The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination

Camilo Peralta, Joliet Junior College

March 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-853-2
Availability: In stock
222pp. ¦ $78 £62 €73

"The Wizard of Mecosta" offers an extended analysis of the fiction of Russell Amos Kirk (1918-1994), a central figure in modern American conservatism who is often referred to as “the father” of the same. Born and raised in Michigan, Kirk was also a prolific writer of fiction, who published almost two dozen short stories and three novels over the course of his long career. At the heart of everything Kirk wrote was what he referred to as the “moral imagination,” a phrase he borrowed from Edmund Burke and often used to describe the instructive and enlightening purposes of great literature. Despite his prominent reputation as a public man of letters and the respect of fellow authors including Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, Kirk’s fiction was never very popular, and has fallen into almost complete obscurity in the present. "The Wizard of Mecosta" is the first full-length study ever published about Kirk’s fiction, and the only work of any length to consider the entirety of his output, including all of the stories and novels he wrote. By emphasizing how Kirk’s fiction illuminates certain aspects of his social and political theory, "The Wizard of Mecosta" distinguishes itself from the half-dozen or more studies of the author’s life and work that have been published since his death in 1994. It should appeal to anyone with an interest in American conservatism, as well as fans and scholars of the sort of Gothic horror in which Kirk, unexpectedly, excelled. Through his stories of avenging ghosts and timeless journeys through the afterlife, he reminds us of the existence of “permanent things,” the core values and beliefs of Western society, which he strove all his life to preserve. It is high time that his fiction found a more appreciative, and larger, audience.

Attired: Perspectives on Historical Costume

Edited by Damayanthie Eluwawalage, Delaware State University

March 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-852-5
Availability: In stock
146pp. ¦ $77 £61 €72

This publication explores the integrative narratives of historical costume in the novel universal perspective of literature, leisure, ornamentation, customs/traditions, and theoretical contexts. The adaptation, mutation, and transformation of attire are the result of complex interactions between many factors, such as economic conditions, political conditions, social conditions, psychological conditions, and technology. The meanings encoded in the costume are one of the noticeable hallmarks of any society. This proposed book investigates multidisciplinary topics, for instance, embellishments such as needlework and embroidery; the historical concept of fight, physical encounter, combat, or bout and its connection with related-attire; the contribution of dress to the narrative process of Virgil’s 'Aeneid'; and the theory and philosophy of fashion.

Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America

Edited by Andrea Espinoza Carvajal, University of Exeter and Luis A. Medina Cordova, University of Birmingham

April 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-821-1
Availability: In stock
282pp. ¦ $106 £85 €99

'Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America' sheds light on how, as Covid-19 spread, infecting and killing millions across the world, life not only continued to be experienced but also continued to be narrated. By putting together this volume, we help understand what happened in the region from a perspective in which, unlike most of what we saw during the health emergency, numbers, statistics and percentages are not at the centre of the analysis. The essays gathered here foreground something else: the manifold ways Covid-19 was subjectively and collectively narrated in the news, government reports, political speeches, NGO communications, social media, literature, songs and many other media. From a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this edition pay attention to how fictional and non-fictional stories, official discourses, as well as personal and political accounts, documented, represented and shaped the health crisis, laying bare how —in Latin American countries— the spread of the virus intersected with corruption, gender-based violence, inequality and exclusion, as with community, solidarity and hope. Readers will find that the focus on narrative provides an alternative source of knowledge on Latin America’s Covid-19 experience. Our perspective contrasts with the usual emphasis on death tolls, infection rates, weekly cases, vaccination counts, and the plethora of statistics that illustrated the gravity of the situation in the build-up to, during, and after the peak of the crisis. While extremely important to understand the situation, numbers do not tell the whole story. A comprehensive picture of the pandemic can only be achieved when the stories of the virus are accounted for. Health, after all, is no stranger to narrative. And neither is Latin America.

Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures

Edited by Jukka Kortti, University of Helsinki, Finland and Heidi Kurvinen, University of Turku, Finland

March 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-851-8
Availability: In stock
252pp. ¦ $101 £81 €94

Ideologies have not been a focus of interest in the field of humanities and social sciences in recent decades, but rethinking the power of ideologies in the media sphere has recently returned to the scholarly discussion. The compilation book “Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures” participates in this by providing selected yet justified approaches to media history from the point of view of ideological uses of media in the Nordic region. In this book, the role of media – comprising both popular media and news journalism – as a forum for ideologies and their circulation will be analyzed by focusing on the Nordic region. The perceived similarities in the media systems of the Nordic countries constitute a perfect extent for a regional media history against not only a European but also a global backdrop. This does not mean that there have not been many national differences. The book does not provide a chronological narrative of Nordic media history. Still, the ideology of media is approached not only from the standpoints of different media forms – film, television, newspapers, magazines, and periodicals – but also from several historical periods from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. The chapters show the multidimensional role that the media has in transmitting ideologies to their audiences and the public sphere. They also demonstrate that analyzing the role of different ideologies, such as modernization, nationalism, solidarity, feminism, and peace movement in media history provides wider perspectives in understanding past and present media landscapes and people’s mediated experiences that are fostered by them. “Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures” can be used both as a reference book and as a classroom adaption in the field of media, communication, and history studies.

Narrative Medicine: Trauma and Ethics

Edited by Anders Juhl Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Morten Sodemann, University Hospital Odense and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

February 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-845-7
Availability: In stock
306pp. ¦ $109 £87 €102

This new volume repositions narrative medicine and trauma studies in a global context with a particular focus on ethics. Trauma is a rapidly growing field of especially literary and cultural studies, and the ways in which trauma has asserted its relevance across disciplines, which intersect with narrative medicine, and how it has come to widen the scope of narrative research and medical practice constitute the principal concerns of this volume. This collection brings together contributions from established and emerging scholars coming from a wide range of academic fields within the faculty of humanities that include literary and media studies, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology as well as medical education and health care studies. This crossing of disciplines is also represented by the collaboration between the two editors. Most of the authors in the volume use narrative medicine to refer to the methodology pioneered by Rita Charon and her colleagues at Columbia University, but in some chapters, the authors use it to refer to other methodologies and pedagogies utilizing that descriptor. Trauma is today understood both in the restricted sense in which it is used in the mental health field and in its more widespread, popular usage in literature. This collection aspires to prolong, deepen, and advance the field of narrative medicine in two important aspects: by bringing together both the cultural and the clinical side of trauma and by opening the investigation to a truly global horizon.