A Bumper Award Update for our Literary Studies Titles

We’re delighted to share exciting book award news for several titles on our Literary Studies list. Read on for details of the prizes, the authors and the books that have been recognised and celebrated.

Professor Ayendy Bonifacio, author of Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the US Press, 1855–1901, has been awarded the Lydia Maria Child Society Social Justice Award, 2024. The Award recognises Humanities scholars who have demonstrated a commitment to social justice through teaching, research, and/or service. From the Award Committee:

‘Professor Ayendy Bonifacio’s multifaceted academic career continues the tradition of publicly-engaged, transformative nineteenth-century American literature scholarship that inspires the Lydia Maria Child Society and its Social Justice Award. … As an active public intellectual, creative voice, and journalist, Professor Bonifacio is introducing new audiences to the complicated, rich lives of Latinx people in the United States while inspiring his fellow first-generation college students with the example of his committed scholarly praxis.’

Find out more about the Lydia Maria Child Society, and explore Bonifacio’s Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the US Press, 1855–1901.

Laura Kasson Fiss has been awarded the 2023 VPFA’s First Book Prize for her monograph The Idler’s Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P. G. Wodehouse. The VPFA is committed to the revival of interest in understudied popular writers, literary genres and other cultural forms, and the First Book Prize celebrates the work of early-career scholars whose research helps us better understand nineteenth-century popular literature and culture. From the judging panel:

‘[Fiss’s] exploration of this particular cohort of writers as a literal and metaphorical ‘club’ makes an original contribution to the study of these famous but largely neglected figures who have had a lasting impact on contemporary popular cultural forms. … This is not  presented as just context, but is a fundamental understanding of the ways in which this kind of periodical writing participates in a material and industrial landscape of literary production.’

Find out more about the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, and explore Fiss’ The Idler’s Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P. G. Wodehouse.

Bernice M. Murphy has won the Society for the Study of the American Gothic’s ‘2024 Best Monograph on the American Gothic’ award for her book The California Gothic in Fiction and Film. The book positions the ‘California Gothic’ as a highly significant regional subgenre, drawing on the work of California historians and cultural commentators to explore the ways in which the nightmarish flipside of the ‘California Dream’ has been depicted within horror and Gothic. From the awards jury:

‘Exhaustively researched, very well organized, and always precise in its consistently convincing arguments, Murphy’s California Gothic is, for now at least, the definitive go-to book on its subject. It strikes a fine balance between the vast and the specific: unfolding the historical sweep of California coming to see its many dark undersides in a wide range of Gothic forms, … and honing in, with brilliant analyses, on both landmark and lesser-known films to make them reveal the fundamental drives of Hollywood and California-Cult Gothic with a richness of insight available nowhere else.

Find out more about the Society for the Study of the American Gothic, and explore Murphy’s The California Gothic in Fiction and Film (now available in PB at £24.99).

Not one, not two but three EUP titles have been shortlisted for The European Society for the Study of English’s 2024 Book Awards. The books and their categories are as follows:

Shortlisted for the ‘Literatures in the English Language’ award:

Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy by Jamie Callison

Explores the transformation of religious orthodoxy in the age of modernism, arguing that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century.

Explore the book – published Open Access as ePub and PDF!

Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War by Cedric Van Dijck

Shifts the scholarly conversation on modernism and war from shell shock to material culture, providing the first book-length study of the material culture of the First World War through the lens of modernist literature.

Explore the book.

Shortlisted for the ‘Cultural and Area Studies in English’ award:

Asbestos – The Last Modernist Object by Arthur Rose

Offers a new take on the established history of asbestos from a literary critical perspective, showing how literature and film during and after modernism responded first to the material’s proliferation through the built environment, and then to its catastrophic effects on human health.

Explore the book – published Open Access as ePub and PDF!

Andrew Smith’s Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One has been shortlisted for the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize, presented by the International Gothic Association. The award recognises a monograph best advancing the field of gothic studies, and the Prizes will be announced at the IGA Conference at Mount-Saint Vincent University in Halifax in late July.

Find out more about the International Gothic Association, and explore Smith’s Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934: The Ghosts of World War One (now available in PB at £19.99).