On Extremity: From Music to Images, Words, and Experiences brings together transdisciplinary scholarship on sounds, images, words, and experiences (human and non-human) to reflect on the polysemic and polymorphic characteristics of extremity and the category of the extreme. The editors and authors aim to contribute to a living, breathing, and expanding definition of extremity that helps us understand what we gain, or lose when we interact with it, create it, and share it with, or force it upon, others. The volume calls for the emergence of “extremity studies� as an area of perusal to help us navigate our current global condition.

It is common to hear heavy metal music fans and musicians talk about the "metal community". This concept, which is widely used when referencing this musical genre, encompasses multiple complex aspects that are seldom addressed in traditional academic endeavors including shared aesthetics, musical practices, geographies, and narratives. The idea of a "metal community" recognizes that fans and musicians frequently identify as part of a collective group, larger than any particular individual. Still, when examined in detail, the idea raises more questions than answers. What criteria are used to define groups of people as part of the community? How are metal communities formed and maintained through time? How do metal communities interact with local cultures throughout the world? How will metal communities change over the lifespan of their members? Are metal communities even possible in light of the importance placed on individualism in this musical genre? These are just some of the questions that arise when the concept of "community" is used in relation to heavy metal music. And yet in the face of all these complexities, heavy metal fans continue to think of themselves as a unified collective entity. This book addresses this notion of "metal community" via the experiences of authors and fans through theoretical reflections and empirical research. Their contributions focus on how metal communities are conceptualized, created, shaped, maintained, interact with their context, and address internal tensions. The book provides scholars, and other interested in the field of metal music studies, with a state of the art reflection on how metal communities are constituted, while also addressing their limits and future challenges.

It is common to hear heavy metal music fans and musicians talk about the "metal community". This concept, which is widely used when referencing this musical genre, encompasses multiple complex aspects that are seldom addressed in traditional academic endeavors including shared aesthetics, musical practices, geographies, and narratives. The idea of a "metal community" recognizes that fans and musicians frequently identify as part of a collective group, larger than any particular individual. Still, when examined in detail, the idea raises more questions than answers. What criteria are used to define groups of people as part of the community? How are metal communities formed and maintained through time? How do metal communities interact with local cultures throughout the world? How will metal communities change over the lifespan of their members? Are metal communities even possible in light of the importance placed on individualism in this musical genre? These are just some of the questions that arise when the concept of "community" is used in relation to heavy metal music. And yet in the face of all these complexities, heavy metal fans continue to think of themselves as a unified collective entity. This book addresses this notion of "metal community" via the experiences of authors and fans through theoretical reflections and empirical research. Their contributions focus on how metal communities are conceptualized, created, shaped, maintained, interact with their context, and address internal tensions. The book provides scholars, and other interested in the field of metal music studies, with a state of the art reflection on how metal communities are constituted, while also addressing their limits and future challenges.

The Persistence of Presence analyzes the relationship between emblem books, containing combinations of pictures and texts, and Spanish literature in the early modern period. As representations of ideas and ideals, emblems are allegories produced in a particular place and time, and their study can shed light on the central cultural and political activities of an era. Bradley J. Nelson argues that the emblem was a primary indicator of the social and political functions of diverse literary practices in early modern Spain, from theatre to epic prose. Furthermore, the disintegration of a unified medieval world view left many seeking the kinds of deep knowledge that could be accessed through symbolic pictures, increasing their cultural significance. In this detailed examination of emblem books, sacred and secular theatre, and Cervantes' critique of baroque allegory in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Nelson connects the early history of emblematics with the drive towards cultural and political hegemony in Counter-Reformation Spain.

A manufactured and pre-programmed serial killer; a suicidal robot; a romantic necrophiliac; and an archaeologist who feeds the perverse desires of aficionados of the apocalypse-Francisco Garcia Gonzalez's stories map out literary and metafictional approaches to the sci-fi universe in ways that echo the humor and violence of Miguel de Cervantes, Maria de Zayas, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosa Montero, and Roberto BolaNo. With a scholarly introduction by translator Bradley J. Nelson that introduces Garcia Gonzalez's oeuvre to contemporary readers and scholars of Spanish-language literature, this science fiction collection introduces Anglophones to this unique author. Garcia Gonzalez turns a black mirror on contemporary society and its relation both to history and to the future. His insightfulness and relevance draw comparisons with Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and China Mieville, though his verbal economy and elegance are more akin to Cormac McCarthy, producing both disturbingly uncanny violence and unexpected comedy.

This volume explores the intersection between theories of the modern spectacle--from Jose Antonio Maravall's conceptualization of the spectacular culture of the baroque to the Frankfurt School's theorization of mass culture, to Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum, to Guy Debord's understanding of the society of the spectacle--and the findings of the emerging fields of urban studies, landscape studies, and, generally speaking, studies of space.

This volume explores the intersection between theories of the modern spectacle--from Jose Antonio Maravall's conceptualization of the spectacular culture of the baroque to the Frankfurt School's theorization of mass culture, to Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum, to Guy Debord's understanding of the society of the spectacle--and the findings of the emerging fields of urban studies, landscape studies, and, generally speaking, studies of space.