Personal / Website News
Peplum Ponderings
I have a brand new Peplum Ponderings published!
I take a look at the 1961 sword and sandal film The Tartars. Check it out here.
Emmanuelle Legacy CFP Re-opened + Bibliography
Since garnering publisher interest, I’ve re-opened the CFP for the Emmanuelle legacy book. The updated CFP can be found here.
I’ve also started annotating Emmanuelle scholarship and posting it here at my website so other scholars have a nice bibliographic resource. The bibliography and annotations can be found here and it is a major WIP.
Miscellaneous Tidbits
Chopping Spree Re-release
Angela Sylvaine’s novella Chopping Spree is getting a re-release by Dark Matter Ink this upcoming autumn. Here is its sporty new cover:
I did a write up about this book back in 2021. If you’re curious about the book, give my review a read, and then consider pre-ordering the book directly from the publisher. There’s signed editions!
Call For Papers
Here is a collection of calls for papers/proposals for pop culture studies I want to help proliferate. If you have a CFP you need help proliferating and want me to add it to my news roundups, shoot me an email and I’ll get it added.
The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies
Deadline for abstract submissions: 24th May 2024
Editors: Lorna Farnell and Carl Wilson
The editors have already commissioned a substantial number of chapters for The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies and are seeking the last few essays that specifically consider the following topics:
- Superhero tourism (including Disney parks)
- Merchandise and toys
- Superheroes in the Global South
- Superheroes and refugees
- Superheroes and the Anthropocene
- Digital superheroes
- British superheroes
- Counterculture superheroes
- Superhero narratives 1930-1970s, and offshoots/adaptations
- Superhero origin stories
- Superhero animations (including the X-Men, BTAS, She-Ra, He-Man, magical girls, and more)
- Creators and the creative process
- Fan communities
The editors invite abstracts of around 300 words on any of the above topics.
Final essays will be 5500 words in length, including references, and will be due two months after a provisional acceptance has been made.
Please email your abstracts (together with a short bio, 100 words max) for consideration to both editors: Lorna Piatti-Farnell, lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz and Carl Wilson, carl@carl-wilson.com
The Cursed Archive: Dangerous Texts, Deadly Communications, and Gothic Media
A popular trope in horror and speculative fiction is a cursed archive: a textual communication that is dangerous, forbidden, or contagious. Medieval grimoires and alchemist treatises were early examples of such cursed or forbidden texts. However, in the age before widespread literacy, the cursed archive was limited to a few banned or heretical books. The trope came into its own with the rise of popular literature when the issue of dangerous ideas disseminated through mass media became a cultural and political concern. Early examples of cursed archives centered on printed or written texts, as in H. P. Lovecraft’s imaginary Necronomicon or G. K. Chesterton’s story “The Blast of the Book” (1933). But with the explosion of media technologies, contemporary cursed archives encompass haunted websites, contagious cellphones, entrapping video games, monster-infested TV sets, and killer movies. In this collection, we want to probe the implications of the cursed archive; its connection to the issues of censorship, book-banning, and freedom of expression; the notion of “contagious” ideas; the differences and similarities between the forbidden book and the dark web; and electronic media as a pandemic. The topics we want to address include, but are not limited to, the following:
- The history of the cursed archive (early examples of book-banning or book-burning by the Church or other religious institutions).
- The cursed archive and the rise of mass media.
- Demonic books in Gothic and horror literature (Lovecraft’s Necronomicon; James Blish’s Black Easter; and similar texts).
- The cursed archive and censorship.
- Horror at the movies (Clive Barker’s “Son of Celluloid”)
- Haunted media (such as video games in the Ring series; Stephen King’s Cell; dating apps in Jason Arnopp’s Ghoster).
- Social media as contagion (including use of social media in crime fiction, such as novels by Ruth Ware and Matt Wesolowski)
- The library as a gothic space (Borges’ “The Library of Babel”; Korner-Stace Archivist Wasp, Scott Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char)
- Alien communications as transforming or erasing humanity (Arrival; Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem).
- Gendering the cursed archive.
- Cross-cultural examples.
- Cursed writing, languages, symbols.
- Cursed means of recording such as tape cassettes, video cassettes, photos, paintings, vinyl records, databases, performance, choreography, etc.
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to Simon Bacon (baconetti@googlemail.com) and Elana Gomel (egomel@tauex.tau.ac.il) by June 30, 2024.
Deep State Conspiracies and the Gothic
This focuses on the intersection of recent conspiracy theories and horror/folk-horror/gothic texts featuring hidden societies /corporations (John Wick/Blade/Resident Evil) or secret cabals/cults (Hereditary/Empty Man/Paranormal Activity) whose aim is control/takeover/cause the end of the world. Ideally in any media, across cultures, since 2000 but historical perspectives welcome.
If interested send a 300 word abstract by end Sept 2024 to: baconetti@gmail.com