Fourth Horseman Press Releases Figures of Freedom
Figures of Freedom (2024)
LONDON, United Kingdom — Fourth Horseman Press is proud to announce the publication of Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis, a new collection of academic essays by an international team of scholars that examines the ways in which freedom has been interpreted in modern media.
The United States of America–its politics, its culture, and its identity–is often framed as an evolving conversation about the nature of freedom. Conflicts in American life typically revolve around questions of what it means to be free, who gets to be free, the limitations of freedom, and the problems and paradoxes associated with freedom. In the twenty-first century, in a time of social media, digital surveillance, climate change, pandemic management, autocratic politicians, and evolving attitudes about race, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity, the old question of what freedom truly entails calls for new answers, new ways of thinking, and even new ways of being free.
Figures of Freedom answers the call. This provocative and thought-provoking collection of essays invites readers to witness how recent literary, filmic, and televisual narratives have represented and reimagined themes of personal and political agency in the context of twenty-first-century aspirations and anxieties. In various ways, films as diverse as Bird Box, Toy Story, and Pacific Rim, television series such as Mad Men and Mr. Robot, and novels such as DeLillo’s Zero K, Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, and Millet’s A Children’s Bible all present characters who grapple with classical questions of freedom against a recognizably contemporary backdrop of terror, tyranny, technology, and apocalypse. Together, they reveal what twenty-first-century narratives can teach us about how the idea of freedom has been expanded, distorted, and reimagined in contemporary fiction.
Randy Laist, PhD, is the author of Rethinking Writing Instruction in the Age of AI (2024), The Twin Towers in Film: A Cinematic History of the World Trade Center (2020), Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s (2015), and Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels (2009). He has also edited volumes of essays on college movies, plant studies, Indiana Jones, retro-representations of the 1980s, and inclusive educational design.
Brian A. Dixon, PhD, is an author, cultural studies scholar, and media critic. His academic writings include studies concerning nineteenth-century American literature, detectives in film and fiction, ethnic humor in British sitcoms, and archetypes in comic books. He is the author of Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast: James Bond and the Body (2024) and has edited volumes including Back to Frank Black: A Return to Chris Carter’s Millennium (2012) and Columbia & Britannia: An Alternate History (2009).
Fourth Horseman Press is an independent publisher established in 2003 with the launch of Revelation, the magazine of apocalyptic art and literature. In the years since, the publisher has released a number of titles including anthologies, novellas, plays, and volumes of cultural critique. In 2010, Fourth Horseman Press earned recognition for its publication of Columbia & Britannia, an anthology nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis is now available in paperback. A multi-platform electronic edition is set to be released later in the year. Publisher’s updates will be made available from Fourth Horseman Press at fourthhorsemanpress.com.