The article will be 4,500-7,000 words in length and suitable for both general readers and scholars. We will include about 30 essays in total.

Please send a 300-500 word proposal by October 1, 2011. Include a brief CV (max 1 page) or bio. To confirm that your preferred topic is available or appropriate, feel free to send a short query before writing a longer proposal. We are happy to review more than one proposal per author.

Completed chapters are due March 1, 2012.

The set is under contract with Praeger. Pub date is 2013.

The editors seek contributions that examine US popular culture in different media: film, television, music, literature, the Web as well as various understandings of evil and its representation in American life and politics and behaviors, plus events that are characterized as evil—or misrepresented as evil--in the media.

The articles should seek to place representations of evil within their historical, social, and cultural context, while encouraging readers to reconsider ideas about evil that pop culture perpetuates and promotes. The set seeks to provide fresh discussions of behaviors and events that were historically characterized as evil historically in the US, or that are considered to be evil, but may not have been evil in another time/place.

Example topics include (but are not limited to): Film:

1 The Holocaust on Film
2 The Catholic Church vs. Cinema: Movies as a Threat to Morality
3 “The Zombie Virus,” the Death Star, and other Popular Metaphors
4 Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth, and the “New” Horror Porn Genre
5 The Saw Franchise: Evil Provides a New Platform for Moral Thought
6 The Rules of the American Horror Genre
7 The Vigilante Film
8 The Usual Suspects :The Devil is a Storyteller, not a Liar:
9 Behind the White Picket Fences: David Lynch and Suburban Evil
10 Apocalypse Now: The Return of the Old Questions
11 Boys Don’t Cry
12 Roman Polanski: Refractions of Darkness
13 Elephant, United 93, Coping, and Catharsis
14 Se7en, The Silence of the Lambs, and the Cultivated Killer
15 A History of the Hit Man in American Film

TV:
16 Roots: Skeletons from the Closet on Prime Time
17 How Hitler Became a Comedian
18 The Wire: The Evil is Everywhere; So Is the Good
19 Rape in the Lifetime Movie of the Week
20 South Park: The Muhammad Episode and the Boundaries of Evil
21 Lost, and the Dialogue between Good and Evil

The Media and Politics:
22 Catholic Pedophilia, Evangelical Hypocrisy, and Islamic Terror: Religion, Evil, and the News
23 Caught on Tape!: How America Represents Evil to Itself
24 Abortion, Torture, and the America Debate over Rights vs. Right
25 Evil Empire and Axis of Evil: The Evocation of Evil in Political Rhetoric
26 Evil on the Left (Torture, Corporations, and Fox) vs. Evil on the Right (The Liberal Media, Terrorism, and Obama)

Volume 2: Evil in Music and Literature Music:

27 The idea (and influence) of “devil-music”
28 “Let it Be” vs. “Let it Bleed”: Rock’s Enduring Dialogue
29 Seeking the Dark and Hidden Messages in Popular Music
30 The History of Goth Culture
31 Horror-Core Music
32 Whatever Happened to Gangtsa Rap?
33 A Strange Case: Sufjan Stevens’ “John Wayne Gacy”

Literature: 34 A Brief History of American Metaphors
35 Bret Easton Ellis and the Evil in the Mirror
36 Hannibal: His History and His Heirs
37 The Road: A New Kind of Apocalypse
38 The Da Vinci Code: Christianity’s Old Enemies and New History
39 The Left Behind series: The Enemy is Everywhere
40 John Grisham’s Use of American Evil as a Plot Device
41 Stephen King: Evil in its Many Forms

Daily Life: 42 Halloween (versus Day of the Dead)
43 YouTube”: Finding the Audience for Evil
44 Bonnie and Clyde, America, and Popular Villains
45 “I Still Can’t Believe He Would Do Those Things”: Keeping an Eye on the Neighbors
46 Going Postal: How American Fears Get Built on American Dreams
47 The Casual Evils of American Slang
48 Satanists and other Cult Phenomena
49 The Human Face of Evil in the Tabloids: Every Year a New Horror
50 American Pedophilia:

Online: 51 The Hitler Meme

Sharon Packer, MD
Assistant Clinical Professor
Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Email: sharonpacker@msn.com

Jody Pennington
Associate Professor in Media and Culture Studies
English | Department of Aesthetics and Communication | Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark
+45 8942 6537
Email: engjwp@hum.au.dk