Affirm Press is an independent publisher in Melbourne, Australia, dedicated to publishing great stories, big ideas, and the most engaging local and international authors. Our children's list was shortlisted for the 2020 BOP Bologna Best Children’s Publisher of the Year award.
View Rights Portal
A literary agency in Toronto, Canada, representing authors and rights sales for several independent Canadian publishers.
View Rights Portal
Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book's pages - human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible - collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript's material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.
Trusted Partner
Medievalists have long taught that highly emotional Christian devotion, often called 'affective piety', appeared in Europe after the twelfth century and was primarily practiced by communities of mendicants, lay people and women. Emotional monasticism challenges this view. The first study of affective piety in an eleventh-century monastic context, it traces the early history of affective devotion through the life and works of the earliest known writer of emotional prayers, John of Fécamp, abbot of the Norman monastery of Fécamp from 1028-78. Exposing the early medieval monastic roots of later medieval affective piety, the book casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in Europe before the twelfth century and redefines how medievalists should teach the history of Christianity.
Trusted Partner
This volume provides a novel platform to re-evaluate the notion of open-ended intimacies through the lens of affect theories. Contributors address the embodied, affective and psychic, sensorial and embodied aspects of their ongoing intimate entanglements across various timely phenomena. This fascinating collection asks how the study of affect enables us to rethink intimacies, what affect theories can do to the prevailing notion of intimacy and how do they renew and enrich theories of intimacy in a manner which also considers its normative and violent forms. Lively and thought-provoking, this collection contributes to timely topics across the social sciences, representing multiple disciplines from gender studies, sociology and cultural studies to anthropology and queer studies. By so doing, it advances the value of interdisciplinary perspectives and creative methodologies to understanding affective intimacies.
Trusted Partner
Affective Bordering is an incisive exploration of the emotional politics of migration and borders. Billy Holzberg dives into the intricate interplay between emotions and migration governance, revealing how emotions work to reinforce racial, sexual, and national hierarchies. Examining pivotal events in Germany during the aftermath of the misnamed 'refugee crisis' in Germany, the book traces the construction of different emotions during key events of this period. Challenging the assumption that positive emotions like hope and empathy necessarily work as a counter to negative emotions like anger or fear, Affective Bordering reveals the racial grammars of deservingness that shape border governance today. Bringing together queer feminist theories of affect with postcolonial border and migration studies, the book offers a thought-provoking perspective on the reproduction and contestation of borders in today's world.
Trusted Partner
Technology and consumerism are two characteristic phenomena in the history medicine and healthcare, yet the connections between them are rarely explored by scholars. In this edited volume, the authors address this disconnect, noting the ways in which a variety of technologies have shaped patients' roles as consumers since the early twentieth century. Chapters examine key issues, such as the changing nature of patient information and choice, patients' assessment of risk and reward, and matters of patient role and of patient demand as they relate to new and changing technologies. They simultaneously investigate how differences in access to care and in outcomes across various patient groups have been influenced by the advent of new technologies and consumer-based approaches to health. The volume spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spotlights an array of medical technologies and health products, and draws on examples from across the United States and United Kingdom.
Trusted Partner
A fear of one’s own emotions can lead people to develop what has been termed emotion- or affect phobia. To deal with this specific kind of phobia, Affect Phobia Therapy (APT) has proven to be useful. In APT, psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, and experimental techniques are combined to help the patient to learn to accept and manage emotions again. Research shows that especially people suffering from anxiety or depression and people with avoidant or dependent personality disorders benefit from this method. This book offers a practical explanation of this evidence-based therapeutic method. The eight chapters focus on all different aspects of APT and the underlying theoretical concepts are illustrated with example patient-therapist dialogues. Target Group: psychologists, psychotherapists, students
Trusted Partner
Over the last twenty-five years, the 'history of emotion' field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature - in particular secular literature - as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past. The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences - those who read them or hear them read or performed?
Trusted Partner
This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. Resisting the overly rationalist tendencies of political philosophy, it argues that critical theory actively cultivates a powerful connection between thinking and feeling, and rediscovers a range of often neglected concepts that were of vital importance to the first generation of critical theorists, including melancholia, hope, (un)happiness, objects and mimesis. In doing so, it brings the dynamic work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer into conversation with more recent debates around politics and affect. An important intervention in the fields of affect studies and social and political thought, Critical theory and feeling shows that sensuous experience is at the heart of the Frankfurt School's affective politics.
Trusted Partner
Trusted Partner
Trusted Partner
Trusted Partner
Trusted Partner
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
Trusted Partner
Trusted Partner
Trusted Partner
Citizenship, nation, empire investigates the extent to which popular imperialism influenced the teaching of history between 1870 and 1930. It is the first book-length study to trace the substantial impact of educational psychology on the teaching of history, probing its impact on textbooks, literacy primers and teacher-training manuals. Educationists identified 'enlightened patriotism' to be the core objective of historical education. This was neither tub-thumping jingoism, nor state-prescribed national-identity teaching, but rather a carefully crafted curriculum for all children which fused civic as well as imperial ambitions. The book will be of interest to those studying or researching aspects of English domestic imperial culture, especially those concerned with questions of childhood and schooling, citizenship, educational publishing and anglo-British relations. Given that vitriolic debates about the politics of history teaching have endured into the twenty-first century, Citizenship, nation, empire is a timely study of the formative influences that shaped the history curriculum in English schools
Trusted Partner
A girl torn between two brothers. Regardless of which one she falls in love with it will be disastrous for the other. Christopher and Adrian have sworn that no girl will ever come between them again, because there is a sleeping monster inside Adrian, just waiting to hurt his brother. But then Jessa comes to High Moor Grange… Jessa would do anything to find her sister Alice, who has been registered as missing for five years. High Moor Grange is the first clue she has been given after all this time – but apart from a ruin shrouded in mist, all she finds there are the owners of this dilapidated manor house. Jessa suspects that they both know more about Alice’s disappearance than they admit. Christopher wants nothing more than to be rid of her, and constantly gets on her nerves with his arrogance – and even his warm-hearted brother Adrian seems to be harbouring some secrets. Jessica knows that she ought to stay away from the twin brothers, because instead of finding answers at High Moor Grange, she finds herself in danger of losing her heart in a battle against a 200-year-old curse. Dark, irresistible and deeply romantic – a modern Beauty and the Beast story by the queen of emotions!
Trusted Partner
Trusted Partner
His world is that of the Royals – full of scandals and secrets. Falling in love with him was never part of her plan. Their paths cross at the royal stud farm... Greta just wants to get away: away from her school and away from the friends who have so endlessly disappointed her. The holiday job at the royal stud farm comes at just the right time for her. She might not have any interest in horses – and even less in princes and princesses – but the royal family’s palace still makes her heart beat faster. But on the very first day she quarrels with Edward, the horse trainer. He guesses that she is hiding a secret and wants to do whatever it takes to bring it out in the open. When, shortly afterwards, Prince Tristan appears at the stud farm, Greta’s life is completely turned upside down. She notices all too late that she is in the process of falling in love – and specifically with the boy that she actually wants to stay away from. Humorous and romantic, glamorous and exciting: ‘Royal Horses’ is the perfect love story for all readers from 12 to 99 years-old. Greta and Edward‘s story continues! Volume 2, ‘Crown Dream’ will be out in autumn 2020.
