Collection: Contemporary Cultures of Reception

Series editor: Brian May, Northern Illinois University, USA

“Culture, verb [T]: to breed and keep particular living things in order to get the substances they produce”

(The Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/culture).

What does it mean to “culture” a book? What are the “substances” that may be “produce[d]” by the “breed[ing] and keep[ing]” of those “particular living things” known as literary works? These questions are at the heart of a new series, Contemporary Cultures of Reception, which will bring to the table the substantive, substantial produce won by cultivating significant literary creations of the past (i.e., “Great Books”). The aim is to yield fresh, viable creations in the present, thereby enabling the literature of the past to live on and flourish for the 21st-century reader.

The series encourages a particular kind of engagement with imaginative literature, one of a kind that is itself imaginative, creative, and literary. Our premise is that literary works are not so much read as received; rather than require a de-coding of a literary plot, they invite its performing— a deliberate cross-breeding between the original author and the imagination of the modern author/reader.

To that end, each book in the series should include two parts: a novella-length work of fiction— or a substantial longer-form piece, such as a sequence of poems, of another genre — paired with a prose supplement, introductory or contextual, that illuminates it.

The creative work should be recognisably the fruit of sustained engagement with a particular work, period, genre, or style — one of some recognised worth, and, crucially, one that is still “living”: that is, a work that continues to attract readers and critics rather than being of merely antiquarian interest. Sharply focussed on this host work or works, the creative portion should attempt a “genuine dialogue” with it; it should make us ask, what has been changed, and why. Rather than merely update a classic, then, transposing its setting and transforming character and plot, et al., so as to feature 21^st-century concerns, it should send us back to its host text with fresh ideas-- and questions-- about it. Like J. M. Coetzee's Foe, which keeps many of the bones of Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe while reshaping the telling entirely, it should compel us to find its famous host work more truly and more strange.

The prose piece should be introductory, expository, explanatory, exploratory, contextual, subtextual, or in some way an illuminating combination of two or more of these. A prose complement is also a possibility, an essay of interest in itself and one which, focusing on the target work, connects with the creative work in ways more implicit.

 For more information or to discuss your book proposal please contact the series editor:

Brian May, Northern Illinois University,  bmay1@niu.edu

or Commissioning Editor: Becky Taylor, b.taylor@exeterpress.co.uk