ACCUTE

Heather Latimer’s (UBC) Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film will be published on June 1, 2013, with McGill-Queen’s UP. “In Reproductive Acts, Heather Latimer investigates what contemporary fiction and film can tell us about the divisive nature of these politics, and demonstrates how fictional representations of reproduction allow for readings of reproductive politics that are critical of the terms of the debate itself….  Latimer analyzes works by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Kathy Acker, Toni Morrison, Larissa Lai, and director Alfonso Cuarón to claim that reproductive politics are deeply connected to cultural anxieties about gender, race, citizenship, and sexuality – anxieties that cannot be contained under the rules of individual rights or choices.”

http://www.mqup.ca/reproductive-acts-products-9780773541580.php

Danielle Fuller (Birmingham) and DeNel Rehberg Sedo (Mount Saint Vincent) have brought out a major edited collection: Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture (Routledge). In Reading Beyond the Book,” writes Christine Pawley, “ Fuller and Rehberg Sedo set out a carefully argued and highly readable account of ‘Mass Reading Events’ (MREs) in Britain, Canada and the USA, supporting careful empirical research with sophisticated political and economic analysis of the reading industry.” Janice Radway writes: “This lively, methodologically adventurous book should be read by everyone interested in the fate of reading in our digital age…. The authors explore with great verve and insight the significance of the fact that a book reading industry has flourished even as digital media garner more and more of our collective attention.” As David Hesmondhalgh (Leeds) puts it: “This is more than just an excellent study of books and reading in the twenty first century.”

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415532952/

http://www.beyondthebookproject.org/

Mary Chapman (UBC) and Angela Mills‘ co-edited Treacherous Texts: US Suffrage Literature 1846-1946 (Rutgers UP 2011, paperback 2012) was awarded Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s enormously prestigious Susan Koppelman Prize, 2012, for best edited volume in feminist popular culture. “Uncovering startling affinities between popular literature and propaganda, Treacherous Texts samples a rich, decades-long tradition of suffrage literature created by writers from diverse racial, social, and regional backgrounds… canonical figures such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sui Sin Far, and Gertrude Stein, as well as writers popular in their day but, until now, lost.”

Dominick Grace (Brescia University College) and Eric Hoffman have just published a collection of interviews with the renowned, and controversial, graphic novelist Dave Sim. Dave Sim: Conversations (University P of Mississippi) fleshes out the ideas of the creator of Cerebus, an independent comic that ran for 300 issues, ending in 2004. “What few interviews Sim gave often pushed the limits of what an interview might be in much the same way that Cerebus pushed the limits of what a comic might be.”

http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1564

A story collection by Greg Bechtel (U Alberta) is about to be published by Freehand Books. Boundary Problems is a “crossover literary/speculative fiction collection about the impossible-turned-possible — secrets, paranoia, sex, conspiracies, and magic.  These are surreal tales that vibrate on the edge of meaning without yielding simple or determinate conclusions.” Look for it on the Freehand Books website:

http://www.freehand-books.com/

Kathleen McConnell (Saint Thomas University) has published Pain, Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight (Wolsak and Wynn). “What if Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock had been filmed by Steven Spielberg? What if Buffy the Vampire Slayer had gone to Columbine High? What if Leopold von Sacher-Masoch had been the dramaturge for Catwoman?” Former ACCUTE President Steven Bruhm writes:  “Kathleen McConnell’s provocative thesis is that each of these scenarios has indeed come to pass, and what they have produced is a resilient and telling popular archive of the Pygmalion story.  In this audacious and poetic collection of essays, McConnell shows us how the Pygmalion and Galatea story continually comes back to life from its stony sediments and animates the most popular of our guilty pleasures.  This is a book that is sure to transform us.”   – Steven Bruhm

http://wolsakandwynn.ca/books/122-pain-porn-and-complicity-women-heroes-from-pygmalion-to-twilight