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Dreams of Peace and Freedom
In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the “major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s “minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past. The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: ...
Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction
Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and its uses both to question what it means to be human in digital era.
Modernism and Time Machines
Bridging modernist studies and science fiction scholarshipModernism and Time Machines places the fascination with time in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and art side-by-side with the rise of time-travel narratives and alternate histories in popular culture. Both modernism and this cardinal trope of science fiction produce a range of effects and insights that go beyond the exhilarations of simply sliding back and forth in history. Together the modernist time-obsession and the fantasy of moving in time help us to rethink the shapes of time, the consistency of timespace and the nature of history.Key FeaturesDraws on insights from a range of sources, including critical geography...
Scraps Of The Untainted Sky
Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than th...
Coral Empire
From vividly colored underwater photographs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef to life-size dioramas re-creating coral reefs and the bounty of life they sustained, the work of early twentieth-century explorers and photographers fed the public's fascination with reefs. In the 1920s John Ernest Williamson in the Bahamas and Frank Hurley in Australia produced mass-circulated and often highly staged photographs and films that cast corals as industrious, colonizing creatures, and the undersea as a virgin, unexplored, and fantastical territory. In Coral Empire Ann Elias traces the visual and social history of Williamson and Hurley and how their modern media spectacles yoked the tropics and coral reefs to colonialism, racism, and the human domination of nature. Using the labor and knowledge of indigenous peoples while exoticizing and racializing them as inferior Others, Williamson and Hurley sustained colonial fantasies about people of color and the environment as endless resources to be plundered. As Elias demonstrates, their reckless treatment of the sea prefigured attitudes that caused the environmental crises that the oceans and reefs now face.
A Companion to Science Fiction
A Companion to Science Fiction assembles essays by an international range of scholars which discuss the contexts, themes and methods used by science fiction writers. This Companion conveys the scale and variety of science fiction. Shows how science fiction has been used as a means of debating cultural issues. Essays by an international range of scholars discuss the contexts, themes and methods used by science fiction writers. Addresses general topics, such as the history and origins of the genre, its engagement with science and gender, and national variations of science fiction around the English-speaking world. Maps out connections between science fiction, television, the cinema, virtual reality technology, and other aspects of the culture. Includes a section focusing on major figures, such as H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula Le Guin. Offers close readings of particular novels, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
The Victorian Bookshelf
This introductory guide to the canon of Victorian literature covers 61 novels by authors from Jane Austen to Emile Zola. Brief critical essays describe what each book is about and argue for its cultural, historical and literary importance. Literary canons remain a subject of debate but critics, readers and students continue to find them useful as overviews--and examinations--of the great works within a given period or culture. The Victorian canon is particularly rich with splendid novels that educate, enlighten and entertain. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Browsings
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda has been hailed as "the best-read person in America" (The Paris Review) and "the best book critic in America" (The New York Observer). His latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on a life in literature. Reaching from the classics to the post-moderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Dirda's topics are equally diverse: literary pets, the lost art of cursive writing, book inscriptions, the pleasures of science fiction conventions, author photographs, novelists in old age, Oberlin College, a year in Marseille, writer's block, and much more. As admirers of his earlier books will expect, there are annotated lists galore—of perfect book titles, great adventure novels, favorite words, books about books, and beloved children's classics, as well as a revealing peek at the titles Michael keeps on his own nightstand.Funny and erudite, Browsings is a celebration of the reading life, a fan's notes, and the perfect gift for any booklover.
H.G. Wells's The Time Machine
The Time Machine is one of the most important works of science fiction. It greatly influenced the genre and continues to be widely read at all levels. This reference guide overviews the novel for students and general readers. Written by a leading scholar on H.G. Wells, the volume covers all aspects of the work, including its plot, textual history, historical and intellectual contexts, themes, style, and reception. Written more than 100 years ago, H.G. Wells' first novel forever shaped the course of science fiction. Of all his vast writings, The Time Machine seems most likely to ensure his permanent place in literary history. But more than a literary work, it is now widely recognized as a key...
Vintage Visions
Vintage Visions is a seminal collection of scholarly essays on early works of science fiction and its antecedents. From Cyrano de Bergerac in 1657 to Olaf Stapledon in 1937, this anthology focuses on an unusually broad range of authors and works in the genre as it emerged across the globe, including the United States, Russia, Europe, and Latin America. The book includes material that will be of interest to both scholars and fans, including an extensive bibliography of criticism on early science fiction—the first of its kind—and a chronological listing of 150 key early works. Before Dr. Strangelove, future-war fiction was hugely popular in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Before Terminator, a French author depicted Thomas Edison as the creator of the perfect female android. These works and others are featured in this critical anthology. Contributors include Paul K. Alkon, Andrea Bell, Josh Bernatchez, I. F. Clarke, William J. Fanning Jr., William B. Fischer, Allison de Fren, Susan Gubar, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Kamila Kinyon, Stanislaw Lem, Patrick A. McCarthy, Sylvie Romanowski, Nicholas Ruddick, and Gary Westfahl. Hardcover is un-jacketed.
