Contributors
Hastings College Press welcomes proposals for new titles. Please see the editor/contributor guidelines below for the types of books published by the press.
Editor/Contributor Guidelines
Hastings College Press publishes reasonably priced editions of regionally themed texts. We focus primarily on forgotten texts that are in the public domain. (Any text published in the United States before Jan. 1, 1927, is in the public domain. Some texts published between 1924 and 1960 have fallen into the public domain. If you would like to propose a reading edition or critical edition of a text but do not know whether it is in the public domain, please contact the director.)
We are interested in fiction, nonfiction, and historical documents, as well as collections of scholarly essays on appropriate regional themes.
Citation style should conform to the standard style of the discipline.
Proposals may be sent to Patricia Oman, Director of HC Press, at hcpress@hastings.edu.
Forgotten Texts
Reading Editions
Reading Editions are low-priced editions of texts aimed at undergraduates, high-school students, and the general public. Books will be published in paperback editions. Editorial matter should be minimal.
To compete with free versions of public domain texts, we focus on providing quality editions that include introductions by knowledgeable scholars. Contributors must provide the following:
An introduction (4000–5000 words) that describes the text’s contemporaneous critical reception and why readers should be interested in the text today. Editors may discuss the text using any critical lens, but keep in mind that the target audience is not a scholarly one.
About the Author (max 200 words)
About the Editor (max 200 words)
Contributors may also provide suggestions about authoritative editions of the text and provide limited footnotes for any names or terms with which readers may be unfamiliar.
Critical Editions
Critical Editions are designed for classroom use at both the undergraduate and high-school level. Books will be published in both paperback and eBook editions. Editorial matter should be more extensive than in the Reading Editions.
Editors must provide the following:
An introduction (5000–7000 words) that describes the text’s contemporaneous reception and the major scholarly debates about the text.
Footnotes that explain terms, names, and cultural/historical contexts with which readers may be unfamiliar. Editors may include additional footnotes that will enhance readers’ understanding or appreciation of the text.
Appendices that enhance the readers’ understanding or appreciation of the text and provide supplementary support for instructors. Appendices may include, but are not limited to, contemporaneous reviews, related contemporary historical documents, private correspondence, important scholarly articles, and facsimiles of the manuscript. Appendix materials are not subject to our general public-domain policy, but inclusion of many copyrighted sources may affect the price of the title. If you would like to include materials that do not fall under public-domain copyright laws, the Director will work with you to choose appropriate pieces.
About the Author (max 200 words)
About the Editor (max 200 words)
Scholarly Collections
HC Press publishes a limited number of critical collections on regional themes. Collections should include 10–15 essays of 4000–6000 words each (including editorial matter). All essays in a collection must be original and previously unpublished.
The editor’s responsibilities include the following:
Propose a collection on a focused theme
Solicit and collect essays from contributors
Review essays for scholarly merit and request revisions from contributors, as necessary
Organize the essays into a logical order
Write an introduction (4000–7000 words) explaining the significance of the topic and how the essays in the collection contribute to a scholarly debate
Suggest the names of scholars who may be willing to review the manuscript
Proposals for our Rediscovering the American Midwest series (series editors, Jon K. Lauck and Patricia Oman) are especially welcome.
Call for Proposals: Midwest Gothic
In the American cultural imagination, the Midwest represents the pastoral “home” or “heart” of the nation, a space closely identified with agriculture and rural values. Defined against the urban and industrial, the region has come to embody national myths, positing a middle landscape full of promise and fertility. Alongside these ideas of the region, pervasive images of small-town provinciality and Main Street speak to the ongoing depiction of the Midwest as nostalgic and anachronistic. While these representations belie the complex realities of history and place, the Midwest Gothic, as a regional subgenre, acts as a response to an increasingly out-of-synch national mythology by digging up the secrets, horrors, and forgotten histories that lie just beneath the topsoil. This subgenre provides a regional lens through which to view the American Gothic’s central themes and concerns, emphasizing the heartland’s distinctive role in national identity.
In literature, the Midwest Gothic has a longstanding and multifaceted tradition, including works such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage, and Bienvenido Santos’s “Scent of Apples.” In film and popular culture, the Midwest Gothic encompasses diverse modes and genres ranging from horror/neo-noir films like Children of the Corn and Fargo, serial documentaries such as Making a Murderer, and television shows like Sharp Objects and Stranger Things. Such works delve into tensions between urban and rural spaces as well as vital socio-political and economic concerns of the region, including deindustrialization and economic disparity, crime, addiction, mental illness, racism, sexism, homophobia, and isolation. Conceiving of the region as a national “wound,” the Midwest Gothic demonstrates the return of the repressed as a force for healing, illuminating the dark underside of a cultural mythology in order to counterintuitively affirm life.
This edited volume is particularly interested in original contributions between 5,000 and 7,000 words on topics including, but not limited to:
The rise of the Midwest Gothic, including seminal authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Laura Ingalls Wilder
Representations of race, socioeconomic class, gender, and queerness
Intersections with the American Gothic and other regional Gothics
Tensions between the urban and rural
Representations of immigration in the Midwestern Gothic
Domestic abjection
Representations of the Farm Crisis
The opioid crisis, addiction, and mental illness
The pastoral and post-pastoral
Documentary and non-fiction approaches to the Midwestern Gothic
Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words to Dr. Brandi Homan and Julia Madsen at mwgothicscholar@gmail.com by November 1, 2019. Selections will be made by December 1, 2019. Final essays (of 5,000-7,000 words) are due February 1, 2019.