We are pleased to announce an exciting new series to be published by Palgrave Macmillan: The Palgrave Studies in Cultural Censorship (Edited by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders)

This new series aims to explore the extensive and complex evolution of censorship from the sixteenth century onwards. We are inviting manuscripts that will examine how censorship has operated and been debated across disciplines: literature, performance (theatre, dance, music) and screen studies. The series will highlight relationships between these artistic and cultural disciplines and various forms of censorship as they have existed and continue to exist globally. The wide geographical and historical parameters that the series intends to address respond to the widespread presence of censorship as well as to its inherent nature, which in turn is inextricably connected to given cultural contexts. Each volume will take its own theoretical, critical, historical, or intertextual approach, and may focus inter alia on a generic or thematic field, on case studies on a particular work or author associated with censorship, or on interdisciplinary topics.

 

As its title implies, the series will encompass a wide theoretical, interdisciplinary, and historical sweep to approach censorious encounters ranging from creation to reception. It will explore the numerous and complex ways by which forms of censorship operate as well as the strategies with which artists circumvent, negotiate, capitulate, or resist such attempts to silence their work. As such, the series intends to initiate redefinitions of what we understand or experience as censorship and the ways in which it can be accommodated, subverted, or challenged.

 

Proposals are welcomed on the following areas but are certainly not limited to these: 

 

·      State endorsed censorship of artistic practice 

·      Censorship through arts funding policies 

·      Artistic self-censorship

·      The histories and functions of censorship bodies 

·      ‘Moral panics’

·      Strategies in artistic practice for avoiding censorship

·      Censorship and literary estates

·      Institutional censorship in arts organizations 

·      Taboos and their evolution

·      Audience/readers as censors

·      Censorship in a global market

·      Strategies of exclusion

 

The need for such an extensive series comes as a direct consequence of the numerous manifestations of censorship itself as a practice within the arts that has operated from the earliest times and without exception globally across cultures. Although there are a variety of single monograph studies in the areas our series plans to cover, by necessity they cannot give a comprehensive representation of the historical or global impact that this subject demands. 

 

We anticipate that the series will function as an invaluable 'go to' resource that represents current thinking and research on the subject and will also form the basis for future research trajectories. 

 

We welcome monographs and edited collections of 80,000-100,000 words as well as shorter works within the Palgrave Pivot series on a single work/artist (25,000 - 50,000 words). 

 

If you are interested in discussing a potential proposal for the series, please contact the series editors:

 

a.etienne@ucc.ie and g.j.saunders@bham.ac.uk