Cambria Press is pleased to announce that Presidential Electors and the Electoral College: An Examination of Lobbying, Wavering Electors, and Campaigns for Faithless Votes by Robert Alexander.

In the face of the coming presidential election, this is the book that everyone studying American politics needs to have. Top political scientists have praised the book, and Mark Ritchie, Minnesota Secretary of State, commends the book because “Dr. Robert Alexander has brought this very important history to life in a way that can help all of us look more carefully into the future. With lots of current public debate about the future of the Electoral College, this book provides a comprehensive and much-needed examination of one of the challenges that we have faced since the founding of our nation.”

Learn more on the book’s web page at the Cambria Press website. This book is part of the Politics, Institutions, and Public Policy in America book series by Cambria Press (Series editors: Scott Frisch and Sean Kelly).

Cite this book: Alexander, Robert. Presidential Electors and the Electoral College: An Examination of Lobbying, Wavering Electors, and Campaigns for Faithless Votes. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012.

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Cambria Press is pleased to announce that The Grotesque and the Unnatural edited by Markku Salmela and Jarkko Toikkanen is now available

The grotesque has provided both laymen and scholars with extreme delights for centuries: from the ornamental combining of rare motifs in antiquity to a hybridisation of structural genres in recent times; from fantastical fusions of humans and beasts to comic exaggerations of bodily aberrations and prosthetic postmodern visions. Eluding clear classification at all times, the notion has often been identified with ideas of contradiction and conflation and observed in relation to principles and categories such as estrangement (Wolfgang Kayser) and carnival (Mikhail Bakhtin), the sublime (Victor Hugo) and Victorian Gothic imagination (John Ruskin). In this context, the present volume appears as a synthesis and radical questioning of existing historical developments.

The book contributes to current discussions on the grotesque in contemporary literary and cultural theory from the perspective of one specific motif: the unnatural. Quite like the grotesque, observing the unnatural (and unnaturalness) reveals a resilient strain in critical thought, and the significance of this history gradually unfolds as the volume charts the progress of its main themes from the Renaissance to the present day. While in much current talk about theory and criticism certain related notions are still posited for and against each other––what is seen as normal or natural and what is not, and what should be seen as normal or natural and what should not––the discussions in The Grotesque and the Unnatural go a long way toward founding a new vista from which to observe this beguiling opposition.

The book presents a new perspective on the grotesque by considering it as a phenomenon which comes into being only through a negation of sorts, yet refusing to place it in a simple, normative pattern as nature’s antithesis or expressive gesture. As the articles demonstrate, the grotesque is always in the process of subverting or surpassing something, always not being ideal or sufficient to either nature or a social rule, and this very negation affects its status as a tool of transformation or emancipation from norm: the grotesque figure does not represent any particular stage of development or natural state of being. As such, the grotesque hints at and hinges on something that exceeds habitual spheres of culture and communication but, as the book aims to show, this elusiveness of meaning gives no cause for analytic despair. By tracing the involutions of the grotesque with the unnatural in specific literary cases, the book evokes centuries of Western cultural history and ultimately focuses on two questions: How and why does the grotesque tend to negate nature, and how does it affect our understanding of what we see?

The diverse materials and historical scope of The Grotesque and the Unnatural make the book, in its exceptional thematic unity, a valuable addition to the fields of literary and cultural studies.

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Cambria Press congratulates Ana Lucia Araujo on the outstanding review of her book Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic by renowned scholar James H. Sweet in The Journal of African History, which states that Professor Araujo’s book is “an important and provocative work.”

It praises the book (published by Cambria Press in 2010) because “no other study so thoroughly chronicles the fraught and ambiguous history of memorializing slavery in the South Atlantic.”

It further adds that Professor Araujo’s “ability to ‘read’ multiple sources – both discursive and non-discursive – makes the book truly interdisciplinary in scope. It will be a crucial starting point for all future studies of slavery and memory in Benin and Brazil.”

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Cambria Press congratulates Pia Masiero on the glowing review of her book  Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld  by the European Journal of American Studies which states that “it is difficult to make an original scholarly contribution, but Masiero succeeds admirably, in two respects: firstly, hers is the first monograph to focus on what she calls ‘the Zuckerman books’; secondly, she is the first Roth critic to produce a book-length narratological analysis of his work.”

It hails the book (published by Cambria Press in 2011), as being “lucidly written and thoroughly researched” and that “this is one of the finest books to have been written on Roth and will be invaluable to scholars, students and general readers.”

Read the Full Book Review!

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Cambria Press wishes one and all Gong Xi Fa Cai for the Chinese New Year.

2012 is the year of the dragon, and there is no better way to usher the new year in than with a brilliant essay on this from top sinologist Professor Victor Mair (University of Pennsylvania).

Professor Mair is the general editor for Cambria Sinophone World Series.

This book is in the Politics, Institutions, and Public Policy in America book series by Scott Frisch and Sean Kelly.

Watch Professor Gierzynki’s TV interview  as well another interview at the University of Vermont.

Cambria Press Author Kochhar-Lindgren with his book, Philosophy, Art, and the Specters of Jacques Derrida

Professor Gray Kochhar-Lindgren (the associate vice chancellor for undergraduate learning and director of the Center for University Studies and Programs at the University of Washington, Bothell, as well as honorary professor at the University of Hong Kong) visited the Cambria Press booth and was pleasantly surprised to see that his book, which was just published, on display along with a poster of the book cover.

It is always great to meet authors in real life, especially so soon after the book project with Cambria Press is wrapped up.

Cambria Press Author Nathanael O'Reilly with his book Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature

Cambria Press was delighted to have Professor Nathanael O’Reilly visit the Cambria Press booth. Professor O’Reilly’s book Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, which was published in 2010, is already earning rave reviews.

In fact, the Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia praises the book because it provides, “provides a highly representative and high-quality sample of current thinking about the issues in Australian culture it deals with, as well as readings of those issues in terms of specific literary texts … to have published this collection of essays there [in the United States] is to have performed a useful service, for the summarising and contemporary nature of the collection is just the sort of thing hard-pressed libraries might acquire, not only in North America but wherever libraries want an up-to-date and high quality assessment of Australian literature in terms of the post-colonial priorities of the present.”

The book is in the Cambria Press Australian literature series (general editor: Dr. Susan Lever).

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Cambria Press Author David Sauer with his book, American Drama and the Postmodern

Professor David Sauer (Spring Hill College) and his lovely daughter visited the Cambria Press booth at the 2012 MLA annual convention.

Professor Sauer is the author of the newly published American Drama and the Postmodern: Fragmenting the Realistic Stage. It was delightful to find that he is every bit as lively and witty in person as he is in his e-mails, which never fail to bring good cheer to all at Cambria Press!

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Thank you to all who visited our booth, especially the Cambria Press authors (whom we were delighted to see so happy with the exhibit … those will have to be posts all by themselves!) as well so many new faces–thank you for already following up and we look forward to keeping in touch!

We hope everyone had a great time in Seattle!

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