The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics

Edited by Andrew Klobucar, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Digital media presents an array of interesting challenges adapting new modes of collaborative, online communication to traditional writing and literary practices at the practical and theoretical levels. For centuries, popular concepts of the modern author, regardless of genre, have emphasized writing as a solo exercise in human communication, while the act of reading remains associated with solitude and individual privacy. “The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics” explores important cultural changes in these relationships thanks to the rapid development of digital internet technologies allowing near-instantaneous, synchronous, multimedia interaction across the globe. The radical shift in how we author and consume media as an online, electronic transmission effectively resituates the writing process across the liberal arts as less a solitary act of individual enquiry and reflection, and more an ongoing, collaborative process of creative interaction within a multimedia environment or network. Contributions in this anthology demonstrate a robust history and equally diverse contemporary approach to multimedia interaction for literary and artistic ends. Central to all media formats, computation is explored throughout this volume to critically examine how algorithmic procedures in writing help bring forward many key concepts to building creative communities in a digital environment. Each chapter in this book accordingly introduces readers to various new collaborative experiments using a broad range of different digital media formats, including VR, Natural Language Generation (NLG), and metagaming tools. This book will appeal broadly to students, instructors, and independent artists working in the digital arts, while its emphasis on social interactivity will interest theorists and teachers working in theatre, social media, and cyberpsychology. Its secondary focus on computation and media programming as a site of artistic experimentation will also interest programmers and web designers at various professional levels.

Florentine Ariosto Jones: A Yankee in Switzerland and the Early Globalization of the American System of Watchmaking

Frank Jacob, Nord University, Norway

This book recounts the story of Florentine Ariosto Jones, who after the Civil War decided to manufacture watches. Combining the cheap labor available at the time in Switzerland with US manufacturing technologies, Jones embarked on his venture to produce affordable watches for the American market. Consequently, he became a pioneer in the business of outsourcing labor for economic purposes through his contracting of labor to Europe. While the company still exists today, very little is known about Jones. The present book will undoubtedly change this by telling the fascinating story of an American adventurer and his pursuit to globalize American watchmaking at the end of the 19th Century.

Mary Hunter Austin: A Female Writer’s Protest Against the First World War in the United States

Jowan A. Mohammed, Nord University, Norway

Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) is often referred to as an important American writer of the early decades of the 20th century, with much of her work concerning nature and Native American culture. Hunter Austin was also considered to be one of the early feminist writers, whose works had an impact on the redefinition of gender roles during the First World War. This study examines the feminist perception of her later years, connecting feminist history to questions related to memory through a study of literature, politics, and interpretations of the past (both feminist and gendered). It demonstrates how far the perception and remembrance of the past are determined by later agendas and considerations. This work is an insightful and detailed study, meant to expand knowledge within the field of collective memory about Mary Hunter Austin’s life and work alike. This book is intended for those with a general interest in feminism, socialism, World War One and gender issues. Academics and specialists in the field will value new research on a crucial figure in American literary history.

Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production

Tracy Gaynor Harwood, De Montfort University and Ben Grussi

This important new work focuses on the pioneers in machinima, considered to be the grassroots and beginnings of virtual production. Machinima’s impacts are identified by the community, supplemented by Harwood and Grussi’s research and experience over a period of 25 years – from game, film and filmmaking to digital arts practice, creative technologies developments and related research and theory. Machinima is the first digital cultural practice to have emerged from the internet into a mainstream creative genre. Its latest transformation is evident through the increasing convergence of games and film where real-time virtual production as a professional creative practice is resulting in new forms of machine-generated interactive experiences. Using the most culturally significant machinima works (machine-cinema) as lenses to trace its history and impacts, ‘Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production’ provides in-depth testimony by filmmakers and others involved in its emergence. The extensive reference to source materials and interviews bring the story of its impacts up to date through the critical reflections of the early pioneers. This book will be of interest to machinima researchers and practitioners, including game culture, media theorists, students of film studies and game studies, digital artists and those interested in how creative technologies have influenced communities of practice over time.

Classical Music in a Changing World (Audio CD Edition)

Crisis and Vital Signs

Edited by Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University and Alberto Nones, Conservatory of Music of Gallarate; Associazione Europea di Musica e Comunicazione (AEMC), Italy

In recent years classical music has become a test case for debates over the future of culture. As times have changed, the value traditionally placed on this music has been challenged on social rather than aesthetic grounds. Lovers of classical music have been asked how its privileged history can be reconciled with growing demands for social justice and social inclusiveness. They have been asked how the music’s standing as one of the great accomplishments of the West can be reconciled with the many injustices on which those accomplishments in part depended. How can the future of classical music escape the darker shadows of its past? ‘Classical Music in a Changing World: Crisis and Vital Signs’ addresses the crisis provoked by such questions in two complementary ways. Several of the chapters show how the classical music world is already grappling with the crisis, and finding vital signs beyond the borders of the music’s traditional European strongholds: in Turkey from Ottoman times to the present, in Colombia, and in a Black American film. Other chapters identify areas that still need improvement, especially on behalf of female and LGBTQ+ musicians, and suggest how advances can be made both on concert stages and in schools. This volume, which opens with an introduction by Alberto Nones that contextualizes the book and outlines the main arguments of its chapters, contains an essay by Lawrence Kramer that examines the place of classical music in the history of consciousness—a history now changing rapidly—and concludes with a Postscript written by the two editors. The writing in this volume will be accessible to a wide audience, including scholars and students, professionals and amateurs, performers and listeners. Teachers will find it a source of lively classroom debate, and scholars a source of learning outside the usual arenas. The book’s “vital signs” include the accompanying audio tracks (available for download at: https://vernonpress. com/book/1281), which feature vibrant music-making from a diverse range of performers and composers.

Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America’s First Museum of Modern Art

Pamela Carter-Birken

He was born to privilege and sought the world of art. She lived at the center of that world—a working artist encouraged by the famous artists in her extended family. Together, Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips founded The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the first museum of modern art in America. It opened in the grand Phillips family home in 1921, eight years before New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and only a few weeks after they wed. Duncan took the lead in developing the collection and showcasing it. Marjorie kept space and time to paint. Duncan considered Marjorie a partner in the museum even though she was not directly involved in all purchasing and presentation decisions. To him, her influence was omnipresent. Although Duncan’s writings on artists and art history were widely published, he chose not to provide much instruction for visitors to the museum. Instead, he combined signature methods of displaying art which live on at The Phillips Collection. Phillips had viewers in mind when he hung American art with European art—or art of the past with modern art, and he frequently rearranged works to stimulate fresh encounters. With unfettered access to archival material, author Pamela Carter-Birken argues that The Phillips Collection’s relevancy comes from Duncan Phillips’s commitment to providing optimal conditions for personal exploration of art. In-depth collecting of certain artists was one of Phillips’s methods of encouraging independent thinking in viewers. Paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Jacob Lawrence, and Mark Rothko provide testament to the power of America’s first museum of modern art.

Classical Music in a Changing World

Crisis and Vital Signs

Edited by Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University and Alberto Nones, Conservatory of Music of Gallarate; Associazione Europea di Musica e Comunicazione (AEMC), Italy

In recent years classical music has become a test case for debates over the future of culture. As times have changed, the value traditionally placed on this music has been challenged on social rather than aesthetic grounds. Lovers of classical music have been asked how its privileged history can be reconciled with growing demands for social justice and social inclusiveness. They have been asked how the music’s standing as one of the great accomplishments of the West can be reconciled with the many injustices on which those accomplishments in part depended. How can the future of classical music escape the darker shadows of its past? ‘Classical Music in a Changing World: Crisis and Vital Signs’ addresses the crisis provoked by such questions in two complementary ways. Several of the chapters show how the classical music world is already grappling with the crisis, and finding vital signs beyond the borders of the music’s traditional European strongholds: in Turkey from Ottoman times to the present, in Colombia, and in a Black American film. Other chapters identify areas that still need improvement, especially on behalf of female and LGBTQ+ musicians, and suggest how advances can be made both on concert stages and in schools. This volume, which opens with an introduction by Alberto Nones that contextualizes the book and outlines the main arguments of its chapters, contains an essay by Lawrence Kramer that examines the place of classical music in the history of consciousness—a history now changing rapidly—and concludes with a Postscript written by the two editors. The writing in this volume will be accessible to a wide audience, including scholars and students, professionals and amateurs, performers and listeners. Teachers will find it a source of lively classroom debate, and scholars a source of learning outside the usual arenas. The book’s “vital signs” include the accompanying audio tracks (available for download at: https://vernonpress. com/book/1281), which feature vibrant music-making from a diverse range of performers and composers.

Religion and the Populist Radical Right: Secular Christianism and Populism in Western Europe

Nicholas Morieson, Australian Catholic University

In Western Europe, populist radical right parties are calling for a return to Christian or Judeo-Christian values and identity. The growing electoral success of many of these parties may suggest that, after decades of secularisation, Western Europeans are returning to religion. Yet these parties do not tell their supporters to go to church, believe in God, or practise traditional Christian values. Instead, they claim that their respective national identities and cultures are the product of a Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition which either encompasses—or has produced—secular modernity. This book poses the question: if Western European politics is secular, why has religious identity become a core element of populist radical right discourse? To answer this question, Morieson examines the discursive use of religion by two of the most powerful and influential populist radical right parties: The French National Front and the Dutch Party for Freedom. Based on this examination, he argues that the populist radical right has capitalised on a cultural shift engendered by the increasing visibility of Islam in Europe. Western Europeans’ encounter with Islam has revealed the non-universal nature of Western European secularism to Europeans, and demonstrated the secularisation of Christianity into Western European ‘culture.’ This, in turn, has allowed secular French and Dutch citizens to identify themselves—as well as their nation and, ultimately, Western civilisation—as Christian or Judeo-Christian. Seizing on this cultural shift, the author contends that the National Front and Party for Freedom have built successful and similar brands of reactionary politics based on the notion that contemporary secularism is a product of Europe’s Christian heritage and values, and that therefore Muslim immigration is an existential threat to the core values of European politics, including the differentiation of politics and religion, and of church and state. ‘Religion and the Populist Radical Right: Secular Christianism and Populism in Western Europe’ will be of interest to scholars and researchers working on the intersections of Political Science, Sociology, and Religion. It will also appeal to the general audience interested in the relationship between populism in Western Europe and religious identity as it is written in an accessible style.

Green Crimes and International Criminal Law

Edited by Regina M. Paulose

‘Green Crimes and International Criminal Law’ examines crimes against the environment, which impact not only humans, but also wildlife and ecosystems more generally. A significant point of discussion in the volume is whether green crimes can fit effectively into existing international criminal law frameworks or not. Chapter authors explore these crimes from both a definitional and theoretical perspective and in various contexts in different parts of the world, questioning whether these violations have led to or are violations of international criminal law. While the recognition of green crimes in the international criminal law community has been slow, it has increasingly gained widespread attention. This volume acknowledges the growing interest and seeks to promote debate among academics and professionals working on the subject. The aim of these texts is to encourage meaningful action around green crimes within the international criminal law community so that environmental justice can become established. The collection will be of particular interest to practicing attorneys and academics studying international criminal law, especially those keen on investigating how green crimes can be incorporated into the specific canon of international law.

Finding Peaks and Valleys in a Flat World

Goodness, Truth, and Meaning in the Midst of Today’s Mad Chase for Prosperity and Instant Feedback

Mark Ellingsen, Interdenominational Theological Center

The flat world of our globalized economic order—with its information technology mandating the need for the labor force to compete globally—has led to turmoil, injustice, and growing unhappiness in our everyday lives. We need a way to find some mountaintops and fulfillment in our flat world, to have a sense that some moments can have eternal significance. Søren Kierkegaard, forerunner of Existentialism, provides us with a vision of life to help us cope and give us joy. Along the way, we’ll see how a lot of his insights connect with cutting-edge findings on brain research about the biological dynamics of joy and fulfillment. Finding Peaks and Valleys in a Flat World will be of interest to undergraduate Philosophy and Religion students as well as Kierkegaard specialists. It will also be a good reference work for people interested in social analyses and theologians of every denominational affiliation.

Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America’s First Museum of Modern Art

Pamela Carter-Birken

He was born to privilege and sought the world of art. She lived at the center of that world—a working artist encouraged by the famous artists in her extended family. Together, Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips founded The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the first museum of modern art in America. It opened in the grand Phillips family home in 1921, eight years before New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and only a few weeks after they wed. Duncan took the lead in developing the collection and showcasing it. Marjorie kept space and time to paint. Duncan considered Marjorie a partner in the museum even though she was not directly involved in all purchasing and presentation decisions. To him, her influence was omnipresent. Although Duncan’s writings on artists and art history were widely published, he chose not to provide much instruction for visitors to the museum. Instead, he combined signature methods of displaying art which live on at The Phillips Collection. Phillips had viewers in mind when he hung American art with European art—or art of the past with modern art, and he frequently rearranged works to stimulate fresh encounters. With unfettered access to archival material, author Pamela Carter-Birken argues that The Phillips Collection’s relevancy comes from Duncan Phillips’s commitment to providing optimal conditions for personal exploration of art. In-depth collecting of certain artists was one of Phillips’s methods of encouraging independent thinking in viewers. Paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Jacob Lawrence, and Mark Rothko provide testament to the power of America’s first museum of modern art.

Latin in Modern Fiction

Who Says It’s a Dead Language?

Henryk Hoffmann

The goal of this book is to prove that Latin is not a dead language by demonstrating how prevalent and strong it still is in modern Western culture. In order to do so, the author, an English philologist with a long experience as a Latin educator, catalogues, explains and interprets Latin quotations and references in a multitude of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary works by—primarily—mainstream authors (from Aldous Huxley to Saul Bellow to John Irving), crime/mystery writers (from Raymond Chandler to Elizabeth George to Dennis Lehane) and frontier/western novelists (from Emerson Hough to Larry McMurtry). The three areas of fiction constituting the main scope of the book indicate the author’s major interest and preference, as well as the subject matter of his extensive research, both prior and current—the former related to his already published books. The writers offering the most impressive contributions to the thesis are featured in the three parts of the main body; those with lesser input are listed in the Appendix. The prospective readers of the book include all Latin students and educators at the secondary and college levels worldwide.

The Corporate Overlords will be Kind: Campaign Finance, Representation and Corporate-led Democracy

Radu George Dumitrescu, University of Bucharest, Romania

‘The Corporate Overlords will be Kind’ is a unique book in that it makes use of a multi-pronged approach – journalistic, legal, theoretical – to find, document, and explain instances in which well-known corporations such as Wal-Mart, Uber, McDonald’s, Airbnb, Gillette, Nike and others have involved themselves, as ‘artificial persons’, in political and social debates involving aspects such as gender, racism, sexual minorities, and gun ownership. This book argues that these transnational, multi-billion-dollar corporations that thrive in the globalized world market are forced to take explicitly political stances by the very environment in which they activate and by the consumers whom they serve, taking on the latter’s values and opinions and representing them to retain them as customers. ‘The Corporate Overlords will be Kind’ advances that corporations are now – and will increasingly be – the loudest voices in the political market square of the United States, but that such a situation is not necessarily a cause for concern. This book thus departs from the traditional scholarly views of Citizens United (the 2010 landmark decision of the Supreme Court which granted free speech to corporations as persons) as a woe to democracy, and argues that the ageless, deathless, genderless, nationless corporations will be the political representatives of the futures, not political parties. This book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students specializing in social sciences, particularly politics, history, sociology, and law. Political professionals and journalists may also be interested in the book, in addition to the general reader with interest in politics.

Arts in the Margins of World Encounters

Edited by Willemijn de Jong, University of Zurich, Switzerland et al.

'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' presents original contributions that deal with artworks of differently marginalized people—such as ethnic minorities, refugees, immigrants, disabled people, and descendants of slaves—, a wide variety of art forms—like clay figures, textile, paintings, poems, museum exhibits and theatre performances—, and original data based on committed, long-term fieldwork and/or archival research in Brazil, Martinique, Rwanda, India, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The volume develops theoretical approaches inspired by innovative theorists and is based on currently debated analytical categories including the ethnographic turn in contemporary art, polycentric aesthetics, and aesthetic cannibalization, among others. This collection also incorporates fascinating and intriguing contemporary cases, but with solid theoretical arguments and grounds. 'Arts in the Margins of World Encounters' will appeal to students at all levels, scholars, and practitioners in arts, aesthetics, anthropology, social inequality, and discrimination, as well as researchers in other fields, including post-colonialism and cultural organizations.

Rethinking Territorial Development Policies: A new framework for territorial stakeholders

Theory, methods and implementations

Michel Felix, Skema Business School and Philippe Vaesken, Lille University, France

This book provides an analytical framework and toolkit for anyone involved — theoretically or practically — with the economic, social, ecological or cultural development of a territory. This work provides an overview of the various territorial development processes, inclusive of both individual and collective actions. In pursuance of its objectives, the book re-examines the classical concepts of governance and regulation in order to position them in an integrative model of the initiatives which contribute dynamically to territorial development. According to this model, the concepts of governance and regulation become two axes, revealing four main reference situations which differentiate between the local initiatives (ground-up) and public actions (top-down) that coexist in a territory. The model emphasizes the need to consider the place of territorial stakeholders in regulatory processes. The book enriches this concept, familiar in a legislative context, and describes it as an area of influence of and negotiation with stakeholders. It contributes to a territorial governance system which encourages development offers. It reveals the inseparable link between influence and development processes that lead to value creation. The logic of governance specifies the various sources of value creation, while the logic of regulation seeks to maximize the acceptability of such value creation by making it into an attractive proposition for stakeholders.

Snapping and Wrapping: Personal Photography in Japan

Richard M. Chalfen, Temple University

'Snapping and Wrapping' represents an original study in Japanese visual culture, pictorial communication, and photographic studies. Vernacular visual culture is highlighted, stressing ordinary people and everyday life to explore photographic expressions of Japanese family life. The theme of “how people looked” is described from two closely related perspectives: how people appeared in their own photographs, and how people looked at specific features of their own lives with analog camera technology. The book includes unexamined material based on a qualitative study involving personal fieldwork undertaken between 1993 and 2009. The metaphor of “wrapping culture” (Hendry) is suggested for ways of interpreting relationships of personal family photographs in conjunction with acknowledged cultural influences and values of Japanese culture. Across an introduction and six chapters, the book covers a series of research topics evoked by efforts to recover, repair, and return millions of photographs to survivors following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Memory, privacy and kinds of information control are reviewed as parts of strategies of sharing pictures, “presence” and the use of photographs for interpersonal interaction and communication. Throughout the monograph, emphasis is placed on understanding details of analog personal photography for potential comparisons to the intensely popular digitalization of photographic recordings and, in turn, facilitate making informed speculations for future photographic practice. This book will be of interest to upper-level students, graduate students and scholars in the fields of media and culture, Asian Studies (especially Japanese visual culture), as well as those working on sensitive relationships of family, memory and representation.

The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing

Edited by Jayjit Sarkar, Raiganj University, India and Jagannath Basu, Sitalkuchi College, India

Focusing on the various intersections between illness and literature across time and space, The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer seeks to understand how ontological, phenomenological and epistemological experiences of illness have been dealt with and represented in literary writings and literary studies. In this volume, scholars from across the world have come together to understand how the pathological condition of being ill (the sufferers), as well as the pathologists dealing with the ill (the healers and caregivers), have shaped literary works. The language of medical science, with its jargon, and the language of the every day, with its emphasis on utility, prove equally insufficient and futile in capturing the pain and suffering of illness. It is this insufficiency and futility that makes us turn towards the canonical works of Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Miroslav Holub as well as the non-canonical António Lobo Antunes, Yumemakura Baku, Wopko Jensma and Vaslav Nijinsky. This volume helps in understanding and capturing the metalanguage of illness while presenting us with the tradition of ‘writing pain’. In an effort to expand the definition of pathography to include those who are on the other side of pain, the essays in this collection aim to portray the above-mentioned pathographers as artists, turning the anxiety and suffering of illness into an art form. Looking deeply into such creative aspects of illness, this book also seeks to evoke the possibility of pathography as world literature. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate, postgraduate and research students, as well as scholars of literature and medical humanities who are interested in the intersections between literary studies and medical science.

Liberty & Prosperity: Liberal economics for achieving universal prosperity

Gopi Krishna Suvanam

‘Liberty & Prosperity: Liberal Economics for Achieving Universal Prosperity’ aims to illuminate alternative policy framework using liberal economic policies. The evolution of this book is grounded in the author’s personal and professional experience investigating economies around the world and therefore takes a global view. The ideas discussed are intended for countries currently under different stages of development and are not restricted to only developed countries or emerging economies. This book examines what we as a society can do to achieve universal prosperity with the recurring topic of the intertwining nature of liberty and prosperity; without prosperity, man cannot have true liberty, and the best way to achieve universal prosperity is by providing liberty to all. It identifies the appropriate measures from existing liberal theories that could help achieve this long-term goal, while also introducing contrarian ideas, including the elimination of income tax, denationalization of money, and the reduction in the role of central banks. The central theme is that liberty in all aspects of economic activity, coupled with universal basic income, could create universal prosperity. This book will particularly appeal to those with a general interest in the economy and business, as well as students who seek an overview of classical macroeconomic principles; however, the book’s innovative ideas may also be of interest to professional economists.

Dialectic, Rhetoric and Contrast: The Infinite Middle of Meaning

Richard Boulton, St George’s, University of London; Kingston University

By compiling an experimental method combining both dialectic and rhetoric, ‘Dialectic, Rhetoric and Contrast: The Infinite Middle of Meaning’ demonstrates how singular meanings can be rendered in a spectrum of 12 repeating concepts that are in a continuum, gradated and symmetrical. The ability to arrange meaning into this pattern opens enquiry into its ontology, and presents meaning as closer to the sensation of colours or musical notes than the bivalent oppositions depicted in classical logic. However, the experiment does not assert that this pattern suggests some sort of constant or absolute principle; instead, it theorises on the ways in which meaning can be considered to be recursive. To explain this, the book explores the concept of contrast itself. No exactitude on the precise existence of contrast can ever be struck because the answer varies infinitely depending upon the scale of measurement used to gauge the meeting point. This characteristic of contrast helps to define a whole new dimension from which sensation, meaning, cognition and consciousness can be analogised to the infinite forms between forms. At a time when the widest consensus in philosophy is the exhaustion of its central themes, the significance of such a hypothesis provides fresh impetus to revise some of the key meanings and concepts underpinning contemporary thought. To do this, the method explores the opposing themes of idealism and realism that run throughout western philosophy from Plato to the Speculative turn. This book will be of interest to professional academic audiences in the humanities and social sciences, from graduates to senior scholars. It will also be an interesting read to anyone wishing to keep abreast of developments in continental philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and the sociology of knowledge.

Polyptych: Adaptation, Television, and Comics

Edited by Reginald Wiebe, Concordia University of Edmonton

Through each of its chapters, 'Polyptych: Adaptation, Television, and Comics' examines the complex dynamics of adapting serialized texts. The transmedial adaptation of collaborative and unstable texts does not lend itself to the same strategies as other, more static adaptations such as novels or plays. Building off the foundational work of Linda Hutcheon and Gérard Genette, Polyptych considers the analogy of adaptation as a palimpsest—a manuscript page that has been reused, leaving traces of the previous work behind—as needing to be reevaluated. A polyptych is a multi-panel artwork and provides a new model for analyzing how adaptation works when translating collaborative and unstable texts. Given that most television and comic books are episodic and serialized, and considering that both media are also the cumulative work of many artists, this book offers a series of distanced readings to reassess how adaptation works in this field. Comic book adaptations on television are plentiful and are nearly completely ignored in critical discussions of adaptation. This collection focuses on texts that fall outside the most common subjects of study among the corpus and contributes to expanding the field of inquiry. The book features texts that are subjects of previous academic interest, as well as studies of texts that have never before been critically considered. It also includes an appendix that provides the first list of comic book adaptations on North American television. 'Polyptych' is a unique and timely contribution to dynamic and growing fields of study. The book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of Comic Studies, Adaptation Studies, and Critical Media Studies more broadly, as well as to students undertaking courses on these subjects. It will also appeal to comic book and pop culture fans who wish to expand their knowledge on the subject.