, Contemporary Legend, Americana, Clepsydra, RAEI, The Grove, and NeoAmericanist, among other publications. She currently teaches at ESNE - Universidad Camilo Jose Cela (Madrid).

Learning from Mickey, Donald and Walt: Essays on Disney’s Edutainment Films

Edited by A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-5957-5
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8475-1
chart, notes, bibliography, index
274pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $40.00

About the Book
Throughout its long and colorful history, Walt Disney Studios has produced scores of films designed to educate moviegoers as well as entertain them. These productions range from the True-Life Adventures nature documentaries and such depictions of cutting-edge technology as Man in Space and Our Friend the Atom, to wartime propaganda shorts (Education for Death), public-health films (VD Attack Plan) and coverage of exotic cultures (The Ama Girls, Blue Men of Morocco). Even Disney’s dramatic recreations of historical events (Ten Who Dared, Invincible) have had their share of educational value. Each of the essays in this volume focuses on a different type of Disney "edutainment" film. Together they provide the first comprehensive look at Walt Disney’s ongoing mission to inform and enlighten his worldwide audience.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
A. BOWDOIN VAN RIPER 1

Section I: War and Propaganda
1. The Canadian Shorts: Establishing Disney’s Wartime Style
BELLA HONESS ROE 15
2. “Desiring the Disney Technique”: Chronicle of a Contracted Military Training Film
DOUGLAS A. CUNNINGHAM 27
3. Cartoons Will Win the War: World War II Propaganda Shorts
RICHARD J. LESKOSKY 40
4. Cartoon Combat: World War II, Alexander de Seversky, and Victory Through Air Power
JOHN D. THOMAS 63

Section II: Science, Technology, Mathematics and Medicine
5. The Promise of Things to Come: Disneyland and the Wonders of Technology, 1954–58
A. BOWDOIN VAN RIPER 84
6. A Nation on Wheels: Films About Cars and Driving, 1948–1970
A. BOWDOIN VAN RIPER 103
7. “A Journey Through the Wonderland of Mathematics”: Donald in Mathmagic Land
MARTIN F. NORDEN 113
8. Paging Doctor Disney: Health Education Films, 1922–1973
BOB CRUZ, JR. 127

Section III: Nature
9. “Nature is the Dramatist”: Documentary, Entertainment, and the World According to the True-Life Adventures
EDDY VON MUELLER 145
10. Sex, Love, and Death: True-Life Fantasies
RONALD TOBIAS 164
11. It Is a Small World, After All: Earth and the Disneyfication of Planet Earth
EDDY VON MUELLER 173

Section IV: Times, Places and People
12. A Past to Make Us Proud: U. S. History According to Disney
MARIANNE HOLDZKOM 183
13. Reviving the American Dream: The World of Sports
KATHARINA BONZEL 201
14. Beyond the Ratoncito: Disney’s Idea of Latin America
BERNICE NUHFER-HALTEN 209
15. Locating the Magic Kingdom: Spectacle and Similarity in People and Places
CYNTHIA J. MILLER 221
16. America’s Salesman: The USA in Circarama
SARAH NILSEN 237

About the Contributors 255
Index 259

About the Author
A. Bowdoin Van Riper has written several books and articles on popular culture and on the history of geology, archaeology, and technology. He teaches in the Social and International Studies Department at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia.

The World of Angela Carter: A Critical Investigation

Dani Cavallaro

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6128-8
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8723-3
bibliography, index
208pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $40.00

About the Book
Angela Carter, a prolific author who worked in numerous genres, remains one of the most important British writers of the last century. She was particularly renowned for her investigation of cultural mythologies, which shape our lives but which we often leave unexamined. This text explores a selection of Carter’s novels and short stories, supplemented with her perspectives on politics, society and aesthetics, and her attempts to redefine popular genres such as the fairy tale. This critical work is a strong addition to the scholarship on this important but often overlooked writer.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

1. Angela Carter’s Vision 5
2. Dark Play: The Magic Toyshop 18
3. Surrealist Visions: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 47
4. Modern Mythologies: The Passion of New Eve 77
5. Tradition Reimagined: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories 99
6. Beyond Gravity: Nights at the Circus 137
7. Mirror Identities: Wise Children 164

Bibliography 189
Index 197

About the Author
Dani Cavallaro has written widely about literature, cultural theory, and anime. She lives in London.

New Horror Studies from McFarland

2011-11-27T23:34:00.001-05:00

Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World
Edited by Maggie Parke and Natalie Wilson

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6350-3
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8912-1
notes, bibliographies, index
253pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $35.00

About the Book
Since the publication of Twilight in 2005, Stephenie Meyer’s four-book saga about the tortured relationship between human heroine Bella Swan and her vampire love Edward Cullen has become a world-wide sensation--inciting screams of delight, sighs of derision, and fervent pronouncements. Those looking deeper into its pages and on screen can find intriguing subtexts about everything from gender, race, sexuality, and religion.

The 15 essays in this book examine the texts, the films, and the fandom, exploring the series’ cultural reach and offering one of the first thorough analyses of the saga.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v
Introduction 1

Part I. Twilight as Pop Cultural Artifact: Pilgrimages, Fan Culture, and Film Adaptations
The Vampire Capital of the World: Commerce and Enchantment in Forks, Washington
TANYA ERZEN 11
Fanpires: Utilizing Fan Culture in Event Film Adaptations
MAGGIE PARKE 25
The Hero and the Id: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into the Popularity of Twilight
HEATHER ANASTASIU 41
Someday My Vampire Will Come? Society’s (and the Media’s) Lovesick Infatuation with Prince- Like Vampires
COLETTE MURPHY 56
Team Bella: Fans Navigating Desire, Security, and Feminism
ANANYA MUKHERJEA 70

Part II. Once Upon a Twilight: Fairy Tales, Byronic (Anti) Heroes, Post- Feminist Romance, and Growing Up in a Twilight World
“How Old Are You?” Representations of Age in the Saga
ASHLEY BENNING 87
Read Only as Directed: Psychology, Intertextuality, and Hyperreality in the Series
ANGELA TENGA 102
Torn Between Two Lovers: Twilight Tames Wuthering Heights
SARAH WAKEFIELD 117
Rewriting the Byronic Hero: How the Twilight Saga Turned “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know” into a Teen Fiction Phenomenon
JESSICA GROPER 132
A Post- Feminist Romance: Love, Gender and Intertextuality in Stephenie Meyer’s Saga
HILA SHACHAR 147

Part III. Twilight Through an Intersectional Lens: Patriarchy, White Privilege, Heteronormativity, Rape Culture, Religion
Maybe Edward Is the Most Dangerous Thing Out There: The Role of Patriarchy
MELISSA MILLER 165
Denial and Salvation: The Twilight Series and Heteronormative Patriarchy
ASHLEY DONNELLY 178
It’s a Wolf Thing: The Quileute Werewolf /Shape- Shifter Hybrid as Noble Savage
NATALIE WILSON 194
Violence, Agency, and the Women of Twilight
ANNE TORKELSON 209
Un-biting the Apple and Killing the Womb: Genesis, Gender, and Gynocide
LINDSEY ISSOW AVERILL 224

About the Contributors 239
Index 243

About the Author
Maggie Parke is completing her doctorate in film and new media at the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries at Bangor University, Wales. She has published in theJournal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and is currently the head of development for Elfin Productions.
Natalie Wilson pens one of the only academic blogs analyzing Twilight and its cultural impact. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos in the Department of Literature and Writing and in the women’s studies program.

Seduced by Twilight: The Allure and Contradictory Messages of the Popular Saga
Natalie Wilson

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6042-7
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8561-1
notes, bibliography, index
242pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $35.00

About the Book
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga has maintained a tight grip on the contemporary cultural imagination. This timely and critical work examines how the Twilight series offers addictively appealing messages about love, romance, sex, beauty and body image, and how these charged themes interact with cultural issues regarding race, class, gender and sexuality. Through a careful analysis of the texts, the fandom and the current socio-historical climate, this work argues that the success of the Twilight series stems chiefly from Meyer’s negotiation of cultural mores.Table of Contents

Table of Contents:

Preface and Acknowledgments 1
Introduction: A Post-Twilight World 5

1. The Allure of the Vampire, the Danger of the Wolf: Or, Why to Avoid Big, Bad Shape-shifters in Favor of Knights in Sparkling Armor 15
2. Bitten by Romance: Happy Twilight-Ever-After 41
3. Vamping Femininity: Twilight as (Anti?) Feminist Fairy Tale, Or, We Can’t All Be Slayers 61
4. The Dawning of New Men: Hegemonic Masculinity, Sparkly White Male Vampires, and Ab-tastic Wolves of Color 83
5. Sexuality Eclipsed: The Taming of Female Sexuality via Vampire Abstinence 106
6. The Soul of the Vampire: Sparkly Mormons, Female Eves, and Unconverted Wolves 133
7. Got Vampire Privilege? Or, Why You Should Marry an Undead White, Wealthy, Heterosexual Mormon 157
8. Consuming Desires: Can You Buy That Twilight Feeling? 180

Conclusion: You Have a Choice, and It Need Not Be Edward or Jacob 205
Chapter Notes 209
Bibliography 219

Index 229

About the Author
Natalie Wilson pens one of the only academic blogs analyzing Twilight and its cultural impact. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos in the Department of Literature and Writing and in the women’s studies program.

Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture
Edited by Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6140-0
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8673-1
notes, bibliography, index
268pp. softcover (7 x 10) 2011
Price: $45.00

About the Book
Growing from their early roots in Caribbean voodoo to their popularity today, zombies are epidemic. Their presence is pervasive, whether they are found in video games, street signs, hard drives, or even international politics. These eighteen original essays by an interdisciplinary group of scholars examine how the zombie has evolved over time, its continually evolving manifestations in popular culture, and the unpredictable effects the zombie has had on late modernity. Topics covered include representations of zombies in films, the zombie as environmental critique, its role in mass psychology and how issues of race, class and gender are expressed through zombie narratives. Collectively, the work enhances our understanding of the popularity and purposes of horror in the modern era.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Generation Z, the Age of Apocalypse
(Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz) 1

Zombies as Internal Fear or Threat
(Kim Paffenroth) 18
White Zombie and the Creole: William Seabrook’s The Magic Island and American Imperialism in Haiti
(Gyllian Phillips) 27
The Origin of the Zombie in American Radio and Film: B- Horror, U.S. Empire, and the Politics of Disavowal
(Chris Vials) 41
The Eco-Zombie: Environmental Critique in Zombie Fiction
(Sarah Juliet Lauro) 54
Lost Bodies/Lost Souls: Night of the Living Dead and Deathdream as Vietnam Narrative
(Karen Randell) 67
Shambling Towards Mount Improbable to Be Born: American Evolutionary Anxiety and the Hopeful Monsters of Matheson’s I Am Legendand Romero’s Dead Films
(Sean Moreland) 77
Ztopia: Lessons in Post- Vital Politics in George Romero’s Zombie Films
(Tyson E. Lewis) 90
Soft Murders: Motion Pictures and Living Death in Diary of the Dead
(Randy Laist) 101
Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Zombie: From Suggestion to Contagion
(Phillip Mahoney) 113
Gray Is the New Black: Race, Class, and Zombies
(Aalya Ahmad) 130
Cyberpunk and the Living Dead
(Andrea Austin) 147
The End Begins: John Wyndham’s Zombie Cozy
(Terry Harpold) 156
Zombies in a “Deep, Dark Ocean of History”: Danny Boyle’s Infected and John Wyndham’s Triffids as Metaphors of Postwar Britain
(Nicole LaRose) 165
Dead and Live Life: Zombies, Queers, and Online Sociality
(Shaka McGlotten) 182
The E- Dead: Zombies in the Digital Age
(Brendan Riley) 194
A Brain Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: Isolation U. and the Campus Zombie
(Brian Greenspan) 206
Rhetoric Goes Boom(er): Agency, Networks, and Zombies at Play
(Scott Reed) 219
The National Strategy for Zombie Containment: Myth Meets Activism in Post–9/11 America
(Christopher Zealand) 231

About the Contributors 249
Index 253

About the Author
Stephanie Boluk is a postdoctoral fellow in the Media Studies program at Vassar College. Wylie Lenz is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Florida.

Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition

Edited by Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-5911-7
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8800-1
bibliography, filmography, index
240pp. softcover (7 x 10) 2011
Price: $45.00

About the Book
The figure of the zombie is a familiar one in world culture, acting as a metaphor for "the other," a participant in narratives of life and death, good and evil, and of a fate worse than death--the state of being "undead." This book explores the phenomenon from its roots in Haitian folklore to its evolution on the silver screen and to its radical transformation during the 1960s countercultural revolution. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines here examine the zombie and its relationship to colonialism, orientalism, racism, globalism, capitalism and more--including potential signs that the zombie hordes may have finally achieved oversaturation.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Race, Colonialism, and the Evolution of the “Zombie”
CORY JAMES RUSHTON and CHRISTOPHER M. MOREMAN 1

I—Haitian Origins: Race and the Zombie
1. New South, New Immigrants, New Women, New Zombies: The Historical Development of the Zombie in American Popular Culture
ANN KORDAS 15
2. Hurston in Haiti: Neocolonialism and Zombification
RITA KERESZTESI 31
3. Putting the Undead to Work: Wade Davis, Haitian Vodou, and the Social Uses of the Zombie
DAVID INGLIS 42
4. Guess Who’s Going to Be Dinner: Sidney Poitier, Black Militancy, and the Ambivalence of Race in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
BARBARA S. BRUCE 60

II—The Capital of the Dead
5. Time for Zombies: Sacrifice and the Structural Phenomenology of Capitalist Futures
RONJON PAUL DATTA and LAURA MACDONALD 77
6. Zombified Capital in the Postcolonial Capital: Circulation (of Blood) in Sony Labou Tansi’s Parentheses of Blood
ELIZABETH A. STINSON 93

III—Culturally Transplanted Zombies
7. Zombie Orientals Ate My Brain! Orientalism in Contemporary Zombie Stories
ERIC HAMAKO 107
8. Post–9/11 Anxieties: Unpredictability and Complacency in the Age of New Terrorism in Dawn of the Dead (2004)
BECKI A. GRAHAM 124
9. The Rise and Fall—and Rise—of the Nazi Zombie in Film
CYNTHIA J. MILLER 139
10. Eating Ireland: Zombies, Snakes and Missionaries in Boy Eats Girl
CORY JAMES RUSHTON 149
11. It’s So Hard to Get Good Help These Days: Zombies as a Culturally Stabilizing Force in Fido (2006)
MICHELE BRAUN 162

IV—The Future of Zombie Understandings
12. Zombie Categories, Religion and the New False Rationalism
EDWARD DUTTON 177
13. Nothing but Meat? Philosophical Zombies and Their Cinematic Counterparts
DAVE BEISECKER 191

Bibliography 207
Filmography 219
About the Contributors 223
Index 225

About the Author
Christopher M. Moreman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at California State University-East Bay, where he teaches courses in comparative religion.

Cory James Rushton is an associate English professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Horror Noir: Where Cinema’s Dark Sisters Meet
Paul Meehan

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-4597-4
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-6219-3
77 photos, filmography, notes, bibliography, index
310pp. softcover (7 x 10) 2011
Price: $39.95

About the Book
This critical survey examines the historical and thematic relationships between two of the cinema’s most popular genres: horror and film noir. The influence of 1930s- and 1940s-era horror films on the development of noir is detailed, with analyses of more than 100 motion pictures in which noir criminality and mystery meld with supernatural and psychological horror. Included are the films based on popular horror/mystery radio shows (The Whistler, Inner Sanctum), the works of RKO producer Val Lewton (Cat People, The Seventh Victim), and Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological ghost stories. Also discussed are gothic and costume horror noirs set in the 19th century (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hangover Square); the noir elements of more recent films; and the film noir aspects of the Hannibal Lecter movies and other serial-killer thrillers.Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Preface 1
Introduction 3

1. Horror and Fantasy Elements in Classic Films Noir 11
2. Horror Noir in the 1930s 30
3. The Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur Noir Legacy 53
4. Horror Noir from Radioland 73
5. Monster Noir 93
6. Gothic and Costume Noir 115
7. Horror Noir in the 1950s 145
8. Hitchcock’s Psychological Ghosts and Doppelgangers 167
9. Modern Horror Noir in the 1960s 186
10. Horror Noirs of the 1970s and 1980s 211
11. The Noir Horrors of Hannibal the Cannibal 237
12. The Mean Streets of Hell 254

Conclusion: Horror and Film Noir—The Dark Genres 277
Filmography 281
Chapter Notes 289
Bibliography 291

Index 293

About the Author
Paul Meehan has also written on UFOs in cinema, and is a contributor to the Noir City Sentinel, the journal of the Film Noir Foundation. He lives in San Francisco.

Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films
George Ochoa

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6307-7
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8654-0
48 photos, notes, bibliography, index
235pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $40.00

About the Book
Why are audiences drawn to horror films? Previous answers to that question have included everything from a need to experience fear to a hunger for psychotherapy. This critical text proposes that the horror film’s primary purpose is to present monsters, best understood as deformed and destructive beings. These monsters satisfy the audience’s desire to know these beings, in particular those beings too fantastic and dangerous to know in real life. The text illuminates many aspects of the horror film genre, including epistemology, ethics, evaluation, history, monster taxonomy, and filmmaking techniques.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

PART I. THE HORROR FILM ANALYZED
1. Purpose 5
2. Knowing 18
3. DDB Profile 28
4. Structure 38
5. Essential Elements 47
6. Ethics 61
7. Meaning and Significance 72
8. Evaluation of a Good Horror Film 83
9. Evaluation of a Bad Horror Film 96

PART II. THE HORROR FILM IN CONTEXT
10. Genres 107
11. History: Beginnings to the 1950s 117
12. History: 1960s to the Present 131
13. Reputation 143
14. Taxonomy 151
15. Techniques 168
16. Directors 181
17. Stars and DDBs 194
18. Other Directions 201

Notes 209
Bibliography 215
Index 219

About the Author
George Ochoa is the author or coauthor of more than thirty nonfiction books. He is currently a medical writer at Applied Clinical Education in New York. Please visit his blog at deformeddestructive.blogspot.com.

Supernatural Romance in Film: Tales of Love, Death and the Afterlife

Richard Striner

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-4664-3
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8487-4
22 photos, appendix, notes, bibliography, index
213pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2011
Price: $40.00

About the Book
Themes of love, death and the supernatural are mainstays in cinema, and this is the first scholarly work to address movies that explore all three. Twenty-two films are covered in short chapters, from The Mummy through What Dreams May Come, with plot synopses, critical analyses of the relationship of each to major philosophical and literary themes, and explorations of the critical responses.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1

The Mummy (1932) 5
Death Takes a Holiday (1934) 15
Topper (1937) 23
On Borrowed Time (1939) 30
Our Town (1940) 35
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) 43
Cabin in the Sky (1943) 49
A Guy Named Joe (1943) 55
Blithe Spirit (1945) 61
A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven) (1946) 68
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) 76
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) 83
Portrait of Jennie (1948) 91
The Red Shoes (1948) 98
Brigadoon (1954) 110
Vertigo (1958) 118
Solaris (Russian version, 1972) 131
Somewhere in Time (1980) 137
Dead Again (1991) 152
Sleepless in Seattle (1993) 161
Sliding Doors (1998) 169
What Dreams May Come (1998) 174

Afterword 181
Appendix: Honorable Mentions 183
Notes 189
Bibliography 199
Index 201

About the Author
Richard Striner is a professor of history at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He has written on political history, economics, architecture, historic preservation and film.

Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21st Century

Charles Derry

Foreword by John Russell Taylor

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-3397-1
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-5695-6
988 photos, notes, appendices, filmography, bibliography, index
447pp. hardcover (7 x 10) 2009
Price: $75.00

About the Book
Greatly expanded and updated from the 1977 original, this new edition explores the evolution of the modern horror film, particularly as it reflects anxieties associated with the atomic bomb, the Cold War, 1960s violence, sexual liberation, the Reagan revolution, 9/11 and the Iraq War. It divides modern horror into three varieties (psychological, demonic and apocalyptic) and demonstrates how horror cinema represents the popular expression of everyday fears while revealing the forces that influence American ideological and political values. Directors given a close reading include Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg, Guillermo Del Toro, Michael Haneke, Robert Aldrich, Mel Gibson and George A. Romero. Additional material discusses postmodern remakes, horror franchises and Asian millennial horror. This book also contains more than 950 frame grabs and a very extensive filmography.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction to Dark Dreams 2.0 1

PART ONE: DARK DREAMS (1977)
Foreword to the Original Edition, by John Russell Taylor 15
Introduction 19
1—The Horror of Personality 21
2—The Horror of Armageddon 55
3—The Horror of the Demonic 88

PART TWO: MILLENNIAL NIGHTMARES (2009)
4—A Context; and Why What’s Not Happening in American Horror Isn’t 109
5—The Horror of Personality, Revisited 112
6—Sequels and Insincerity 200
7—The Horror of the Demonic, Revisited 203
8—The Horror of Armageddon, Revisited 231
9—Asian Millennial Horror 284
10—Postmodern Remakes, the Averted Gaze, and Some Glimmerings of the New 305
11—Guillermo Del Toro 315
12—David Cronenberg 330
13—9/11 and Beyond 342

Appendix I: A Proposed Canon of Modern Horror 347
Appendix II: Interviews with Horror Directors: Aldrich, Castle, Harrington, Romero, Friedkin (1977) 349
Appendix III: Filmographies (Compiled by Thomas G. Kohn) 365
Notes 409
Bibliography 413
Index 415

About the Author
Charles Derry is professor emeritus of motion picture studies at Wright State University. He has written widely on a variety of popular culture topics, including film, television and ideology.

Horror Film Festivals and Awards

Thomas M. Sipos

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6572-9
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8796-7
34 photos, notes, lists, index
318pp. softcover (7 x 10) 2012
Price: $40.00

About the Book
The rise of independent horror filmmaking has spurred a growth of "indie" horror film festivals, promising promotional and distribution opportunities for selected motion pictures. Some filmmakers spend thousands of dollars on festival entry fees, only to be rejected everywhere. What occurs behind the scenes at these events? More than two dozen festival directors discuss how they secure money, sponsors and screening venues, and how they promote and run their events, as well as their criteria for selecting films. This book will help horror filmmakers take fuller advantage of festival opportunities, and assist festival directors in founding and improving events. Included are listings of 200+ film festivals and awards--current, defunct and prospective--and of previous award winners, spanning six continents and several decades.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Preface 1

1 How to Run a Film Festival on Pennies a Day! 5
2 How to Make an Award- Winning Horror Film! 37
3 Working the Film Festival! 65

Directory of Festivals and Awards 95
List of Award Winners (by Festival) 121

Notes 253
Index 257

About the Author
Thomas M. Sipos is the founder/manager of the Tabloid Witch Awards and a past film judge for the World Horror Convention. He has worked as a script reader, actor or extra on more than 70 productions and has written for Filmfax, Midnight Marquee and other magazines.

CFP Fringe Collection

2011-11-27T01:20:00.001-05:00

Shapeshifters, Cyborgs, and Psychedelics: Analyzing the Alternate Worlds of J.J. Abrams’ Fringe
Call for Papers Date: 2012-03-01
Date Submitted: 2011-11-17
Announcement ID: 189836

Coeditors Sherry Ginn, Tanya R. Cochran, and Paul Zinder invite proposals or completed essays for an edited collection of scholarly works that explore J.J. Abrams’ science fiction television series Fringe (2008-present). We are interested in a variety of topics as well as diverse disciplinary approaches. Proposals should demonstrate not only a clear methodology and strong thesis but also a familiarity with current conversations and publications about the series. We would be especially pleased to see innovative perspectives on unusual topics such as the show’s paratexts or production elements.

Though not prescriptive, the following list of topics may be productive to consider:

*Alternate Worlds
*Auteur Theory—J.J. Abrams, creator
*Broadcasting/Scheduling
*Casting
*Characters/Character Development
*(Dis)Ability—representations of mental illness, psychotherapeutic techniques, (de)institutionalization
*Drug Use—recreational use as well as therapeutic use of recreational drugs
*Discourse Analysis
*Fandom
*Gender
*Genre
*Government Intervention/Conspiracy Theories
*History—LSD trials, emergence of transpersonal psychology/Consciousness Studies
*Intertextuality
*Interpersonal Communication
*Myth(ologies)
*(Neuro)Science and Technology—ethics (e.g., human experimentations)
*Philosophy/Spirituality/Religion
*Paratexts—web content, fan fiction, glyphs
*Production—cinematography, editing, musical score
*Predecessors—The X-Files, Regenesis, Eleventh Hour, etc.
*Psychology
*Race
*Rhetoric

We strongly recommend authors familiarize themselves with these publications to extend and/or challenge published analyses of the series:
*Grazier, Kevin R., ed. Fringe Science: Parallel Universes, White Tulips, and Mad Scientists. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2011. Print.
*Stuart, Sarah Clarke. Into the Looking Glass: Exploring the Worlds of Fringe. Toronto: ECW, 2011. Print.

QUERIES AND SUBMISSIONS
Queries are welcomed; please email us at fringecollection@gmail.com. Send 350-500-word proposals or 5,000-7,000-word essays in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF) to the same email address; please label your attachment with “Fringe,” your last name, and the date (day.month.year)—e.g., “Fringe, Cochran, 1.3.12.” We suggest but do not require that proposals include a working bibliography. Please provide in a separate document or in the body of the email a brief biography and selected vita.

PRODUCTION TIMELINE
We are currently negotiating with a publisher and working on the following timeline:
*Proposals Due: 1 March 2012
*Notification of Acceptance: 1 May 2012
*First Drafts Due: 1 August 2012
*Second Drafts Due: 1 December 2012
*Completed Manuscript: 1 March 2013

BIOGRAPHIES
Sherry Ginn, Ph.D.—Ginn earned both her M.A. (1984) and Ph.D. (1988) in General-Experimental Psychology from the University of South Carolina. She currently teaches at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, near Charlotte, North Carolina. She has published numerous articles in the fields of neuroscience and psychology. Her book Our Space, Our Place: Women in the Worlds of Science Fiction Television was published in 2005; forthcoming is Power and Control in the Television Worlds of Joss Whedon (McFarland, 2012). She is a member and/or officer of a number of professional organizations, including the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (President, 2008-2009; Secretary, 2010-present), the Popular Culture Association (Chair, Science Fiction and Fantasy Section, 2009-2012), the Whedon Studies Association, and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Current projects in the field of popular culture include an essay on the Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith, cinematic intersections of neuroscience with the Frankenstein myth, Sexing Science Fiction (with coeditor Michael Cornelius), and Farscape (editor).

Tanya R. Cochran, Ph.D.—Cochran earned her Ph.D. (2009) in Rhetoric and Composition from Georgia State University. An associate professor of English at Union College in Lincoln, NE, she teaches first-year writing and the history/theory of rhetoric and directs the College Writing Program and the Studio for Writing and Speaking. She is a founding board member of the Whedon Studies Association as well as its current secretary-treasurer and serves on the editorial boards of Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association and Watcher Junior: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies. She is a past chair (2006-2010) of the Popular/American Culture Association’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Area. Her publications related to popular culture and the rhetoric of fandom include chapters in Televising Queer Women (Palgrave, 2008); Siths, Slayers, Stargates + Cyborgs: Modern Mythology in the New Millennium (Peter Lang, 2008); and Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (McFarland, 2011). With Rhonda V. Wilcox, Cochran edited the anthology Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier (I.B. Tauris, 2008). Forthcoming publications include an article in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures and a coedited collection on the works of Joss Whedon for Syracuse University Press.

Paul Zinder, M.F.A.—Zinder earned his M.F.A. (1996) in Film from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. He has taught media studies, production, theory, and screenwriting courses at universities in the United States and Italy for over fifteen years. He is currently Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Department of Communication and English at The American University of Rome, where he created and teaches a variety of media studies courses, including Cult Film and Television. His writing has been published in Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (McFarland, 2011) and Investigating Alias: Secrets and Spies (I.B. Tauris, 2007) and will appear in the forthcoming volumes The Post-9/11 Western: Repurposing the Genre and The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of the American Empire. He is also a film and video-maker, whose work has been recognized internationally. His documentaries Benedizione delle Bestie (Benediction of the Beasts) (2009) and Uno degli Ultimi (One of the Last) (2007) screened at over 40 international film festivals from 2008-2011 and won eight awards. His latest film, Robot e Pinocchi (Robots and Pinocchios) (2011), will have its world premiere at the St. Louis International Film and Video Festival in 2011.

Sherry Ginn, Ph.D.
Rowan-Cabarrus Community College
Email: fringecollection@gmail.com

Area CFP 2012

2011-11-27T00:26:00.001-05:00

Here is the official CFP for next year's conference:

CALLFOR PAPERS

SCIENCEFICTION,

FANTASY, ANDLEGEND AREA

2012 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/AmericanCulture Association (NEPCA)

St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York

26-27 October 2012

Proposals by 1 June 2012

Proposalsare invited from scholars of all levels for papers to be presented in theScience Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area. Presentations will be limited to15-20 minutes in length (depending on final panel size) and may address anyaspect of the intermedia genres of science fiction, fantasy, and/or legend asrepresented in popular culture produced in any country, any time period, andfor any audience. Please see our website(http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/) for further details and ideas.

Ifyou are interested in proposing a paper or panel of papers, please send aproposal of approximately 300 to 500 words and a one to two page CV to both theProgram Chair AND to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area Chair at thefollowing addresses (please note “SF/Fantasy/Legend Proposal” in your subjectline):

Tim Madigan

Program Chair

Tmadigan@rochester.rr.com

Michael A. Torregrossa

Science Fiction, Fantasy and Legend Area Chair

http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/

The Northeast Popular Culture/American CultureAssociation (NEPCA) is a regional affiliate of the American Culture Associationand the Popular Culture Association. NEPCA is an association of scholars in NewEngland and New York, organized in 1974 at the University of Rhode Island. Wereorganized and incorporated in Boston in 1992. The purpose of thisprofessional association is to encourage and assist research, publication, andteaching on popular culture and culture studies topics by scholars in thenortheast region of the United States. By bringing together scholars fromvarious disciplines, both academic and non-academic people, we fosterinterdisciplinary research and learning. We publish a newsletter twice per yearand we hold an annual conference at which we present both the Peter C.Rollins Book Award and an annual prize.

Membership in NEPCA is required for participation.

Annual dues are currently $30 for full-time facultyand $15 for all other individuals.

Furtherdetails are available at http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/NEPCA.html

Mechademia 6 (2011)

2011-11-17T21:45:00.001-05:00

The latest volume of Mechademia has been published. Here are the details:

Mechademia 6 (also on Project Muse)
User Enhanced
2011
Frenchy Lunning, editor

Manga and anime inspire a wide range of creative activities for fans: blogging and contributing to databases, making elaborate cosplay costumes, producingdôjinshi (amateur) manga and scanlations, and engaging in fansubbing and DIY animation. Indeed, fans can no longer be considered passive consumers of popular culture easily duped by corporations and their industrial-capitalist ideologies. They are now more accurately described as users, in whose hands cultural commodities can provide instant gratification but also need to be understood as creative spaces that can be inhabited, modified, and enhanced.

User Enhanced, the sixth volume of the Mechademia series, examines the implications of this transformation from consumer to creator. Why do manga characters lend themselves so readily to user enhancement? What are the limitations on fan creativity? Are fans simply adding value to corporate properties with their enhancements? And can the productivity and creativity of user activities be transformed into genuine cultural enrichment and social engagement?

Through explorations of the vitality of manga characters, the formal and structural open-endedness of manga, the role of sexuality and desire in manga and anime fandom, the evolution of the Lolita fashion subculture, the contemporary social critique embodied in manga like Helpman! and Ikigami, and gamer behavior within computer games, User Enhanced suggests that commodity enhancement may lead as easily to disengagement and isolation as to interaction, connection, and empowerment.

Contributors: Brian Bergstrom; Lisa Blauersouth; Aden Evens, Dartmouth College; Andrea Horbinski; Itô Gô, Tokyo Polytechnic U; Paul Jackson; Yuka Kanno; Shion Kono, Sophia U, Tokyo; Thomas Lamarre, McGill U; Christine L. Marran, U of Minnesota; Miyadai Shinji, Tokyo Metropolitan U; Miyamoto Hirohito, Meiji U; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Wesleyan U; Matthew Penney, Concordia U, Montreal; Emily Raine; Brian Ruh; Kumiko Saito, Bowling Green State U; Rio Saitô, College of Visual Arts, St. Paul; Cathy Sell; James Welker, U of British Columbia; Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt U.

$24.95 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7734-4
336 pages, 57 b&w photos, 7 x 10, November 2011

CONTENTS:

Introduction
Thomas Lamarre

Countering Domestication

Under the Ruffles: Shôjo and the Morphology of Power
Frenchy Lunning
Girliness Is Next to Godliness: Lolita Fandom as Sacred Criminality in the Novels of Takemoto Novala
Brian Bergstrom
Beyond Domesticating Animal Love
Christine L. Marran
Exploited and Mobilized: Poverty and Work in Contemporary Manga
Matthew Penney

Commodity-Life

Tezuka Is Dead: Manga in Transformation and Its Dysfunctional Discourse
Itô Gô
Translated and with an Introduction by Miri Nakamura
How Characters Stand Out
Miyamoto Hirohito
Translated by Thomas Lamarre
Manga Translation and Interculture
Cathy Sell
Speciesism Part 3: Neoteny and the Politics of Life
Thomas Lamarre

Photo Play

Out of the Closet: The Fancy Phenomenon
Photography by Rio Saitô
Introduction by Frenchy Lunning

Desiring Economies

Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part 2: Bellmer's Dolls and Oshii's Gynoids
Livia Monnet
Desire in Subtext: Gender, Fandom, and Women’s Male-Male Homoerotic Parodies in Contemporary Japan
Kumiko Saito
The Sacrificial Economy of Cuteness in Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space
Emily Raine
Flower Tribes and Female Desire: Complicating Early Female Consumption of Male Homosexuality in Shôjo Manga
James Welker

Untimely Effects

Transformation of Semantics in the History of Japanese Subcultures since 1992
Miyadai Shinji
Translated by Shion Kono
With an Introduction by Thomas Lamarre
The Logic of Digital Gaming
Aden Evens
Tsuge Yoshiharu and Postwar Japan: Travel, Memory, and Nostalgia
Yoshikuni Igarashi
Implicational Spectatorship: Hara Setsuko and the Queer Joke
Yuka Kanno

Review and Commentary

War for Entertainment: The Sky Crawlers
Andrea Horbinski
Volition in the Face of Absurdity
Brian Ruh
The Past Presents the Future: Toward the Terra
Paul Jackson

トレンド Torendo

Wherein the Author Documents Her Experience as a Porcelain Doll
Lisa Blauersouth

Contributors
Call for Papers

NEPCA 2011 Update

2011-11-13T19:21:00.001-05:00

My thanks to our presenters and audience this weekend at NEPCA. All three sessions went well, and we had great discussion sessions following all three sets of presentations. Unfortunately, we also had a number of last-minute withdrawals due to illness and injury and a no-show, and I include the revised session list below.

ScienceFiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area

2011 Annual Conference of the Northeast PopularCulture/American Culture Association

Western ConnecticutState University (Danbury, CT), November 11-12, 2011

ScienceFiction, Fantasy, and Legend I: Science Fiction (Session I, Friday, 4-5:30 PM, Warner320)

Presider: Michael A.Torregrossa, The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and theMiddle Ages

Paper 1: “Surviving The Night of the Comet: Zombies, Space,and the 2012 Hysteria”

KristineLarsen, Physics and Earth Sciences Department, Central Connecticut StateUniversity

Paper 2: “Ain’t I a Xenomorph?:Representations of Post-Feminist Identity in the Alien Films”

RandyLaist, Goodwin College

Thepaper by Marlene San Miguel Groner has been withdrawn.

ScienceFiction, Fantasy, and Legend II: Legends Old and New (Session II, Saturday,8:30-10 AM, Warner 320)

Presider: Brian Clements,Western Connecticut State University

Paper 1: “Robin Hood in Balladand Film”

KerryR. Kaleba, George Mason University

Paper 2: “What Do Vampires Haveto Do with the Holy Grail?: The Transformation of the Grail Legend in UndeadArthuriana”

MichaelA. Torregrossa, The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and theMiddle Ages

Paper 3: “Vampires in SookieStackhouse Southern Vampire novels and the Twilight Saga”

AndreaSiegel, Graduate Center/CUNY

Thepaper by Barry Hall has been withdrawn.

ScienceFiction, Fantasy, and Legend III: Fantasy (Session III, Saturday, 10:30 AM – 12PM, White 023)

Presider: Faye Ringel, UnitedStates Coast Guard Academy, retired

Paper 1: “ ‘Close This BookRight Now’: The Writer-Character in Children’s Fantasy”

AmieA. Doughty, SUNY Oneonta

Thepaper by Anne Berthelot has been withdrawn, and we believe that paper by RobertLuce has been withdrawn as well.

Mythcon 2012 CFP

2011-11-08T18:39:00.000-05:00

Sorry I missed this:

Mythcon 43 - August 2012
Call For Papers

Across the Continents: Myths and legends from Europe and Asia meet and mingle
Call for Papers: Mythopoeic Society Conference 43
Clark Kerr Campus, University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA August 3-6, 2012
http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/43/

Author Guest of Honor: Grace Lin
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature winner for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (2010); also a Newbery Honor Book.

Scholar Guest of Honor: Prof. G. Ronald Murphy, SJ
Myth and folklore scholar, winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for The Owl, the Raven & the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales (2002) and Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzival (2007)

The meeting of cultures, particularly when each appears exotic to the other, generates many possible outcomes. One culture may conquer or cooperate with the other. The two (or several) may learn to live side by side without much interaction, or one may assimilate the other. In some instances, many cultures can mingle and influence each other in a way that sets off an explosion of creativity and cross-pollination. How has the meeting of East and West influenced fantasy writers? Interesting things happen at the borders, or the margins, or the corners. Can this be seen as another example of the interstitial nature of fantasy? Fantasy vs. reality—the ultimate cultural confrontation? Disaster or the seed of creativity, richness, beauty and complexity? Something in between?

Papers dealing with these conference themes, including Asian mythology and/or fantasy works based upon it, (or other themes sparked in your brain by this topic) are especially encouraged. As always, we welcome papers focusing on the work and interests of the Inklings (especially J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams), of our Guests of Honor, and other fantasy authors and themes. Papers from a variety of critical perspectives and disciplines are welcome.

Each paper will be given a one-hour slot to allow time for questions, but individual papers should be timed for oral presentation in 40 minutes maximum. Two presenters who wish to present short, related papers may also share a one-hour slot. Participants are encouraged to submit papers chosen for presentation at the conference to Mythlore, the refereed journal of the Mythopoeic Society (http://www.mythsoc.org/mythlore/). All papers should conform to the MLA Style Manual. Paper abstracts (250 word maximum), along with contact information, should be sent to the Papers Coordinator at the following address (e-mail is preferable) by 15 April, 2012. Please include your AV requests and the projected time needed for your presentation.

Edith L. Crowe
Faculty Emerita, San Jose State University
edithcrowe@comcast.net

The Mythopoeic Society is an international literary and educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and mythopoeic literature. We believe the study of these writers can lead to greater understanding and appreciation of the literary, philosophical, and spiritual traditions which underlie their works, and can engender an interest in the study of myth, legend, and the genre of fantasy. Find out about past conferences at (http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/).

Mythlore 30.1-2 Contents

2011-11-08T18:35:00.001-05:00

As promised, here are the contents of the latest Mythlore. It can be purchased direct from The Mythopoeic Society:

Mythlore 115/116

Volume 30, Issue 1/2

2011 Fall/Winter

196 pages

Editorial
—Janet Brennan Croft

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” Seventy-five Years Later
—Michael D.C. Drout

Thresholds to Middle-earth: Allegories of Reading, Allegories for Knowledge and Transformation
—Andrew Hallam

The Pearl Maiden’s Psyche: The Middle English Pearl and the Allegorical-Visionary Impulse in Till We Have Faces
—T.S. Miller

Is a “Christian” Mystery Story Possible? Charles Williams’s War in Heaven as a Generic Case Study
—Sørina Higgins

Into the Lion’s Den: Joy Davidman and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
—Don W. King

Christian, Norse, and Celtic: Metaphysical Belief Structures in Nancy Farmer’s The Saxon Saga
—Marek Oziewicz

The Great War and Narnia: C.S. Lewis as Soldier and Creator
—Brian Melton

The Lord of the Rings’ Interlace: The Adaptation to Film
—Emily Auger

Reviews

The Making of a Mystic: New and Selected Letters of Evelyn Underhill. Ed. Carol Poston. (Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher)
From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey Through Myth and Legend. By Valerie Estelle Frankel. (Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft)
The Wizard of Oz and Philosophy: Wicked Wisdom of the West. Ed. Randall E. Auxier and Phillip S. Seng. (Reviewed by Ruth Berman)
C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile. Edited with an Introduction by A.T. Reyes. (Reviewed by Richard C. West)
The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of the Rings. Edited by Paul E. Kerry. (Reviewed by Harley J. Sims)
Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern 1.2 (2010); Journal of Inklings Studies 1.1 (March 2011); VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review 27 (2010); and Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 7 (2010). (Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft)
Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays. Edited by Jason Fisher. (Reviewed by Mike Foster.)

Area Session List Update

2011-11-08T18:15:00.002-05:00

Here is the latest updates (as of this afternoon) on our area sessions for this weeks conference:

ScienceFiction, Fantasy,and Legend Area

2011 Annual Conference of the Northeast PopularCulture/American Culture Association

Western Connecticut StateUniversity (Danbury, CT), November 11-12, 2011

ScienceFiction, Fantasy, and Legend I: Science Fiction (Session I, Friday, 4-5:30 PM, Warner320)

Presider:Michael A. Torregrossa, The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Cultureand the Middle Ages

Paper1: “Surviving The Night of the Comet:Zombies, Space, and the 2012 Hysteria”

Kristine Larsen, Physics and Earth SciencesDepartment, Central Connecticut State University

Paper2: “Ain’t I a Xenomorph?: Representations of Post-Feminist Identity in the Alien Films”

Randy Laist, Goodwin College

ScienceFiction, Fantasy, and Legend II: Legends Old and New (Session II, Saturday,8:30-10 AM, Warner 320)

Presider:Brian Clements, Western Connecticut State University

Paper1: “Robin Hood in Ballad and Film”

Kerry R. Kaleba, George Mason University

Paper2: “What Do Vampires Have to Do with the Holy Grail?: The Transformation of theGrail Legend in Undead Arthuriana”

Michael A. Torregrossa, The Virtual Society for theStudy of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages

Paper3: “Vampires in Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire novels and the TwilightSaga”

Andrea Siegel, Graduate Center/CUNY

ScienceFiction, Fantasy, and Legend III: Fantasy (Session III, Saturday, 10:30 AM – 12PM, White 023)

Presider:Faye Ringel, United States Coast Guard Academy, retired

Paper1: “ ‘Epic’ in Epic-Fantasy Literature”

Robert Luce, Independent Scholar

Paper2: “Who Is Afraid Of Merlin? The Darkening of Merlin in Modern ArthurianFiction”

Anne Berthelot, University of Connecticut

Paper3: “ ‘Close This Book Right Now’: The Writer-Character in Children’s Fantasy”

Amie A. Doughty, SUNY Oneonta

For more details about the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area

and to check out our current call for papers,

visit our blog at http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/.

CFP PCAACA 2012

2011-11-05T02:15:00.000-04:00

The calls for papers from the upcoming joint meeting of the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association are now online. I've pasted the area list below to preserve links to the individual CFPs. Be aware that it is a very long list.

Boston 2012

April 11 - 14, 2012
Note: This is a week later than we have traditionally held it in the past.

Deadlines

Registration:

Paper Proposals Due December 15, 2011

Proposals Due for Endowment January 7, 2012

Tentative Program on Web January 28, 2012

Early Bird Registration Ends January 31, 2012

Regular Registration Begins February 1, 2012

Regular Registration Ends March 31, 2012

Late Registration Begins April 1, 2012

Last Day for a Refund February 15, 2012

Areas & Chairs

Subject Areas with names underlined and highlighted in blue have submitted Calls for Papers (CFP's). To see an area's CFP, click on the highlighted name. As soon as an area's up-dated (2012) CFP becomes available, it will be linked to the area's name; check back often.

Submit a proposal to only one area at a time. Exceptions and rules.
You should submit your proposals online: PCA 2.0

(back)

|A-B| C-D| E-F| G-H| I-L| M-N| P-R| S-T| U-W|

A Special Topic--Boston Conference
Science and Technology

stgermaina@wit.edu

Academics & Collegiate Culture

acaney@ccp.edu

Adaptation (Film, TV, Lit., & Electronic Gaming)

dennis_cutchins@byu.edu

Lynneaking@hotmail.com

Adolescence in Film & Television

k.hart@tcu.edu

Advertising

sdanna@luc.edu

African-American Culture

katrina.hazzard@gmail.com

African Culture

doug.julien@tamut.edu

Age of Theodore Roosevelt & Popular Culture

murphy@hanover.edu

Aging & Senior Culture

faug@loc.gov

American Indian Literatures & Cultures

conniejb@email.arizona.edu

rsax@unm.edu

American Literature

richardsongr@uncw.edu

Animation

david.silverman@kwu.edu

Appalachian Studies

lworthington@gsc.edu

Armed Conflict

separry@ilstu.edu

rmclaugh@ilstu.edu

Arthurian Legends

Asian Popular Culture

jlent@temple.edu

xuying2@hotmail.com

Australian & New Zealand Popular Culture

t.johnsonwoods@uq.edu.au

Automobile Culture

mcgoun@bucknell.edu

Baby-Boomer Culture

jvonschilling@northampton.edu

Biographies

susie.skarl@unlv.edu

Black Music Culture

Hip Hop Culture

wbanfield@berklee.edu

anelson@bgsu.edu

Hip Hop

crystal.alberts@gmail.com

crystal.alberts@und.nodak.edu

Body and Physical Difference

lkelly@carrollu.edu

Border Studies, Cultural Economy & Migration

aracelimasterson@augustana.edu

Brazilian Popular Culture

ayala@denison.edu

martinem1@ohiodominican.edu

British Popular Culture

mthum@umflint.edu

rigaf@canisius.edu

Buffy, The Vampire Slayer

manyiwo0807@curry.edu

Business/Corporate Culture

dosborne@scc.spokane.edu

Caribbean

Literature & Culture

jorge.febles@unf.edu

Celebrity in Culture

mikebro@erols.com

Cemeteries & Gravemarkers

jedgette1@widener.edu

Chicana/o Culture: Literature, Film, Theory

scott.baugh@ttu.edu

alyssa.ryan@ttu.edu

Children's/YA Series Books and Dime Novels

James@Keeline.com

Children‘s Literature & Culture

harryeiss@comcast.net

Circuses & Circus Culture

robsugar@comcast.net

Civil War & Reconstruction

allredr@byuh.edu

Collecting & Collectibles

kmm104@psu.edu

Comedy and Humor

lsnaith@westga.edu

Comic Art & Comics

nfreim@charter.net

Communication & Digital Culture

mnunes@spsu.edu

Creative Fiction Writing

jerry.bradley@lamar.edu

Dance & Culture

DanceAndCulture@gmail.com

Disasters & Culture

larabee@msu.edu

Documentary

hmm160@gmail.com

Eastern European Studies

phoboes2000@yahoo.com

Ecology and Culture

meo@email.unc.edu

Education, Teaching, History & Popular Culture

ejanak@uwyo.edu

Eros, Pornography & Popular Culture

muirkb@appstate.edu

Fairy Tales

lholland-toll@moc.edu

rnicks@utk.edu

Fan Culture & Theory

klarsen@gwu.edu

Fashion, Style, Appearance, Consumption & Design

Jhh33@drexel.edu

alphonso.d.mcclendon@drexel.edu

Fat Studies

goddess_les@yahoo.com

jmccross@gwu.edu

Festivals & Faires

DrKTKorolEvans@yahoo.com

Film

donaldpalumbo@earthlink.net

Film Adaptation

david.moody@oswego.edu

Film & History

cymiller@tiac.net

Folklore

nixone@franklin.edu

Food in Popular Culture

btaylor@email.unc.edu

Game Studies
Tony Avruch
American Culture Studies Program
Bowling Green State University
digitalgames.pcaaca@gmail.com
avruch.pca@gmail.com
&
Joshua Call
Department of English
Grandview University
digitalgames.pcaaca@gmail.com
&
Gerald Voorhees
Nido Qubein School of Communication
High Point University
digitalgames.pcaaca@gmail.com
&
Katie Whitlock
Theatre Department
California State University, Chico
digitalgames.pcaaca@gmail.com

Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Studies

drushebe@muohio.edu

Gender Studies

cpeirce@apu.edu

Gender & Media Studies

dphillip@muskingum.edu

Generation X

watsone@etsu.edu

German Literature & Culture

claude.desmarais@ubc.ca

Gothic in Literature, Film, & Culture

louis.palmer@castleton.edu

Horror

pcahorror@gmail.com

Indian Culture, Art, & Media

rmenon@berklee.edu

Internet Culture

montanm@bgnet.bgsu.edu

Jack London's Life & Works
Gina M. Rossetti, PhD
Associate Professor and Chair
Saint Xavier University
Chicago, IL 60655
EMAIL

Journalism

& Media Culture

jvonschilling@northampton.edu

muirkb@appstate.edu

Language

Attitudes & Popular Linguistics

donaher@missouriwestern.edu

Latin American Film & Media

aracelimasterson@augustana.edu

Latin Americans & Latinos:

Identity Issues & Cultural Stereotypes

rrosales@drew.edu

Latin American Literature & Culture

patricia.montilla@wmich.edu

Latin American Performance Studies

robertharker@charter.net

Libraries, Archives, Museums,

& Popular Research

ellisa@nku.edu

Literature & Madness

brieger@lander.edu

Literature & Politics

mooreg@colorado.edu

Literature & Science

robertsi@missouriwestern.edu

Literature & Society

salong@olemiss.edu

Material Culture

alexbitterman@gmail.com

Medical Humanities: Health & Disease in Culture

jennifer.tebbe@mcphs.edu

Medieval Popular Culture & Arthurian Legends

kaufmana@mtsu.edu

Memory & Representation

confortir1@southernct.edu

Men/Men's Studies

hxh17@psu.edu

Mental Health & Mental Illness in Popular Culture

lrubin@stu.edu

Motherhood/Fatherhood & Popular Culture

lpodniek@ryerson.ca

Motorcycling Culture & Myth

garberwwr@earthlink.net

gary.kieffner@clovis.edu

Music

Kittst@stjohns.edu

Musicals, Stage & Film

goldsts@DaytonaState.edu

Mystery & Detective Fiction

beth.blakesley@wsu.edu

mfreier@nmu.edu

Mythology in Contemporary Culture

earth2k8@mac.com

Sywilkers@aol.com

New England Studies

pholloran@worcester.edu

New/Special Topics in Popular Culture

Jhh33@drexel.edu

Non-Fiction Writing

Dan_Jones@tamu-commerce.edu

Philosophy & Popular Culture

tmadigan@sjfc.edu

jokapal@missouriwestern.edu

Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry

malleman@lsue.edu

Politics Portrayed in Electronic Print and Media

fhassenc@odu.edu

Popular American Authors

rjones@rangercollege.edu

Popular Art, Architecture, & Design

derhamgroves@hotmail.com

derham@unimelb.edu.au

Popular History in American Culture

jstevens@rwu.edu

Professional Development

Jhh33@drexel.edu

hkent3@uis.edu

Protest Issues & Actions

larsenl@wou.edu

Pulp Studies

j.everet@usp.edu

dpettipiece@wcupa.edu

Punk Culture

acc27@drexel.edu

Radio & Audio Media

frank.chorba@washburn.edu

Religion & Culture

ihs@ionet.net

Rhetoric, Composition, & Popular Culture

richarjj@potsdam.edu

Romance

sarahfrantz@gmail.com

Science Fiction/Fantasy

pcasff@gmail.com

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Sea Literature, History, & Culture

curleys@tamug.edu

Shakespeare on Film and Television

richard.vela@uncp.edu

The Sixties

carmic28@msu.edu

Soap Opera

irwin@canisius.edu

Sociology of Literature

salong@olemiss.edu

Southern Literature & Culture

chris.bloss@gmail.com

Sports

vlasich@suu.edu

Stephen King

stephenkingpca@gmail.com

Subcultural Style & Identity

vicki.karaminas@uts.edu.au

Tarot in Culture

augeremily@gmail.com

Television

pcatelevision@gmail.com

Theatre & Drama

kwiggins@martinmethodist.edu

Transatlantic Cultural Issues

febles@wisc.edu

Travel & Tourism

marcuspg@hotmail.com

Undergraduate Sessions

mrubinfeld@westminstercollege.edu

The Vampire in Literature, Culture, & Film

mfindley@vtc.edu

Virtual Idenities & Self-Promoting

consilje@lewisu.edu

Visual & Verbal Culture

aubreyj@mscd.edu

Visual Culture

royce.smith@wichita.edu

War After 1945: Literature, History, Culture, and the Arts

rprescot@kent.edu

Westerns & the West

lewish@witcc.edu

Women's Studies

hkent3@uis.edu

World's Fairs & Expositions

manningmj@state.gov

Film & History 2012 History Conference

2011-11-05T01:27:00.000-04:00

Here is the full CFP for the Film & History Conference. Links are to PDF versions of the CFPs:

F i l m a n d M y t h
CALL for PAPERS and for AREA CHAIRS (organizers of multiple panels)

Area-Chair Proposals: December 15, 2011

Proposals for Panels or Individual Papers: June 1, 2012

Download the Poster: The 2012 F&H Conference Award for Best New Film

The 2012 Film & History Conference (Sept. 26-30, Hyatt Regency, Milwaukee, USA) will examine the power of myth in film, television, and the other moving-image arts.
As a collective pattern, myth transcends the individual, yet it provides structure to our most personal feelings and assumptions. It can be subtle or obvious, shallow or complex. It can move nations to attack each other—or to reconcile. It can induce affection or ridicule or longing. Myth operates somewhere between the waking consciousness of history and the drowsy consciousness of mystery. Often it is both narrative and meta-narrative, trying to tell us what we know and how we might know it. And film is the most vibrant stage of mythmaking today. How do films exploit or succumb to certain myths? Why do audiences embrace one mythic pattern over another—in romance or tragedy or comedy? Who or what controls mythmaking in film and television? How do certain historical characters or events become legendary? How do they become mythic? What historical mutations have myths undergone in film? What myths are on the horizon?
Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal invites proposals to chair an area of multiple panels. Please send a brief description of your area (100-200 words) to FilmandHistory@uwosh.edu by December 15, 2011. Describe the area/topic, and pose the fundamental questions it will address. The deadline to be listed on your Call for Papers will be June 1, 2012. There will be no rolling deadlines before that date. The areas listed below are suggestions; you are welcome to modify an area or to propose an area of your own. Here is the template to use for drafting your Call: CFP Template.UPDATED LIST (as of October 17, 2011)
Adventure! Danger! Romance!: Myths of Exploration
Animating History: "Disney Americans" and Other Myths
Archetype and Ego Psychology in Film
Beast or Human: Animal Myths in Film and Television
Chalk It Up to Myth: Education on Film
Chicks with Brains: Representing Women's Intellect in Film
Cowboy Mythology: Frontier Myths
Crime and Punishment: Mythologizing the Law
Doctored Reality: The Myths of Medicine in Film
Dwelling on Myth: The City, The Suburb, and The Farm
Evil, Sin, Death, Doom: Mythologizing the Underworld in Film
Facing Race: Film, Television, and Myth
Future Myths, Mythic Futures
Heroes and Villains: Iconography, Narrative, and Film
Innocence and Experience: Children, the Elderly, and Myth
Legend or Myth: Anthropological Entanglements in Film
Literature, Genre, and Myth: Structures, Texts, Films
Marriage and Family Myths in Film
Medieval Magic, Myths, and Legends in Film and Television
Monster Myths: Terror, Horror, and Film
Music, Motifs, and Mythmaking
Myth, Inc.: The Business World in Film and Television
Myths R Us: Nationality in Film and Television
Mythic Mother Nature: Storytelling and Myth-Building Through Moving Image Representations of Nature and the Environment
Mythical Movie Jews: Anti- and Philo-Semitic Stereotypes on the Silver Screen
Mything God: Religious Desire in Film and Television
Mythmaking and Marketing: The Money Trail On and Off the Screen
Mythos: Screening Classical Mythology on Film and Television
Mythologies of Travel in Film and Television
Myths of War, Myths of Peace
Myths R Us: Nationality in Film
Natives and Primitives: The Myths of Oral Cultures
Naught-I Movies: Untangling Sex and Gender Myths
Science-Fiction Myths: Travels through Time and Space
Sir Dude and Madame Chick: Mythologizing Class in Film
Storytelling101: History as Myth on the Big Screen
The Classic Myths of Classical History on Film
The Myths of Science and Scientists
West/East: Hollywood/Bollywood
Each conference room will be equipped with a 50-inch plasma TV, with direct HDMI and VGA+audio hookups to your laptop computer. We'll have adapters for mini-DVI, DVI-to-VGA, and DisplayPort. Blu-Ray/DVD players will also be available in case you don't have a laptop and wish to bring just your media for presentation.
Your job will be to practice activating the external video port on your laptop computer. Usually, "clone" or "mirror" or "duplicate" will be offered in the "Display" section of your computer's operating system.

CFP Science-Fiction Myths: Travels through Time and Space

2011-11-05T01:24:00.000-04:00

Sorry I missed this.

CALL FOR PAPERS (download PDF)

“Science-Fiction Myths: Travels through Time and Space”

An area of multiple panels for the Film & History Conference on “Film and Myth”

September 26-30, 2012

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

www.filmandhistory.org

Deadline: June 1, 2012

Films that depict travel through time and space captivate us with tales of the past, the future, the
distant, and the alien. These stories are shaped, however, not just by scientific principles, but by
complex mythologies that reflect our collective anxieties. How fragile is “our” history? A
seemingly trivial change to the past—a dropped book in Back to the Future, an act of kindness
in The Butterfly Effect—can sweep away the present and replace it with something far worse (or
far better). How do the alien forms of distant worlds beckon us (with a new Earth in Titan A.E.)
or disappoint us (with pale imitations of Earth in Firefly) or terrify us (with the upside-down
society of Planet of the Apes)? How do space- and time-travel myths give shape to our fears—of
loving the wrong person, of leaving home forever, of being forgotten, of entering a foreign
world? How do these myths give shape to our hopes—that the future is ours to shape, that the
universe is full of wonders, that human experience might transcend time and space?
This area, comprising multiple panels, will treat all aspects of the mythological underpinnings of
space and time travel in science-fiction films and television programs. Papers that explore how
such myths are played out in science fiction from outside the US and UK are especially
welcome. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Nomads: Cold Sleep, Relativity, and the Loneliness of Space Travel
Generation Spaceships and the Ship-as-World (e.g., Alien, Pandorum)
Time Travel and "Fixing History" (e.g., Quantum Leap, 12 Monkeys)
Love, Sex, and the Time Traveler (e.g., Back to the Future, Somewhere in Time)
Who Are You?: Myth and Identity in Space and Time Travel
Paradoxes in Time Travel: Killing Grandpa, and Other Bad Ideas
Just Like California: “Alien” Worlds and Space Travel as Tourism
Galactic Empires: Rome with Spaceships?
The Human(oid) Void: Myths of First Contact (e.g., Star Trek, Babylon 5)
Homeward Bound: Myths of the Lost Earth (e.g., Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Wall-E)
Wormhole Diplomacy: Bridging Cultural Spaces

Proposals for complete panels (three related presentations) are also welcome, but they must
include an abstract and contact information, including an e-mail address, for each presenter.

Please e-mail your 200-word proposal by June 1, 2012:
A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Area Chair, 2012 Film & History Conference
“Science-Fiction Myths: Travels through Space and Time”
Southern Polytechnic State University
Email: bvanriper@bellsouth.net

Call for Papers of Interest

2011-11-02T22:56:00.000-04:00

SFRA 2012 Conference

2011-11-02T22:25:00.001-04:00

The Science Fiction Research Association has posted its call for papers for next year's annual meeting. Details as follows:

SFRA 2012 Conference - Urban Apocalypse, Urban Renaissance: Science Fiction and Fantasy Landscapes

Dates: 06/28/2012 - 07/01/2012

SFRA 2012 Conference: Urban Apocalypse, Urban Renaissance: Science Fiction and Fantasy Landscapes

June 28-July 1, 2012

Detroit, Michigan

The 2012 SFRA Conference will meet in Detroit, Michigan on June 28-July 1.

With the theme of “Urban Apocalypse, Urban Renaissance: Science Fiction and Fantasy Landscapes,” the conference will explore urban destruction and construction through science fiction and fantasy media including novels, short stories, music, movies, television shows, and video games. The Guest of Honor is Eric Rabkin, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the guest speakers include Professor Steven Shaviro of Wayne State University and writers Saladin Ahmed, Sarah Zettel (aka C.L. Anderson), and Minister Faust.

Call for papers:

Urban Apocalypse, Urban Renaissance: Science Fiction and Fantasy Landscapes

Detroit is at once an apocalyptic city and a Renaissance city. Over the past ten years, Detroit has suffered immensely, especially during the economic downturn and the virtual demise of the auto industry. Its apocalyptic landscape of abandoned buildings, its negative image due to high crime rates, a recently impeached corrupt Mayor, Kwame Kilpartick, and the loss of close to 300,000 people in the last census have made it the symbol of a city with a hopeless future. However, there is hope as the so called Renaissance city of the 1970s may now be experiencing a true Renaissance. New venues for the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Lions, funding obtained by Mayor Bing to raze many of the abandoned buildings, the resurgence of the auto industry along with an invitation to the film industry, and a call for repopulation of Detroit with legal immigrants by New York Mayor Bloomberg may re-establish Detroit as the major city that it could be.

It is an urban landscape of change, revealing the end of one era and the beginning of another–an urban landscape that is ripe for science fiction and fantasy literature. The wide-ranging landscape of Detroit, Michigan is reminiscent of the various landscapes evident in science fiction and fantasy. Thus, Detroit can serve as an inspiration for paper topics considered at this conference. Papers can cover any topic concerning landscapes. Here are some suggested topics.

Apocalyptic Landscapes in science fiction and fantasy, as in the novels Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut, Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre, or The Road by McCarthy
Renaissance landscapes evident in utopic literature such as More’s Utopia
Psychogeography presented in recent novels like Valente’s Palimpsest or Mieville’s The  City and the City
Alien Landscapes: from the landscape in Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” to Pohl’s Venus in The Space Merchants to Le Guin’s Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness to Robinson’s Mars trilogy to Vinge’s Fire upon the Deep
Landscapes created by terraforming
Set design in SF films, like Syd Mead’s set design in Blade Runner, based in part on the Detroit skyline of the early 80s
Virtual landscapes as in the fiction of Greg Egan, William Gibson, Charles Stross, etc. or  in films, such as The Matrix
Foreign landscapes as evident in recent novels like Bacigalupi’s Thailand in The Wind- Up Girl, McDonald’s Istanbul in The Dervish House, VanderMeer’s Ambergris in Finch, etc.
Alternate history landscapes
U.S. landscapes as in Gaiman’s Minnesota in American Gods or Doctorow’s San Francisco in Little Brother
Ecological landscapes: The effects of pollution or eco-terrorism on landscapes
Future landscapes as in Banks’ Algebraist, Stephenson’s Anathem, or Wilson’s Julian   Comstock or past landscapes as in Butler’s Kindred, Willis’ Doomsday Book, or Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Space or the spaceship as a landscape?
Gender Landscapes

Non-conference themed papers and panels related to or focusing on science fiction and fantasy are also welcomed!

Please forward abstracts to sdberman1121@gmail.com by April 23rd, 2012

Presenters must be members of the SFRA. To join, go to sfra.org.

Full conference details are available here: http://sfradetroit2012.com/

NEPCA Reminder

2011-11-02T22:22:00.000-04:00

A reminder that the 2011 conference of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association convenes next week, 11-12 November, at Western Connecticut State University. The complete program and registration information can be found on their website at http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/NEPConf.html.

Hope to see you there.

Science Fiction Studies 38.3

2011-11-02T22:16:00.000-04:00

The latest issue (38.3) of Science Fiction Studies arrived today. Here are the contents from their website. Hyperlinks are to abstracts of each paper.

Science Fiction Studies

#115 = Volume 38, Part 3 = November 2011

ESSAY

Mike Davis. Ward Moore’s Freedom Ride

ARTICLES

Andrew Milner. Science Fiction and the Literary Field

Charles Thorpe. Death of a Salesman: Petit-Bourgeois Dread in Philip K. Dick’s Mainstream Fiction

Theo Finigan. “Into the Memory Hole”: Totalitarianism and Mal d’Archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale

Elissa Gurman. “The holy and the powerful light that shines through history”: Tradition and Technology in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

Charles Paulk. Post-National Cool: William Gibson’s Japan

REVIEW-ESSAYS

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. Sound is the New Light: Whittington’s Sound Design and Science Fiction

Carl Abbott. The Imagination of Disaster, Revisited: Page’s The City’s End and Yablon’s Untimely Ruins.

Jess Nevins. Defining Steampunk: Ashley’s Steampunk Prime, Bowser/Croxall’s “Steampunk, Science, and (Neo)Victorian Technologies,” and VanderMeers’ Steampunk II

Jerome Winter. Lab Coats, Not Straitjackets: Allen’s Master Mechanics and Wicked Wizards and Kirby’s Science, Scientists, and Film

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Bolton/Csicsery-Ronay, Jr./Tatsumi’s Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams (Hajime Nakatani)

Meehan’s The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir and Botting’s Limits of Horror (Carl Freedman)

Bould/Butler/Roberts/Vint’s Fifty Key Figures in SF (Eric S. Rabkin)

Cherry’s Horror (Kimberly Hall)

Chu’s Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep? (John Rieder)

Fowler/Notkin’s 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin (Elizabeth Lundberg)

Gomel’s Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination (Joshua Raulerson)

Hampton’s Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler (Arianna Gremigni)

Mendlesohn/James’s A Short History of Fantasy (Kristin Noone)

Rich’s C.M Kornbluth (Joe Sanders)

Thaler’s Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions (Mark Young)

Urbanski’s Essays on New Media Rhetoric (Lisa Yaszek)

Books Received

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE

Campbell, “Doc” Smith, and the CIC (Edward Wysocki)
William Wilson (Richard Bleiler)
Mullen Research Fellows for 2011-12 (Rob Latham)
“Must-Read” SF (Carol McGuirk)
New Associations, Conference Reports, Translation Awards, CFPs
Volume Index
Notes on Contributors
“For-a-While”: Remembering Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

New Mythlore

2011-11-02T22:12:00.003-04:00

The latest issue (30.1-2) of Mythlore has been published. Contents will be posted as soon as they are available.

RIP Realms of Fantasy

2011-11-02T22:10:00.001-04:00

The literary magazine Realms of Fantasy has died again after a valiant attempt to revive the serial. Details can be found at the magazine's blog at http://www.rofmag.com/.

Programming Nightmares

2011-10-28T22:09:00.000-04:00

Well they've done it again. In their infinite wisdom, the programs at FOX, CW, and NBC have all scheduled genre programming against each other on Friday nights at 9 PM EST. FOX airs the fourth season of Fringe (preempted tonight because of baseball), CW the seventh season of Supernatural, and NBC freshman series Grimm (following a lead-in from the fifth and final season of Chuck). Hopefully, NBC won't cancel Grimm too soon.

Retro TV on DVD--The Mighty Hercules and Drak Pack

2011-10-19T16:15:00.000-04:00

For animation junkies and fans of retro TV, two recent releases might be of interest. A single-disc version of the classic 1960s series The Mighty Hercules has been released by Classic Media, while Visual Entertaining Inc. has issued a three-disc set of Drak Pack, a 1980s mash-up of the Universal monsters and The Super Friends. Trailers to both shows are appended below. The DVDs are available for purchase online and at your local retailers.

Remember Jem and the Holograms?

2011-10-10T20:18:00.001-04:00

I came across an interesting post on io9.com interviewing Samantha Newark, the actress who voiced series protagonist Jerrica Benton and her alter ego Jem, on the 1980s's animated series Jem (1985-88), which included significant sf elements and is now available on DVD.

For those unfamiliar with the series, here is the opening sequence:

I, Vampire Reborn

2011-10-10T18:34:00.000-04:00

DC Comics is re-envisioning vampire Andrew Bennett in the new series I, Vampire as part of the New 52 re-launching of the DC Universe into Andrew Stanton, a radically younger version of the established character. There is an insightful interview with the writer, Joshua Fialkov, at Newsarama.

BBC America This Saturday

2011-09-26T12:08:00.000-04:00

Coming this Saturday (1 October). BBC America premieres the season finale of Doctor Who and the series opener of Bedlam. Trailers follow.

New TV: Terra Nova

2011-09-26T11:59:00.000-04:00

FOX premieres new series Terra Nova tonight, in which future humans retreat to the prehistoric past when conditions on present-day Earth become to dangerous. There is an interview with executive producers Brannon Braga and Rene Echevarria at the Geek Chic Daily website, and the series opener is reviewed in today's Los Angeles Times.

The following is the initial trailer for the series:

Iron Giant Returns

2011-09-25T19:37:00.003-04:00

Knopf Books for Young Readers has recently released a new US edition of Ted Hughes's The Iron Man (1968) under its more familiar title, The Iron Giant, with illustrations by British artist Laura Carlin. The art is somewhat strange making this an atypical children's book, but the story, which inspired a 1999 animated feature film, is sure to captive readers young and old, who may be drawn further in through the inventiveness of Carlin's designs. Previews of the art can be found at Walker Books, publishers of the British version.

Making Avatar

2011-09-25T18:49:00.001-04:00

Publisher Abrams Books has recently released Jody Duncan and Lisa Fitzpatrick's The Making of Avatar (2010). With nearly 300 pages, the book is a detailed--often too detailed, at times--look at the technological innovations behind the feature film. I don't believe it will appeal to casual fans of the film, and die-hard fans might be more interested in the world-building (serviced in part by Fitzpatrick's The Art of Avatar:James Cameron’s Epic Adventure [also from Abrams Books, 2009]) than the technology that was involved in its creation.

Advance Call for Papers NEPCA 2012

2011-09-25T01:43:00.000-04:00

ADVANCE CALL FOR PAPERS

SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND LEGEND AREA

http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/

2012 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)

St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York

Fall 2012 (Exact Dates TBA)

Proposals by 1 June 2012

Proposals are invited from scholars of all levels for papers to be presented in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes in length (depending on final panel size) and may address any aspect of the intermedia genres of science fiction, fantasy, and/or legends as represented in popular culture produced in any country, any time period, and for any audience. Please see our website (http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/) for further details and ideas.

If you are interested in proposing a paper or panel of papers, please send a proposal of approximately 300 to 500 words and a one to two page CV to both the Program Chair AND to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area Chair at the following addresses (please note "SF/Fantasy/Legend Proposal" in your subject line):

Tim Madigan

Program Chair

tmadigan@rochester.rr.com

Michael A. Torregrossa

Science Fiction, Fantasy and Legend Area Chair

Popular.Culture.and.the.Middle.Ages@gmail.com

The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is a regional affiliate of the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association. NEPCA is an association of scholars in New England and New York, organized in 1974 at the University of Rhode Island. We reorganized and incorporated in Boston in 1992. The purpose of this professional association is to encourage and assist research, publication, and teaching on popular culture and culture studies topics by scholars in the northeast region of the United States. By bringing together scholars from various disciplines, both academic and non-academic people, we foster interdisciplinary research and learning. We publish a newsletter twice per year and we hold an annual conference at which we present both the Peter C. Rollins Book Award and an annual prize.

Membership in NEPCA is required for participation. Annual dues are currently $30 for full-time faculty and $15 to all other individuals. Further details are available at http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/NEPCA.html.

NEPCA 2011 Sessions

2011-09-25T01:37:00.000-04:00

The program for the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association is now avaliable online. The conference will be held at Western Connecitcut State University in Danbury, Connecticut, from 11-12 November 2011.

Details on our sessions are as follows:

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend I: Science Fiction (Session I, Friday, 4-5:30 PM, Warner 320)

Presider: Michael A. Torregrossa, The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages

Paper 1: “Surviving The Night of the Comet: Zombies, Space, and the 2012 Hysteria”

Kristine Larsen, Physics and Earth Sciences Department, Central Connecticut State University

Paper 2: “Abandonment and Salvation in Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book”

Marlene San Miguel Groner, Farmingdale State College/SUNY

Paper 3: “Ain’t I a Xenomorph?: Representations of Post-Feminist Identity in the Alien Films”

Randy Laist, Goodwin College

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend II: Legends Old and New (Session II, Saturday, 8:30-10 AM, Warner 320)

Presider: Brian Clements, Western Connecticut State University

Paper 1: “The Werewolf: Out of Bounds”

Barry Hall, University of Nizwa

Paper 2: “Robin Hood in Ballad and Film”

Kerry R. Kaleba, George Mason University

Paper 3: “What Do Vampires Have to Do with the Holy Grail?: The Transformation of the Grail Legend in Undead Arthuriana”

Michael A. Torregrossa, The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages

Paper 4: “Vampires in Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire novels and the Twilight Saga”

Andrea Siegel, Graduate Center/CUNY

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend III: Fantasy (Session III, Saturday, 10:30 AM – 12 PM, White 023)
Presider: Faye Ringel, United States Coast Guard Academy, retired

Paper 1: “ ‘Epic’ in Epic-Fantasy Literature”

Robert Luce, Independent Scholar

Paper 2: “Who Is Afraid Of Merlin? The Darkening of Merlin in Modern Arthurian Fiction”

Anne Berthelot, University of Connecticut

Paper 3: “ ‘Close This Book Right Now’: The Writer-Character in Children’s Fantasy”

Amie A. Doughty, SUNY Oneonta

Paper 4: “Fandom 2.0: Fantasy, Social Media, and Fan Creativity”

James Kennedy, Columbia College

Twilight and Its Contexts

2011-08-20T01:07:00.001-04:00

Published last year from John Wiley & Sons, Twilight and History is a mixed bag of essays exploring the various contexts of the Twilight series:

Twilight and History
Nancy Reagin
ISBN: 978-0-470-58178-0
Paperback
288 pages
April 2010
US $17.95

The first look at the history behind Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series, timed to release with the third movie, Eclipse.

The characters of the Twilight Saga carry a rich history that shapes their identities and actions over the course of the series. Edward, for instance, may look like a seventeen-year-old teen heartthrob, but was actually born in 1901 and died during the Spanish Influenza of 1918. His adopted sister, Alice, was imprisoned in an insane asylum in 1920 and treated so badly there that even becoming a vampire was a welcome escape. This book is the first to explore the history behind the Twilight Saga's characters and their stories. You’ll learn about what life might have been like for Jasper Whitlock Hale, the Confederate vampire who fought during the Civil War, Carlisle Cullen, the Puritan witch hunter-turned-vampire who participated in the witchcraft persecutions in Early Modern England, and the history of the Quileute culture that shaped Jacob and his people —and much more.

Gives you the historical backdrop for Twilight Saga characters and events
Adds a whole new dimension to the Twilight novels and movies
Offers fresh insights on vampires, romance, and history
Twilight and History is an essential companion for every Twilight fan, whether you've just gotten into the series or have followed it since the beginning.

CONTENTS:

Acknowledgments: For Those Who Turned Us.

Twilight's Timeline.

Introduction: Frozen in Time (Nancy R. Reagin).

PART ONE: Your Basic Human-Vampire-Werewolf/Shape-shifter Triangle: Bella, Edward, and Jacob.

1 “An Old-Fashioned Gentleman”? Edward’s Imaginary History (Kate Cochran). [download from the publisher]

2 Biting Bella: Treaty Negotiation, Quileute History, and Why “Team Jacob” Is Doomed to Lose (Judith Leggatt and Kristin Burnett).

3 CinderBella: Twilight, Fairy Tales, and the Twenty-First-Century American Dream (Sara Buttsworth).

4 Courting Edward Cullen: Courtship Rituals and Marital Expectations in Edward’s Youth (Catherine Coker).

PART TWO: Some Family History: The Cullen Coven.

5 Jasper Hale, the Oldest Living Confederate Veteran (Elizabeth Baird Hardy).

6 Smoky Mountain Twilight: The Appalachian Roots of Emmett McCarty Cullen and His Family (Elizabeth Baird Hardy).

7 Better Turned Than “Cured”? Alice and the Asylum (Grace Loiacono and Laura Loiacono).

8 Carlisle Cullen and the Witch Hunts of Puritan London (Janice Liedl).

9 A Subtle and Dangerous Gift: Jasper Hale and the Specter of the American Civil War (Andrea Robertson Cremer).

10 Like Other American Families, Only Not: The Cullens and the “Ideal” Family in American History (Kyra Glass von der Osten).

PART THREE: A World of Vampires: The Volturi and Beyond.

11 The Sort of People Who Hired Michelangelo as Their Decorator: The Volturi as Renaissance Rulers (Birgit Wiedl).

12 “Where Do the Cullens Fit In?”: Vampires in European Folklore, Science, and Fiction (Eveline Brugger).

13 Getting Younger Every Decade: Being a Teen Vampire during the Twentieth Century (Kat Burkhart).

The Forks High School Faculty.

Index: Alice Foresaw All of This

Nancy R. Reagin is a professor of history and women's and gender studies at Pace University, who has published several books in modern European history. Her current research focuses on the history of literary fan communities. She's also an active fan who has worked on fan archives and Web sites, and has helped build fan organizations. She rooted for Team Jacob long after most reasonable people would have given up hope.

Torchwood Reborn?

2011-08-18T20:39:00.001-04:00

I had sworn off Torchwood after what seemed to be the needless deaths of its most interesting characters in season 2 and Children of Earth, but the recent mini-series Torchwood: Miracle Day on Starz shows some promise (though I still dislike Gwen). The first episode is/was available for viewing to non-subscribers to the pay-cable network. No word yet on a DVD release.

Extrapolation 52.2

2011-08-14T17:26:00.000-04:00

Extrapolation 52.2 (Summer 2011) arrived in the mail last week. Contents as follows:

The Holy Family in Outer Space: Reconsidering Philip K. Dick's The Divine Invasion
Umberto Rossi

Mapping the Walls of The Dispossessed
Sandra J. Lindow

Gotlieb Upon Caliban
Dominick Grace

Flexible Heroines, Flexible Narratives: The Werewolf Romances of Kelley Armstrong and Carrie Vaughn
Erin S. Young

Stanley Weinbaum: We've Met The Aliens and They Are Us
Drko Suvin

Reviews

Grimm TV Show

2011-08-14T04:02:00.000-04:00

I came upon this video in relation to Once Upon a Time: Grimm is a new series for NBC inspired by the fairy tales of the Brother's Grimm (and, clearly, a bit of The X-Files and Supernatural).

Once Upon a Time TV Show

2011-08-14T03:48:00.000-04:00

ABC is set to premiere the fairy-tale-inspired series Once Upon a Time this fall. An interview with the creators at Spinoff Online details some of the background around the creation of the series. It looks interesting, but, given the current climate towards telefantasy on network television, how long can we expect it to last?

Eureka Update

2011-08-14T03:42:00.001-04:00

SyFy has done it again, and another fan favorite series is dead. According to an article at Spinoff Online, Eureka had been green-lighted a six-episode season to tie up lose ends, but SyFy has now reneged and canceled the series out right at the end of the upcoming (and, apparently, already completed) season 5, . Fans of other popular SyFy and Sci-Fi shows (remember Farscape, for example), will no doubt recall similar circumstances that lead to their premature demise. Not to be too paranoid, but, my only question is what's next SyFy? Warehouse 13 and Sanctuary are now three years old; has their time run out as well? Is any show safe? (Besides the very, un-SyFyish ECW, of course.)

"Thundercats, Ho!"

2011-08-14T02:29:00.000-04:00

Cartoon Network has recently revived Thundercats, a fan-favorite cartoon of the 1980s, as a half-hour anime-inspired animated series airing Friday nights. The new series offers an innovative approach to the original and bears following. For those interested, the Spinoff Online web site includes some snippets from interviews with the producers and two members of the voice cast.

Doctor Who Returns 27 August

2011-08-14T02:02:00.000-04:00

The hit series Doctor Who returns to BBC America on Saturday, 27 August, and reruns air throughout the month on the network. (My thanks to the Spinoff Online web site for the head's up.)

John Carter of Mars!

2011-08-14T01:54:00.000-04:00

Trailer released last month:

Parallel Universes and Source Code

2011-08-11T14:57:00.000-04:00

The recent film Source Code is now out on DVD and Blu-Ray and for download. The film is not that great but presents an interesting theory of parallel universes and our ability to interact with them, when the US military employs a wounded soldier (there's not much of him left really) to stop a terrorist who threatens to blow up Chicago. Rather like Avatar, the soldier is uploaded into the body of another man and must discover the identity of the terrorist and stop him. In the end, the film allows the soldier to come to some resolution (at least in the parallel universe) to his life and a chance both to be a hero and to start over, albeit having taken over the life of another, who, troublingly, is never taken into account here.

Beastly on DVD

2011-08-08T01:58:00.000-04:00

The recent film Beastly is now available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and for download/rent for sources like Amazon and iTunes. The film offers a modern-day recasting of the Beauty and the Beast story and is adapted from the young adult novel by Alex Finn. As reviews have noted, it is not the most successful representation of the story, but it should spur much discussion as an adaption of Finn and of the traditional fairy tale.

I append below both the trailer and an interview with the principal cast:

DVD/Blu-Ray extras as follows:
"Be Mine" Music Video by Kristina and the Dolls
Alternate Ending
Deleted Scenes
A Classic Tale Retold: The Story of Beastly
Creating the Perfect Beast

CFP Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (8/15/11)

2011-07-18T21:47:00.000-04:00

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/41890

Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology
full name / name of organization: Ken Dvorak, PhD
contact email: krdvorak@nnmc.edu

We are seeking contributors for a collection of critical essays on Steampunk. Steampunk remains an elusive topic even among its admirers and practitioners, but at its heart, it re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. From sci-fi and fantasy to websites catering to a Steampunk lifestyle, this multi-faceted genre demands greater scholarly analysis.

The editors of this anthology seek contributions in the following suggested subject areas:

Steampunk Film
Steampunk Literature
Steampunk History
Steampunk Fashion
Steampunk Technology
Steampunk Fandom/fan culture
Steampunk Art & Design
Steampunk as Culture/Lifestyle Gender
and
Steampunk Critiques of existing analyses of Steampunk

Submission Guidelines: Send a 1000 word abstract in Microsoft Word by email attachment on or before August 15, 2011; include a brief biography or vita. International submissions are welcomed and encouraged.

Abstracts chosen for inclusion in the anthology will be considered “conditional acceptances” – the editors will secure the submission in the volume, but the editors reserve the right to reject any full essay that does not meet the standards (of style/content, etc) agreed to between the editors and authors. Endnotes are mandatory; illustrations are encouraged and must be secured (along with permissions) by the author and submitted with the final draft.

Editors:
Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo
History Dept., University of Maryland
Email: Taddeo@mail.umd.edu

Dr. Cynthia Miller
Institute for Liberal Arts, Emerson College
cynthia_miller@emerson.edu

Dr. Ken Dvorak
Distance Education, Northern New Mexico College
Email: krdvorak@nnmc.edu

CFP The Undead (NeMLA) (9/30/11)

2011-07-18T21:37:00.002-04:00

http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/41506

The Undead (deadline 9/30/2011)
full name / name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association
contact email: lindsay.bryde@gmail.com

This seminar seeks papers with strong analytical theses that offer readings of the undead phenomenon in literature and/or pop culture. Proposals may theorize the undead, offer close readings of individual undead texts, contemporary or not, but should keep in mind the big picture question: why is this material resonating so strongly with contemporary audiences (American or otherwise)? How do we, in other words, make sense of our love of the undead? Send 300-500 word abstracts and a brief biography to Lindsay Bryde at lindsay.bryde@gmail.com.

Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Legend Area

Monsters in America

CFP History of Video Games

CFP Anomalous Ethnographies

CFP Monstrophy

CFP Speculative Dimensions of Divination

Techno-Orientalism in SF CFP

CFP Supernaturally Grimm: Fairy Tales on TV

New Bradbury Scholarship

American Literature Special Issue

Latin American SF

CFP ORU Conference on Science and Science Fiction

Call For PapersFor the ORU Conference on Science and Science FictionApril 12 & 13, 2012

Plenary Speakers

New Book on Supernatural

Wrath of the Titans Trailer

CFP Wagner Conference

CFP Neo-Victorian Studies

CFP Folklore and Fantasy Conference (UK)

CFP Fairy Tales Conference (UK)

CFP Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

CFP Conference on French Science Fiction

CFP Swords, Sorcery, Sandals and Space

CFP Performing the Fantastic

Odyssey 2012

2011 In Memoriam

TV Update

New Trailers from Warner Bros. Pictures

New Trailers from Walt Disney Pictures

New to DVD

Doctor Who Returns

SilverHawks on DVD

China Miéville Conference (UK)

Miscellaneous from McFarland

New Horror Studies from McFarland

CFP Fringe Collection

Area CFP 2012

Mechademia 6 (2011)

NEPCA 2011 Update

Mythcon 2012 CFP

Mythlore 30.1-2 Contents

Mythlore 115/116

Table of Contents

Reviews

Area Session List Update

CFP PCAACA 2012

Boston 2012

April 11 - 14, 2012Note: This is a week later than we have traditionally held it in the past.

Deadlines

Areas & Chairs

Film & History 2012 History Conference

CFP Science-Fiction Myths: Travels through Time and Space

Call for Papers of Interest

SFRA 2012 Conference

NEPCA Reminder

Science Fiction Studies 38.3

New Mythlore

RIP Realms of Fantasy

Programming Nightmares

Retro TV on DVD--The Mighty Hercules and Drak Pack

Remember Jem and the Holograms?

I, Vampire Reborn

BBC America This Saturday

New TV: Terra Nova

Iron Giant Returns

Making Avatar

Advance Call for Papers NEPCA 2012

NEPCA 2011 Sessions

Twilight and Its Contexts

Torchwood Reborn?

Extrapolation 52.2

Grimm TV Show

Once Upon a Time TV Show

Eureka Update

"Thundercats, Ho!"

Doctor Who Returns 27 August

John Carter of Mars!

Parallel Universes and Source Code

Beastly on DVD

CFP Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (8/15/11)

Call For Papers
For the ORU Conference on Science and Science Fiction
April 12 & 13, 2012

April 11 - 14, 2012
Note: This is a week later than we have traditionally held it in the past.