Literary studies: from c 2000 Books
Liverpool University Press Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles: Contesting
Book SynopsisGiven the extensive influence of the 'transport revolution' on the past two centuries (a time when trains, trams, omnibuses, bicycles, cars, airplanes, and so forth were invented), and given science fiction’s overall obsession with machines and technologies of all kinds, it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to transportation in this increasingly popular genre. Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles is the first book to examine the history of representations of road transport machines in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American science fiction. The focus of this study is on two machines of the road that have been locked in a constant, often bitter, struggle with one another: the automobile and the bicycle. With chapters ranging from the early science fiction of the pulp magazine era in the 1920s and 1930s, to the postcyberpunk of the 1990s and more recent media of the 2000s such as web television, zines, and comics, this book argues that science fiction by and large perceives the car as anything but a marvelous invention of modernity. Rather, the genre often scorns and ridicules the automobile and instead promotes more sustainable, more benign, more restrained technologies of movement such as the bicycle.Trade Review‘With its broad historic reach, its synthesis of a variety of disparate types of research from a variety of scholarly disciplines, its lucid prose, and its welcome readability, Withers' Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles offers a significant contribution to both ecocritical discourse and the study of science fiction as a genre.’- Lisa Swanstrom, University of UtahTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Perfectibility and Techno-Optimism in the Pulp Era2. Murderous Cars, Space Bikes, and Alien Bicycles in the Golden Age3. Electric Cars, Auto-Dueling, and Bike Shares in the New Wave4. Messenger Skateboards and Messenger Bikes in Postcyberpunk5. Staying Mobile in the Post-Apocalyptic World6. Kids on Bikes in 1980s Nostalgia TextsConclusion
£109.50
Liverpool University Press The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement,
Book SynopsisThis book explores the literary afterlives of one of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial sons, Roger Casement. A seminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder of a sexual life lived in the shadows: through Casement, writers have been able to commune and negotiate with a difficult past. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts, alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialogues between modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost opens a fault line in our uneasy engagement with the cross-currents between history and memory, reality and fiction. It positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrain of Anglo-Irish history.Trade Review'This is a welcome study, learned, wide-ranging and on a fascinating and timely topic.'Professor Matthew Campbell, University of York'As with all queer pasts the archive remains somewhat out of reach, incomplete, hidden, silenced and disputed; Casement will, as Garden rightfully notes, "continue to haunt us", but this work makes his haunting less of a ghostly white on white text, and is a worthy addition to Casement studies.' Mary McAuliffe, Irish Historical Studies'Garden writes an admirably nuanced and elaborately and systematically interwoven text […] This study adds much to the fields of memory studies, to gender studies, to the nationalist histories of Ireland and Britain, and to literary studies.' Frances Devlin-Glass, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies'Garden embraces all that is "complex, contradictory and messy" in Casement’s legacy: unrestricted by text or canon, she ... demonstrates how the "queer archival trail" of Roger Casement continues to disturb neat narratives of history.' Galen D. Bunting, Modernism/Modernity'This is a courageous, profoundly researched and theoretically challenging work that synthesizes the expanding Queer archive of Casement material and builds on the pioneering work by the American literary historian, Lucy McDiarmid. Garden’s opening chapter on Conrad and Sebald must rank as one of the most stimulating interventions on the "archival, textual and historical dialogue" between Heart of Darkness and The Rings of Saturn.' Angus Mitchell, Review of Irish Studies in EuropeTable of ContentsIntroduction: Casement's Queer GhostI. 'He could tell you things! Things I've tried to forget, things I never did know': Conrad, Sebald and Spectres of ImperialismII. The Black Diaries: Sex, Race and Empire in The Swimming-Pool Library and The Lost WorldIII. Queer Nationalism and Colonial Ireland: Ulysses and At Swim Two BoysIV. Saint Casement: The 'National Political Trial', Partition and the Dramatic Troubles of Sir RogerV. The Traitor and the Hero: War, Betrayal and EspionageVI. 'The Ghost of Roger Casement': Poetic Afterlives
£109.50
Liverpool University Press Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory,
Book SynopsisPost-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance confronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. Insofar as the articulation of memory in (post)colonial contexts can be viewed as an integral component of a continuing anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, in tracing the dynamics of conveying the memory of ongoing, chronic trauma, this collection negotiates the urgency for Palestinians to reclaim and retain their heritage in a continually unstable and fretful present. The collection offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period. Reflecting on the potential for the Palestinian narrative to recreate reality in ways that both document it and resist its brutality, the critical essays in this collection show how Palestinian writers in the twenty-first century critically and creatively consider the possible future(s) of their nation.Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsForeword: “Under Suffering’s Glow: Palestinian Writing after Oslo.”Bashir Abu-MannehIntroductionRachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad QabahaPart I: Palestinian Archives: Catastrophe, Exile, and Life WritingChapter 1: “Late Style as Resistance in the Works of Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti.”Tahrir HamdiChapter 2: “A ‘rich fabric of some sort, which no one can fully comprehend [or] fully own’: Levantine Remains in Memoirs by Edward Said, Jean Said Makdisi, and Wadad Makdisi Cortas.”Lindsey MooreChapter 3: “The Exile’s Memory and the Chronotope in Ghada Karmi’s Return: A Palestinian Memoir.”Ahmad QabahaChapter 4: “Snapshots of Solidarity: Anthologizing Palestinian Life Writing.”Sophia BrownPart II: Palestinian Aesthetics: Icons, Haptics, and PalimpsestsChapter 5: “Confronting the Mythic? Najwan Darwish and Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry.”Sarah IrvingChapter 6: “Enduring Palestine: Haptics, Violence, and Affect in Adania Shibli’s Fiction.”!!Michael PritchardChapter 7: “‘I can only get there now on the rafts of memories’: Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories in Susan Abulhawa’s Novels.”Rachel Gregory FoxPart III: Palestinian Horizons: Endings and Beginnings, or Taking FlightChapter 8: “Killing God to Find Palestine ‘after the end of the world’ in Adania Shibli, Mahmoud Amer, and Maya Abu al-Hayyat.”Nora ParrChapter 9: “Unfinished Work: Anticolonial Pedagogy in Selma Dabbagh’s Out Of It.”Tom SperlingerChapter 10: “Wingwomen: Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of Flight in Twenty-First Century Palestinian Creative Consciousness.”Anna BallWorks Cited
£109.50
Liverpool University Press Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and
Book SynopsisThe formulation ‘egalitarian strangeness’ is a direct borrowing from Courts voyages au pays du peuple [Short Voyages to the Land of the People] (1990), a collection of essays by the contemporary French thinker Jacques Rancière. Perhaps best known for his theory of radical equality as set out in Le Maître ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] (1987), Rancière reflects on ways in which a hierarchical social order based on inequality can come to be unsettled. In the democracy of literature, for example, he argues that words and sentences serve to capture any life and to make it available to any reader. The present book explores embedded forms of social and cultural ‘apportionment’ in a range of modern and contemporary French texts (including prose fiction, socially engaged commentary, and autobiography), while also identifying scenes of class disturbance and egalitarian encounter. Part One considers the ‘refrain of class’ audible in works by Claude Simon, Charles Péguy, Marie Ndiaye, Thierry Beinstingel, and Gabriel Gauny and examines how these authors’ practices of language connect with that refrain. In Part Two, Hughes analyses forms of domination and dressage with reference to Simone Weil’s mid-1930s factory journal, Paul Nizan’s novel of class alienation Antoine Bloyé from the same decade, and Pierre Michon’s Vies minuscules [Small Lives] (1984) with its focus on obscure rural lives. The reflection on how these narratives draw into contiguity antagonistic identities is extended in Part Three, where individual chapters on Proust and the contemporary authors François Bon and Didier Eribon demonstrate ways in which enduring forms of cultural distribution are both consolidated and contested.Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: By Way of RancièrePART I: THE REFRAIN OF CLASSChapter 1 Events and Sensibility in Claude Simon’s L’AcaciaChapter 2 ‘Les Savoirs de la main’: Dramas of Manual Knowledge in Péguy and BeinstingelChapter 3 A Solitary Emancipation: Ndiaye’s La Cheffe, roman d’une cuisinièreChapter 4 The Worker Philosopher: Gauny and Self-BelongingPART II: DISTURBANCE AND DRESSAGEChapter 5 Animal laborans: Missing Life in Paul Nizan’s Antoine BloyéChapter 6 A Degrading Division: Hands and Minds in Simone WeilChapter 7 Pierre Michon, ‘Small Lives’, and the Terrain of ArtPART III: AUDIBLE VOICESChapter 8 Tales of Distribution in A la recherche du temps perduChapter 9 Convocation, or On Ways of Being Together: François BonChapter 10 Circuits of Re-appropriation: Accessing the Real in the Work of Didier EribonConclusionBibliographyIndex
£109.50
Liverpool University Press Mutopia: Science Fiction and Fantastic Knowledge
Book SynopsisThe Enlightenment’s project of establishing scientific proof for the unity of the universe led instead to the fragmentation of knowledge. The culture of certainty mutated into a culture of conjecture and speculative supplements as the image of a unified cosmos mutated into a patchwork totality. In the process, the pursuit of knowledge developed a symbiotic association with science fiction. While sf has often provided concrete ideas adopted by the knowledge faculties, equally important is the way science-fictional counterfactual world building – science fiction’s “fantastic knowledge” – has intersected with rational speculation in all fields of knowledge. As a result, the dream of a completed, rationally engineered utopia has evolved into the image of “mutopia,” in which the objects of knowledge, the process of knowing, and the science-fictional imagination itself are expected to undergo constant transformation. The essays in Mutopia address the science-fictional imagination’s relevance for scientific modeling, critical theory, the deconstruction of the future, the future of religion, the future of nations, the imagination of empire, the construction of aliens, the future of science fiction itself, and the transformation of utopia into mutopia. Written over many years by a leading scholar of science fiction, the essays are revised and expanded for republication in this collection, alongside new commentary that places them in an updated context.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Fantastic KnowledgeThe Poetics of Modeling: Duhem, Harré, Lem (1990)Postscript to “The Poetics of Modeling: Duhem, Harré, Lem”The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway (1991)Postscript to “The SF of Theory"Futuristic Flu, or The Revenge of the Future (1992)Postscript to “Futuristic Flu, or The Revenge of the Future”Living in Downtime: Speculations on Virtual Reality and the Future of Religion (1996)Postscript to “Living in Downtime”Notes on Mutopia (1997)Dis-Imagined Communities: Science Fiction and the Future of Nations (2002)Postscript to “Dis-Imagined Communities”Science Fiction and Empire (2003)Appendix 1: Cyberpunk and Empire (2003)Postscript to “Science Fiction and Empire”Some Things We Know About Aliens (2007)Postscript to “Some Things we Know About Aliens”What Do We Mean When We Say “Global Science Fiction?”: Reflections on a New Nexus (2012)Postscript to “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Global Science Fiction?’”
£104.00
Liverpool University Press Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The
Book SynopsisDrawing on historical, literary and cultural studies perspectives, this book examines the phenomenon of the “Returned Yank” in the cultural imagination, taking as its point of departure the most exhaustively discussed Returned Yank narrative, The Quiet Man (dir. John Ford, 1952). Often dismissed as a figure that embodies the sentimentality and nostalgia of Irish America writ large, this study argues that the Returned Yank’s role in the Irish cultural imagination is much more varied and complex than this simplistic construction allows. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, s/he has been widely discussed in broadcast and print media, and depicted in plays, novels, short stories and films. The imagined figure of the Returned Yank has been the driving impetus behind some of Ireland's most well-known touristic endeavours and festivals. In the form of U.S. Presidential visits, s/he has repeatedly been the catalyst for questions surrounding Irish identity. Most significantly, s/he has been mobilised as an arbiter in one of the most important debates in post-Independence Ireland: should Ireland remain a "traditional" society or should it seek to modernise? His/her repeated appearances in Irish literature and culture after 1952 – in remarkably heterogeneous, often very sophisticated ways – refute claims of the “aesthetic caution” of Irish writers, dramatists and filmmakers responding to the tradition/modernity debate.Trade Review'An incisive and impressively contextualized study of the trope of "the Returned Yank" in Irish culture. This fascinating and outstanding book will make an invaluable and timely contribution to Irish and American Studies, as well as to diaspora studies more widely.'Dr Tony Murray, Director of the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University'Extremely commendable in its scope and ambition, this book offers a valuable contribution to Irish cultural studies, in particular to research on the complex relationship between "tradition" and "modernity" in Irish culture. It fills a genuine gap in existing scholarship, and its sustained analysis across several decades and multiple forms of representation is especially impressive, as it allows the reader to track a complex and historically-informed narrative arc for the "Returned Yank" figure.'Dr Stephanie Rains, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies, Maynooth UniversityReviews 'Sinéad Moynihan’s Ireland, Migration and Return Migration is an impressively wide-ranging and insightful study of migration to and from the United States in Irish literature, film, and culture. This book pushes beyond simplistic models of deracination, exile or the émigré, to think about the recurring nature of migration and return migration, and raises questions about decolonization, neo-colonialism, and the nature of “modern” Ireland both before and after the Celtic Tiger. Moynihan's work interrogates gendered mythologies about maternity and return, and similarly reworks notions of return in relation to literary forebears and genres. She combines an impressive range of cultural sources with nuanced close readings in an important and timely contribution to Irish Studies.' 2019 ACIS Michael J. Durkan PrizeTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction - “The Meanest Form of Animal”?: The Returned Yank in the Cultural ImaginationChapter 1. “Quiet Men”: Film and Filmmaking in Returned Yank Fictions of the TroublesChapter 2. “Mother Macree ad nauseam”: Maternity, Modernity and the Female Returned Yank Chapter 3. Erin’s Acres: The Returned Yank, Property Disputes and the Rise and Fall of the Irish EconomyChapter 4. “The Secret Dotted Line”: Return, Roots Journeys and Irish Literary GenealogiesCoda - “We are where we are”: Mythologies of Return and the Post-Celtic Tiger MomentWorks CitedIndex
£27.99
Liverpool University Press Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan
Book SynopsisIn contrast to recent theories of the ‘global’ Latin American novel, this book reveals the enduring importance of the national in contemporary Venezuelan fiction, arguing that the novels studied respond to both the nationalist and populist cultural policies of the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuela’s literary isolation. The latter results from factors including the legacy of the Boom and historically low levels of emigration from Venezuela. Grounded in theories of metafiction and intertextuality, the book provides a close reading of eight novels published between 2004 (the year in which the first Minister for Culture was appointed) and 2012 (the last full year of President Chávez’s life), relating these novels to the context of their production. Each chapter explores a way in which these novels reflect on writing, from the protagonists as readers and writers in different contexts, through appearances from real life writers, to experiments with style and popular culture, and finally questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality. This literary analysis complements overarching studies of the Bolivarian Revolution by offering an insight into how Bolivarian policies and practices affect people on an individual, emotional and creative level. In this context, self-reflexive narratives afford their writers a form of political agency.Trade Review'Katie Brown’s monograph explores the intrinsic aesthetic value of literature; how it can be instrumentalized to serve political purposes; and the impact that said instrumentalization has on literary production, access to markets, as well as the creative autonomy and artistic integrity of Venezuelan writers. [...] This monograph is a timely and significant contribution to understanding the effect of Bolivarian cultural policy, and its inherent contradictions, on the ‘minor’ contemporary literature produced by Venezuelans, both within the country and in exile.'Penelope Plaza, Modern Language ReviewTable of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1: Writing for the StateChapter 2: Writing and DistinctionChapter 3: Challenging the National NarrativeChapter 4: Making Literary ConnectionsChapter 5: Form and Popular CultureChapter 6: Fiction and RealityConclusionReferencesAcknowledgements
£29.95
Liverpool University Press Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account
Book SynopsisSpeculative Epistemologies is about truth effects in sf, which stands for both science fiction and speculative fiction. It examines six narratives, one from each decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, that challenge dominant assumptions about the normal, the possible, and the real. It asks what the patterns of overlap and interference generated by texts located in border territories that make their identification as sf problematic, and sometimes controversial, can reveal about the dynamics of sf’s multiple subcultures (e.g. professionals, academics, and fans); the complexity of the genre’s communities of practice and their routes of production, distribution, and reception; and the genre’s shifting position within a broadly conceived field of literary and cultural production. The “speculative epistemologies” in these stories are counter-hegemonic ways of knowing, ways of imagining knowing differently, and the focus of this study is their effect on the formation of identities and communities. Combining the methods of genre theory, reception theory, and the sociology of cultural production, the readings of these six narratives trace a history of sf’s increasingly feminist, racially and ethnically diverse, philosophically ambitious, and politically engaged character from the 1960s to the present.Trade Review“A new book by John Rieder is an event, and Speculative Epistemologies delivers. It is, exactly as its title promises, ‘eccentric,’ in the best possible sense – reorienting science fiction studies to unconventional vistas, alternate possibilities, and roads not taken. It’s not to be missed.”Gerry Canavan, Marquette University‘In Speculative Epistemologies… [Rieder] displays his uncanny knack for spotting those things bobbing and flickering in the corner of sf studies’ eye, of gathering them together and placing them center stage, and of saying things about sf that immediately strike you as obvious and true—but only after he has said them.’ Mark Bould, Science Fiction Studies'Speculative Epistemologies is a reminder of Rieder's expertise and a concerted investigation into the grand narrative of sf via some of its minor literature… More of us should be producing "eccentric" scholarship of this nature in an effort to spark new coversations about sf from voices that can get lost in the shadow of history.' D. Harlan Wilson"Rieder’s reputation as a wide and generous reader precedes him, and the chapters devoted to each work in this book are testament to a body of knowledge and experience that puts my own to shame. What I can say with certainty is that he provides ample reason to seek out the stories I haven’t read, and to return to those I have.' Paul Graham Raven, SFRA Review "Table of Contents1. SF, Disciplinary Knowledge, and Mass Culture 2. The Canonical Marginality of Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe”3. How Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony Became SF4. Power and the Proper Fiction in Samuel R. Delany’s “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals”5. Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein and the Feminist Critique of Science6. Albert Wendt’s Postcolonial Wonderwork: The Adventures of Vela7. What Kind of Genre Fiction Is This? Donna Haraway’s “The Camille Stories”8. Conclusion: Truth and SF in 2020
£98.50
Liverpool University Press Shakespeare and Science Fiction: 2021
Book SynopsisIn Shakespeare and Science Fiction Sarah Annes Brown investigates why so many science fiction writers have turned to Shakespeare when imagining humanity’s future. He and his works become a kind of touchstone for the species in much science fiction, both transcending and exemplifying what it means to be human. Writers have used Shakespeare in a range of often contradictory ways. He is associated with freedom and with tyranny, with optimistic visions of space exploration and with the complete destruction of the human race. His works have been invoked to justify the existence of humanity, but have also frequently been coopted for their own purposes by alien life forms or artificial intelligences.Shakespeare and Science Fiction is the first extended study of Shakespeare’s influence on the genre. It draws on over a hundred works across different science fiction media, identifying recurring patterns – and telling contradictions – in the way science fiction engages with Shakespeare. It includes discussions of time travel, alternate history, dystopias, space opera, posthuman identity and post-apocalyptic fiction.Trade Review‘In Shakespeare and Science Fiction, Sarah Annes Brown offers a comprehensive analysis of Shakespeare’s presence in SF to date. The greatest strength of Brown’s investigation lies in its evidential data, focusing on explicit references to Shakespeare in SF. Without attempting to locate him as the origin of SF, Brown offers an overview of Shakespearean allusions as proof of Shakespeare’s ability to be paradoxically both more and less than other authors… this book is an invaluable resource for scholars looking to think through the ways in which Shakespeare has inspired SF writers.’ Noah Slowik, Fafnir‘In this ambitious, erudite monograph, Brown demonstrates just how much the sf genre has invested in “Shakespeareanness”… Her research, aptitude, and acuity shine through on every page.’ D. Harlan Wilson, Extrapolation‘Despite Brown’s scholarly rigor, this book is written in a clear and accessible style, and with no small degree of wit. While noting the difficulty SF authors face in trying to create a plausible voice for Shakespeare when they try to depict him, Brown herself demonstrates an admirable facility with language. While the book’s primary audience is academic, this book would be accessible to undergraduate students and probably advanced high school students, so it could serve as a useful recommended reading text for such audiences.’ Dominick Grace, SFRA ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Shakespeare and Time Travel 2. Alternative Shakespeares 3. Dystopian Shakespeares 4. New Worlds and Alien Species 5. Prospero’s Magic and Science Fiction 6. Shakespeare and Posthuman Identity 7. Shakespeare and Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
£104.00
Liverpool University Press Apocalypse in Crisis: Fiction from 'The War of
Book SynopsisApocalypse is traditional and familiar, and it is an actual threat; it is feared, desired, and banal. Apocalypse in Crisis discusses fictions from the 1940s to the present, examining shifts in the imagination of apocalypse from the postwar British disaster novels, through novels of the countercultural sixties, feminist interventions, and recent revisions and critiques. As empire fades, ideas of sexuality shift, and attitudes to nature and to the city change, so apocalyptic fictions change. The individual subject is asserted, immolated, transcended, abandoned; individual deaths are substituted for mass death; death is faked or erased. The subjects and survivors of catastrophe set about re-establishing civilization, or they abandon it, finding new ways of being and of dying; they respond to it when it comes from outside, as an invasion, or they are immersed in it, as it shifts from being an event to being a condition. They flee the city for the country, or accept that they must draw on the energies of the world city in order to survive. The book includes detailed discussion of novels by H. G. Wells, George M. Stewart, Nevil Shute, John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Anna Kavan, Arno Schmidt, Anthony Burgess, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom Perrotta, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Trade Review“The individual readings in the book are often illuminating, particularly in the discussion of points of style, an issue that is often overlooked in discussion of sf texts.” Connor Pitetti, Science Fiction StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Apocalypse Now and ThenPart 1: The Nineteenth Century to the Postwar Disaster Novels1. Modern Apocalypses and Modernism: Enter Science Fiction2. The Postwar Disaster Novels: Apocalypse ContainedPart 2: Post-Imperial Subjects3. Style and Immolation: J. G. Ballard 4. Apocalypse in 1969: Brian Aldiss and Angela Carter5. Darker Imaginations, Harder Lessons: Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing Part 3: Resistance and Revision6. Apocalypse, Comedy, Multiplicity: Arno Schmidt, Anthony Burgess, Ursula K. Le Guin7. Apocalypse and Everyday Life: Tom Perrotta, Douglas Coupland8. Apocalypse in the Contemporary World City: Don DeLillo, China Miéville9. Beyond Apocalypse: Two Paths: Jeff VanderMeer, Kim Stanley Robinson
£109.50
Liverpool University Press The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2023 The Rise of the Cyberzines concludes Mike Ashley's five-volume series, which has tracked the evolution of the science-fiction magazine from its earliest days in the 1920s to its current explosion via the internet. This series has traced the ways in which the science-fiction magazine has reacted to the times and often led the way in breaking down barriers, for example in encouraging a greater contribution by women writers and stimulating science fiction globally. Magazines have continued to build upon past revolutions such as the 'new wave' and 'cyberpunk', producing a blend of high-tech science fiction and expansive speculative fiction that has broadened the understanding of science and its impact on society. This final volume, which covers the years 1991-2020, shows how the online magazine has superseded the print magazine and has continued to break down barriers, especially for the LGBTQ community and for writers of colour. Trade Review'I enjoyed how much Ashley focused on the very small press, while doing his homework with a high degree of accuracy with the large commercial publishers... This is exhaustive work, so much credit goes to Ashley for this gargantuan task.' Andy Andrews, True Review‘Mike Ashley’s dedicated, thoroughly researched history of the SF magazines during this specific time period is testament to his love of the genre. It is a remarkable book and a must have for serious collectors and those interested in the history of the SF magazine field.’ Dave Truesdale, TangentTable of Contents1. Before the WebBase CampAsimov’s RulesInterzone and AnalogF&SF—The Rusch YearsPulphouse ExpandsTomorrow ComesGoing SlickScience Fiction AgeSlipstreamingWorlds BeyondThe Small-Press LabyrinthD.N.A. Sequence2. Into the WebDigital DustThe Omni ExperienceGalaxy TransformsThrough the Cyber ForestBeyond the Event Horizon3. The ChallengeBusiness Almost as UsualThe Small-Press SurvivorsThe British AlternativesAdvance of the Cyberzines4. Taking StockAppendix 1. Checklist of English-Language Science Fiction MagazinesAppendix 2. Schedule of Magazine Circulation Figures
£109.50
Liverpool University Press Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in
Book SynopsisWinner of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2023. The commons and enclosure are among the most vital ways of thinking about poetry today, posing urgent ecological and political questions about land and resource ownership and use. Poetry & Commons is the first study to read postwar and contemporary poetry through this lens, by putting it in dialogue with the Romantic experience of agrarian dispossession. Employing an innovative transhistorical structure, the book demonstrates how radical Anglophone poetries since 1960 have returned to the 'enclosure of the commons' in response to political and ecological crises. It identifies a 'commons turn' in contemporary lyric that contests the new enclosures of globalized capital and resource extraction. In lucid close readings of a rich field of experimental poetries associated with the 'British Poetry Revival', as well as from Canada and the United States, it analyses a landscape poetics of enclosure in relationship with Romantic verse. Canonical Romantic poetry by Wordsworth and Clare is understood through the fine-grain textures of the period’s vernacular and radical verse and discourse around enclosure, which the book demonstrates contain the seeds of neoliberal political economy. Engaging with the work of Anne-Lise François and Anna Tsing, Poetry & Commons theorizes commoning as marking out subsistence 'rhythms of resource', which articulate plural, irregular, and tentative relations between human and nonhuman lifeworlds.Trade Review'This is an excellent, highly original, and necessary study of poetry and radical thought. In tracing both the persistence (and permutations) of the concept of the commons alongside a probing reading of lyric poetry in the Romantic and British and North American postwar periods, Poetry & Commons makes anew the case for thinking about lyric in the neoliberal era.'- David Farrier, Professor of Literature and the Environment, University of Edinburgh'Daniel Eltringham’s brilliant Poetry & Commons traces the transhistorical relationship between a poetry of the common word and the continuing resistance to ongoing practices of enclosure, dispossession, and extraction. Few critics have so precisely articulated the conceptual range with which the commons is necessarily entangled: from a romantic-era politics of enclosure to contemporary ecopoetics; from land rights and the right to roam to the interdependencies of "earth’s human and nonhuman tenants"; and, ultimately, from the origins to the outputs of the Anthropocene. Throughout, Eltringham has his finger on the pulse of the poet’s temporally open practice of "commoning historical languages of resistance". Poetry & Commons constitutes a major expansion of our understanding of the literary commons.'- Stephen Collis, Professor of English, Simon Fraser University‘Through meticulous, expansive research and illuminating close readings… Eltringham’s negotiation of entangled Romantic and contemporary forms of enclosure and commoning offers an abundantly original, thorough and politically sharp analysis of both the cultural history of the commons and the kinds of conceptual work the commons perform in mapping the historically inflected relationship between human and more-than-human worlds.’ Mandy Bloomfield, Review of English Studies‘[O]riginal and discerning… Eltringham marshals an eloquent and superbly researched argument, covering the literary and social implications of the issues and controversies involved in land use, and this study makes a genuinely significant intervention in current debates.’ Roger Ebbatson, Green Letters‘Original, rigorous and timely, this book puts Romantic-era poetry into fruitful dialogue with post-war and contemporary British avant-garde poetry. In doing so, Eltringham reveals why the figure of the commons might matter now more than ever, in the face of market-driven, neoliberal forms of enclosure, entwined with ecological crisis. Eltringham compellingly demonstrates how we can use historical knowledge in the contemporary moment by tracing the ways in which recent poets revisit, revise and revivify ideas of the commons and practices of commoning. The book’s materialist approach offers an inventive take on some well-known poems by canonical Romantic writers, as well as introducing readers to a wealth of new poetic and contextual materials. The judges especially valued its meticulous research, astute in-depth analysis and illuminating discussions of both poetry and politics. But there are moments of humour and hope too. As Eltringham wryly points out, “sheep and poetry are uneasy companions;” yet his book amply reveals how such unlikely alliances might model productive forms of collectivity and resistance.’ Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland) Book PrizeTable of Contents
£104.00
Liverpool University Press The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights,
Book SynopsisThis two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two essays written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. Covering three hundred years of Irish theatre history from 1716 to 2016, it is the most comprehensive study of plays written by Irish women to date. These short essays provide both a valuable introduction and innovative analysis of key playtexts, bringing renewed attention to scripts and writers that continue to be under-represented in theatre criticism and performance. Volume Two contains chapters focused on plays by sixteen Irish women playwrights produced between 1992 and 2016, highlighting the explosion of new work by contemporary writers. The plays in this volume explore women’s experiences at the intersections of class, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity, pushing at the boundaries of how we define not only Irish theatre, but Irish identity more broadly.CONTRIBUTORS: Nelson Barre, Mary Burke, David Clare, Shonagh Hill, Mária Kurdi, José Lanters, Fiona McDonagh, Dorothy Morrissey, Justine Nakase, Brian Ó Conchubhair, Brenda O'Connell, Shane O'Neill, Graham Price, Siobhán Purcell, Carole Quigley, Sarah Jane Scaife, Melissa Sihra, Clare WallaceTrade Review'In a word, The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716–2016... is superb. This two-volume collection showcases writers familiar and less familiar, offers valuable context and incisive textual readings, attends to performance as well as stagecraft, and ranges among historical periods and critical approaches.'Prof. Paige Reynolds, English Studies‘The Golden Thread is an ambitious, richly textured and multifaceted research piece that opens up the field of Irish theatre studies in most fruitful ways. It offers a robust counteracting to the under-representation of Irish women playwrights in the canon and is a strong incentive for producers to revive their work… a most valuable book for anyone interested in Irish studies, in Irish theatre studies and also for anyone interested in an alternative history of Irish theatre.’ Hélène Lecossois, Études irlandaises‘This is one of those indispensable works that will influence the future of performance studies and feminist criticism. The number and variety of voices on display, the effort in the reconstruction of the canon by adding women playwrights who had been erased in the past, and the declared ambition to draw attention to and create the conditions for revivals and publications of plays created by contemporary women playwrights make this extensive compilation more than recommendable... All in all, a very enjoyable edition, which makes for a rewarding read and provides essential information.’ María Gaviña-Costero, Estudios Irlandeses‘Spanning from the eighteenth-century to the present day, The Golden Thread brings together the work of leading scholars in Irish theatre and women’s writing with that of theatre practitioners to recover the often-hidden contributions of women playwrights. The collection develops a counter-canon of Irish playwrights that examines issues of class, sexuality, and disability.’ Colleen English, The New Books NetworkTable of ContentsIntroductionDavid Clare, Fiona McDonagh & Justine NakaseMarie Jones’s Don’t Look Down (1992): Representations of Disability for Young AudiencesFiona McDonaghLesbianism and Legibility in Emma Donoghue’s I Know My Own Heart (1993)Shonagh HillLearning to Play Poker: The Re-vision of Irish Women’s Agency in Gina Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995)Nelson BarreDirecting Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998) in ChinaSarah Jane ScaifeUrsula Rani Sarma’s Blue (2000) and Social Transformation in IrelandShane O’NeillChallenging “Good Taste”: Roslaeen McDonagh’s The Baby Doll Project (2003) and the Creation of a “Traveller Canon”Mary BurkeDisordered States and Affective Economies in Stella Feehily’s O Go My Man (2006)Clare WallaceLiving in a Rape Culture: Gang Rape and “Toxic Masculinity” in Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl (2006)Carole QuigleyMarina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006) and the Ars MoriendiJosé LantersLizzie Nunnery’s Intemperance (2007) and Compromised Mental Health among the Irish in BritainDavid ClareMemory, History, and Forgetting in Anne Devlin’s The Forgotten (2009)Graham Price“We are here, we were here all along”: Queer Invisibility and Performing Age in Amy Conroy’s I (Heart) Alice (Heart) I (2010)Brenda O’ConnellMotherhood and the Search for Recognition in Deirdre Kinahan’s Moment (2011)Dorothy Morrissey“Unrealing the Real”: Disability and Darwinism in Lynda Radley’s Futureproof (2011)Siobhán PurcellFamily Dysfunction and Character Dynamics: Nancy Harris’s Our New Girl (2012) in Conversation with Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlin (1996) and Martin Crimp’s The Country (2000)Mária KurdiUnconscious Casting: Stacey Gregg’s Shibboleth (2015), Walls, and the (En)Gendering of ViolenceJustine NakaseNevertheless, She Persisted: Celia de Fréine’s Luíse (2016)Brian Ó ConchubhairCoda – Spinning Gold: Threads of Augusta Gregory and Marina CarrMelissa Sihra
£109.50
Liverpool University Press Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in
Book SynopsisIn the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ In Beyond Return, Lucas Hollister proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, Hollister shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Hollister argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.Trade Review'Beyond Return is a rich, intellectually vigorous, and persuasive study of contemporary French fiction and its presumed return to subject, story, and world. Entertainingly written and well-documented, it focuses on four major writers of the past forty or fifty years, each representing a different take on how such returns can be situated in terms of modernist and postmodernist stances or beyond them, on what they can consist of, and on what they can mean.'Gerald J. Prince, University of Pennsylvania'This book will be an original contribution to scholarship on contemporary French fiction. Hollister’s significant achievement here is to demonstrate how innovative French takes on genre fiction may provide important insights on literary history and cultural politics.'Ruth Cruickshank, Royal Holloway, University of LondonTable of ContentsIntroduction: Contemporary, French, Literature1. The Story and the World (Jean Rouaud)Anti-modern Adventure (The Imitation of Happiness)Littérature-monde2. A Circle of Circles (Jean-Patrick Manchette)Noir Form!Getting out of Circles (West Coast Blues)Endless Circles? (The Prone Gunman)3. Ghosts (Jean Echenoz)The Manchette ConnectionDisplacing Violence (One Year)The Phantom Limb (1914)4. Apocalypse and Posthistory (Antoine Volodine)The Volodinian Dystopia (View of the Boneyard)Post-ExoticismConclusion: Beyond Return
£27.99
Liverpool University Press Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the
Book SynopsisThe rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life has meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel. Indeed, like France itself, the protagonists of its best fiction are constantly called upon to renegotiate their identity in order to maintain any sense of belonging within the troubled territories they call home. Maps and Territories reads today’s French novel for how it re-maps such territories, and for how it positions its protagonists vis-à-vis the pressures of globalization, uncovering previously unseen affinities amongst, and offering fresh readings of—and offering exciting new perspectives on—a diverse set of authors: namely, Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq. In the process, it sets the literary works into dialogue with a range of today’s most influential theorists of postmodernity and globalization, including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, Edward Casey, David Harvey, and Ursula K. Heise.Trade Review'This book importantly addresses questions that are at the very heart of contemporary debates about our relationship to space and places in a world where borders and distance are being redefined by the forces of globalization.' Jean-Xavier Ridon, University of Nottingham'Its wide-ranging corpus, ambitious scope, and nuanced readings make Armstrong’s study an essential starting point for anyone interested in the current state of contemporary French fiction, and a persuasive account of the concerted way in which that fiction is capturing the profound social, physical, and psychical effects of globalization.' Edward Welch, Modern Language Review'[The book] provides insightful examples of how the French view their own sense of belonging within the dynamics of new territories and realities. [...] Maps and Territories is extremely useful for scholars of contemporary French novels. His clear prose and thoughtful commentary help explain the unease that a changing postwar France experiences today. Thanks to Armstrong's thoughtful analysis, we better understand pressures facing an ever-increasing urbanized society in France and the world.'Kory Olson, L'Esprit CréateurTable of ContentsIntroductionI. Watching the World Go ByChapter One: Absolute Clarity: Michel Houellebecq’s La carte et le territoireChapter Two: Dérive psychose géographique: Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la télévisionII. Getting Up to SpeedChapter Three: Planetary Ambitions: Lydie Salvayre’s Portrait de l’écrivain en animal domestiqueChapter Four: Décalage Permanent: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s FuirIII. Falling Through the CracksChapter Five: A Tale of Two Frances: Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex TrilogyChapter Six: Deep Dérive: Philippe Vasset’s La conjurationIV. Making RoomChapter Seven: Asymmetrical Tactics: Jean Rolin’s OrmuzChapter Eight: Sense of Planet: Marie Darrieussecq’s Le paysConclusionWorks Cited
£31.86
Liverpool University Press Science Fiction and Climate Change: A
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Best Non-Fiction Award 2020Shortlisted for the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Non-Fiction Award 2021An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst Anglophone conservative politicians and journalists, there is still a near-consensus amongst climate scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to disastrous effect. The resultant climate crisis is simultaneously both a natural and a socio-cultural phenomenon and in this book Milner and Burgmann argue that science fiction occupies a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. Science Fiction and Climate Change takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom famously dubbed ‘cli-fi’. It does not, however, attempt to impose a prescriptively environmentalist aesthetic on this sub-genre. Rather, it seeks to explain how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to the problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. Milner and Burgmann adopt a historically and geographically comparatist framework, analysing print and audio-visual texts drawn from a number of different contexts, especially Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. Inspired by Williams's cultural materialism, Bourdieu's sociology of culture and Moretti's version of world systems theory, the book builds on Milner’s own Locating Science Fiction to produce a powerfully persuasive study in the sociology of literature. Trade Review'[This] volume offers an interesting introductory overview covering a variety of climate fictions... The clear, easily accessible writing style and overall useful introductory nature of the material would definitely recommend the volume as a text for undergraduates studying climate fictions as part of a literary studies or cultural studies curriculum.'Anya Heise-von der Lippe, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts'Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgmann’s Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach adds some vitally needed critical rigor to the burgeoning subgenre of SF literature and media Daniel Bloom has labelled “cli-fi,” that is, climate fiction.'Jerome Winter, SFRA Review'Science Fiction and Climate Change is a comprehensive examination of the current state of CF [climate fiction]. It is pleasingly open to genre and form, and Milner and Burgmann's accessible style results in a book that is at once objective sociological-literary commentary and personal reflection on the practice of CF research.' Jasmin Kirkbride, Green LettersTable of Contents1. Ice, Fire and Flood: A Short Pre-History of Climate Fiction 2. A Theoretical Interlude 3. Climate Fiction and the World Literary System 4. The Classical Dystopia in Climate Fiction 5. The Critical Dystopia in Climate Fiction 6. The Problem of Fatalism in Dystopian Climate Fiction 7. Base Reality Texts and Eutopias 8. Cli-Fi in Other Media 9. Changing the Climate: Some Provisional Conclusions
£29.69
Liverpool University Press Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and
Book SynopsisDread Trident examines the rise of imaginary worlds in tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs), such as Dungeons and Dragons. With the combination of analog and digital mechanisms, from traditional books to the internet, new ways of engaging the fantastic have become increasingly realized in recent years, and this book seeks an understanding of this phenomenon within the discourses of trans- and posthumanism, as well as within a gameist mode.The book explores a number of case studies of foundational TRPGs. Dungeons and Dragons provides an illustration of pulp-driven fantasy, particularly in the way it harmonizes its many campaign settings into a functional multiverse. It also acts as a supreme example of depth within its archive of official and unofficial published material, stretching back four decades. Warhammer 40k and the Worlds of Darkness present an interesting dialogue between Gothic and science-fantasy elements. The Mythos of HP Lovecraft also features prominently in the book as an example of a realized world that spans the literary and gameist modes.Realized fantasy worlds are becoming ever more popular as a way of experiencing a touch of the magical within modern life. Reworking Northrop Frye’s definition of irony, Dread Trident theorizes an ironic understanding of this process and in particular of its embodied forms.Trade Review'Dread Trident sets a novel and rewarding precedent for future research that melds literature studies and game studies... [It] is an impressive investigation into embodiment, play, and posthumanism, in order to synthesize previously understudied connections at work in TRPGs. Carbonell expertly moves between fields of study, from discussions of transhumanism and posthumanism, to literary theory, to game studies, and even between genres even within analog games.' Adrianna Burton, Analog Game Studies‘Dread Trident offers a theoretically rigorous and informative exploration of its focal gametexts and the use of game archives to critically explore how the modern fantastic as a genre evolves in them over time. Carbonell’s approach to theorizing these gametexts as using digital and analogue tools to generate realized worlds… is innovative and compelling.’ Clare Wall, SFRA ReviewTable of Contents1. Introduction: Theorizing the Modern Fantastic2. The Posthuman in the Schismatrix Stories and Eclipse Phase3. Dungeons and Dragons' Multiverse4. Worlds of Darkness: From Gothic to Cosmic Horror5. Lovecraft's (Cthulhu) Mythos6. Warhammer 40,000: A Science Fantasy Epic7. Beyond Borders with Miéville, Wolfe, and Numenera8. Conclusion
£29.69
Liverpool University Press Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Reimagining Urban Nature questions some of the underlying imaginaries which have for so long allowed us humans to develop technologically at great cost to the more-than-human world and ourselves. In urban places, cultural and more-than-human entities are in frequent contact; however, the non-human is often seen as expendable in these human-centric places. While much important work has been done on improving care for the more rural and wild areas of the globe, to really address environmental damage we must work towards reimagining the city. These are places where the majority of people live and work, and where the majority of decisions are made about the care and protection of many environments within and beyond the city. This book contributes to the still under-developed field of urban ecocriticism by adding a posthumanist perspective, as well as expanding current discussions within urban studies and environmental activism that seek to shift political and cultural imaginaries of urban nature. Importantly, this investigation is grounded in the Australian (and more broadly, the Australasian) context to allow for the analysis of a more diverse set of voices, texts and ecologies in an area still dominated by the northern hemisphere and the Global North.Trade Review'Written from an explicit settler-migrant Antipodean perspective, this book makes a convincing case for a relational understanding of entanglements with nature. Respectful in its handling of material from indigenous writers, it advances in fresh and cogent ways the discussion of the “more than human” in current ecological and environmental humanities.'- Professor Julie Sanders, Principal of Royal Holloway, University of LondonTable of ContentsIntroduction: Towards a Posthuman Urban Ecocriticism1. The Language of Urban Nature2. Writers Who Venture: Posthuman Methodologies3. Private Entanglements: Houses and Gardens4. Bodies of Water5. Public Entanglements: Streets and ParksConclusion: Recipro-city
£38.34
Liverpool University Press Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.Trade ReviewReviews ‘Kinship Across the Black Atlantic provides an outstanding analysis of new models and modes of family-making proposed by a range of key contemporary diasporic writers. Drawing upon a wealth of critical discussions of kinship drawn from anthropology, philosophy, feminism, queer studies, and more besides, Gigi Adair pursues a series of dazzling, detailed readings of the literary re-imagining of family-making across the black Atlantic. Ever alert to the pitfalls as well as the possibilities of fictionalising kinship anew, her vibrant analysis valuably uncovers the progressive modes of kinship that diasporic writing daringly and urgently proposes, often by reaching beyond the colonial-crafted constraints of heteronormativity, genealogy and biocentric myths of 'blood'.'John McLeod, Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, University of LeedsTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Diasporic kinship across the Black AtlanticPart I: Rewriting anthropologyPostcolonial sabotage and ethnographic recovery in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My MotherDestabilizing structuralism in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s TalePart II: Historiography and the afterlife of slavery‘As constricting as the corset they bind me in to keep me a lady’: Colonial historiography in Andrea Levy’s The Long SongShattering the flow of history: Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the MoonPart III: Queer diasporic relationalityQueer creolization in Patrick Chamoiseau’s TexacoWriting self and kin: diasporic mourning in Jackie Kay’s TrumpetConclusion: Diasporic futures?BibliographyIndex
£29.69
Liverpool University Press What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and
Book SynopsisThis volume responds to important questions about the formal properties of literary texts and the agency of form. A central feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone writing has been the exploration of how cultural forms (literary, philosophical and visual) create distinctive semiotic environments and at the same time engage powerfully with external realities. How does form propose a bridge between the environment of the text and the world beyond? What kinds of formal innovations have authors devised in response to the complexity of that world? How do the formal properties of texts inflect our reading of them, and perhaps also our apprehension of the real? In addressing such questions as they apply to a wide corpus of texts, including the novel, life writing, the essay, travel writing, poetry and textual/visual experiments, the chapters in this volume offer new perspectives on a wide range of creative figures including Proust, Picasso, Breton, Bataille, Ponge, Guillevic, Certeau, Camus, Barthes, Perec, Roubaud, Chauvet, Savitzkaya, Eribon, Ernaux, Laurens and Akerman. Collectively, they renew the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and of analysis in French studies.Trade ReviewReviews'This volume is of a very high calibre. It offers a broad cross-section of readings in French and Francophone Studies, bringing together a vibrant range of texts through a collective endeavor to rethink the concept and practice of literary form.'Anna-Louise Milne, The University of London Institute in ParisTable of ContentsTable of ContentsIntroduction: What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought.Part 1: Interrogating FormChapter 1: Peter Read, ‘Fixé par les cris des hirondelles au vol géométrique du désir’ (Picasso, 7th June 1936): Patterns and Permutations in Picasso’s Writing.Chapter 2: Ann Jefferson, A Gaggle of Geese or Technical Rigour: Re-forming the Novel in 1940s FranceChapter 3: Diana Knight, ‘Faire ceci ou faire cela?’: Barthes and the Choice of FormChapter 4: Johnnie Gratton, The Eclipse of Form in Roland Barthes’ La Chambre ClaireChapter 5: Mairéad Hanrahan, Going on, or Achieving Interruption: Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noirPart 2: Form and Life WritingChapter 6: Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, Narratives of Forgetting: Memory and Literary FormChapter 7: Shirley Jordan, The Time of our Lives: Repetition, Variation and Fragmentation in French Women’s Life WritingChapter 8: Charles Forsdick, Vertical Travel, Listing and the Enumeration of the EverydayChapter 9: Patrick Crowley, Eugène Savitzkaya: Fictional Forms of RemembranceChapter 10: Ian Maclaclan, A Voice Takes Form: The Sounds of Autobiography in Louis-René des Forêts’s Poèmes de Samuel WoodPart 3: Form and Social ExperienceChapter 11: Eddie Hughes, Circuits of Re-appropriation: Accessing the Real in the Work of Didier EribonChapter 12: Celia Britton, Metaphor, Parody and Madness: Two Readings of Marie Chauvet’s FolieChapter 13: Alison Finch, Aesthetic Form and Social ‘Form’ in À la recherche du temps perdu: Proust on TasteChapter 14: Michael Lucey, ‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’: Proust with BourdieuPart 4: Forms and Formless: World, Movement, ThoughtChapter 15: Emily McLaughlin, How To Think Like a Plant? Ponge, Jaccottet, GuillevicChapter 16: Patrick O’Donovan, Certeau’s Landscapes: What can Images do?Chapter 17: Eric Robertson, À la dérive: Drifting in and out of Form in French Literature and Visual Art from Bataille to BergvallChapter 18: Patrick ffrench, Convulsive Form: Benjamin, Bataille and the Innervated BodyChapter 19: Michael Syrotinski, Form and energeia in the Work of Barbara Cassin (For M)
£32.99
Liverpool University Press Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account
Book SynopsisSpeculative Epistemologies is about truth effects in sf, which stands for both science fiction and speculative fiction. It examines six narratives, one from each decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, that challenge dominant assumptions about the normal, the possible, and the real. It asks what the patterns of overlap and interference generated by texts located in border territories that make their identification as sf problematic, and sometimes controversial, can reveal about the dynamics of sf’s multiple subcultures (e.g. professionals, academics, and fans); the complexity of the genre’s communities of practice and their routes of production, distribution, and reception; and the genre’s shifting position within a broadly conceived field of literary and cultural production. The “speculative epistemologies” in these stories are counter-hegemonic ways of knowing, ways of imagining knowing differently, and the focus of this study is their effect on the formation of identities and communities. Combining the methods of genre theory, reception theory, and the sociology of cultural production, the readings of these six narratives trace a history of sf’s increasingly feminist, racially and ethnically diverse, philosophically ambitious, and politically engaged character from the 1960s to the present.Trade Review“A new book by John Rieder is an event, and Speculative Epistemologies delivers. It is, exactly as its title promises, ‘eccentric,’ in the best possible sense – reorienting science fiction studies to unconventional vistas, alternate possibilities, and roads not taken. It’s not to be missed.”Gerry Canavan, Marquette University‘In Speculative Epistemologies… [Rieder] displays his uncanny knack for spotting those things bobbing and flickering in the corner of sf studies’ eye, of gathering them together and placing them center stage, and of saying things about sf that immediately strike you as obvious and true—but only after he has said them.’ Mark Bould, Science Fiction Studies'Speculative Epistemologies is a reminder of Rieder's expertise and a concerted investigation into the grand narrative of sf via some of its minor literature… More of us should be producing "eccentric" scholarship of this nature in an effort to spark new coversations about sf from voices that can get lost in the shadow of history.' D. Harlan Wilson"Rieder’s reputation as a wide and generous reader precedes him, and the chapters devoted to each work in this book are testament to a body of knowledge and experience that puts my own to shame. What I can say with certainty is that he provides ample reason to seek out the stories I haven’t read, and to return to those I have.' Paul Graham Raven, SFRA Review "Table of Contents1. SF, Disciplinary Knowledge, and Mass Culture 2. The Canonical Marginality of Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe”3. How Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony Became SF4. Power and the Proper Fiction in Samuel R. Delany’s “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals”5. Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein and the Feminist Critique of Science6. Albert Wendt’s Postcolonial Wonderwork: The Adventures of Vela7. What Kind of Genre Fiction Is This? Donna Haraway’s “The Camille Stories”8. Conclusion: Truth and SF in 2020
£27.99
Liverpool University Press Wendy Cope
Book SynopsisWendy Cope is one of Britain’s most popular poets: her first two collections have together sold almost half a million copies, and in 1998, when Ted Hughes died, she was the BBC listeners’ choice to succeed him as Poet Laureate. She is also contrarian and sometimes controversial, and has been celebrated as one of the finest parodists of her, or any, generation. It is perhaps surprising, then, that her popular appeal has been met with critical near-silence. After five major collections, Cope has received only piecemeal critical attention, mostly confined to book reviews. This is the first in-depth study of her poetry. Drawing on Cope's published work, archival material and correspondence, Rory Waterman considers her main collections, her works for children and her uncollected poems, with many close readings, and detailed considerations of her cultural and literary contexts and her poetic development.Table of ContentsIntroduction1. ‘I learned to get my own back’: Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986)2. ‘He thinks you’re crazy’: Serious Concerns (1992)3. ‘Still warm, still warm’: If I Don’t Know (2001)4. ‘Your anger is a sin’: Family Values (2011)5. ‘About the human heart’: Anecdotal Evidence (2018)6. ‘The gift of changing’: Cope’s Poems for Children7. ‘They waited patiently’: Uncollected Cope
£16.99
Liverpool University Press The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement,
Book SynopsisThis book explores the literary afterlives of one of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial sons, Roger Casement. A seminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder of a sexual life lived in the shadows: through Casement, writers have been able to commune and negotiate with a difficult past. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts, alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialogues between modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost opens a fault line in our uneasy engagement with the cross-currents between history and memory, reality and fiction. It positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrain of Anglo-Irish history.Trade Review'This is a welcome study, learned, wide-ranging and on a fascinating and timely topic.'Professor Matthew Campbell, University of York'As with all queer pasts the archive remains somewhat out of reach, incomplete, hidden, silenced and disputed; Casement will, as Garden rightfully notes, "continue to haunt us", but this work makes his haunting less of a ghostly white on white text, and is a worthy addition to Casement studies.' Mary McAuliffe, Irish Historical Studies'Garden writes an admirably nuanced and elaborately and systematically interwoven text […] This study adds much to the fields of memory studies, to gender studies, to the nationalist histories of Ireland and Britain, and to literary studies.' Frances Devlin-Glass, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies'Garden embraces all that is "complex, contradictory and messy" in Casement’s legacy: unrestricted by text or canon, she ... demonstrates how the "queer archival trail" of Roger Casement continues to disturb neat narratives of history.' Galen D. Bunting, Modernism/Modernity'This is a courageous, profoundly researched and theoretically challenging work that synthesizes the expanding Queer archive of Casement material and builds on the pioneering work by the American literary historian, Lucy McDiarmid. Garden’s opening chapter on Conrad and Sebald must rank as one of the most stimulating interventions on the "archival, textual and historical dialogue" between Heart of Darkness and The Rings of Saturn.' Angus Mitchell, Review of Irish Studies in EuropeTable of ContentsIntroduction: Casement's Queer GhostI. 'He could tell you things! Things I've tried to forget, things I never did know': Conrad, Sebald and Spectres of ImperialismII. The Black Diaries: Sex, Race and Empire in The Swimming-Pool Library and The Lost WorldIII. Queer Nationalism and Colonial Ireland: Ulysses and At Swim Two BoysIV. Saint Casement: The 'National Political Trial', Partition and the Dramatic Troubles of Sir RogerV. The Traitor and the Hero: War, Betrayal and EspionageVI. 'The Ghost of Roger Casement': Poetic Afterlives
£29.99
Liverpool University Press Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles: Contesting
Book SynopsisGiven the extensive influence of the 'transport revolution' on the past two centuries (a time when trains, trams, omnibuses, bicycles, cars, airplanes, and so forth were invented), and given science fiction’s overall obsession with machines and technologies of all kinds, it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to transportation in this increasingly popular genre. Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles is the first book to examine the history of representations of road transport machines in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American science fiction. The focus of this study is on two machines of the road that have been locked in a constant, often bitter, struggle with one another: the automobile and the bicycle. With chapters ranging from the early science fiction of the pulp magazine era in the 1920s and 1930s, to the postcyberpunk of the 1990s and more recent media of the 2000s such as web television, zines, and comics, this book argues that science fiction by and large perceives the car as anything but a marvelous invention of modernity. Rather, the genre often scorns and ridicules the automobile and instead promotes more sustainable, more benign, more restrained technologies of movement such as the bicycle.Trade Review‘With its broad historic reach, its synthesis of a variety of disparate types of research from a variety of scholarly disciplines, its lucid prose, and its welcome readability, Withers' Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles offers a significant contribution to both ecocritical discourse and the study of science fiction as a genre.’- Lisa Swanstrom, University of UtahTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Perfectibility and Techno-Optimism in the Pulp Era2. Murderous Cars, Space Bikes, and Alien Bicycles in the Golden Age3. Electric Cars, Auto-Dueling, and Bike Shares in the New Wave4. Messenger Skateboards and Messenger Bikes in Postcyberpunk5. Staying Mobile in the Post-Apocalyptic World6. Kids on Bikes in 1980s Nostalgia TextsConclusion
£29.99
Liverpool University Press Biology and Manners: Essays on the Worlds and
Book SynopsisThis volume of essays continues the establishment of Lois McMaster Bujold as an important author of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. It argues persuasively that Bujold's corpus spans the distance between two full arcs of US feminism, and has anticipated or responded to several of its current concerns in ways that invite or even require theoretical exploration. The fourteen essays collected here provide wide-ranging scholarly analyses of Bujold’s work and worlds so far, covering not only the science fiction and fantasy series, but taking into account the wealth of ancillary material inspired by her works, such as fan fiction and role-playing games. Examining the major series through a range of perspectives, including feminist readings, queer theory, and disability studies, this volume aims to establish beyond doubt the seriousness of intent behind Bujold’s various artistic projects and provide a set of rich readings of this engaging, experimental, playful, and popular author. Trade ReviewReviews'Biology and Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold advances scholarship on this important author by light-years. This collection covers nearly the entire chronological range of Bujold’s work, and gives equal attention to her Vorkosiverse science fiction and her Chalion and Sharing Knife fantasy worlds. Lee and McCormack have gathered a set of particularly strong essays applying queer theory and theological analysis to Chalion’s five-god pantheon and its interactions with humanity, and the chapters on women and reproduction are equally thought-provoking. Overall, an impressive and essential addition to Bujold studies.'Janet Brennan Croft, editor of Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy'Biology and Manners substantially advances previous scholarship through its comprehensive coverage of Bujold’s fictional range, its depth, and its attention to detail. The various scholarly approaches provide a central holographic reader response to Bujold’s oeuvre that becomes three-dimensional as the chapters come together, providing a clearer image of Bujold’s literary genius as well as her empathy and subversiveness... the accessibility of the prose in these essays makes this anthology of value not only to scholars and libraries, but also to serious fans.'Sandra Lindow, Science Fiction Studies'Biology and Manners is a compelling read. Upon completion, the reader is left with a pronounced feeling the anthology will become a foundational text that promotes future Bujold research... In these ways, Biology and Manners should prove its value to readers for years to come.' Karen Stewart, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts"Overall, this collection’s use and array of theoretical approaches speaks to the range of Bujold’s writing, the need for further scholarly analysis of her works, and the impact they continue to have on her readers."Rebecca Jones, FoundationTable of ContentsSection 1: The Emergence of Bujold StudiesIntroduction: The Emergence of Bujold StudiesRegina Yung Lee and Una McCormackThe History of Scholarship on Lois McMaster Bujold’s Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Feminist Bibliographic EssayRobin Anne ReidSection 2: Bujold’s WomenUntimely Graces: Gender, Failure, and Sainthood in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of SoulsRegina Yung LeeYou Wish to Have the Curse Reversed? Traditional Narrative Motifs of Gender Reconfigured in Bujold’s Chalion NovelsCaitlin HeringtonIn Quiet Converse: The Intertextual Speaking of Madame Vorsoisson and Miss PriceKatharine WoodsSection 3: Heroes’ JourneysThe Shape of a Hero’s Soul: Exploring the Paradox of Fate and Free Will in The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of SoulsC. Palmer-PatelThe Road and the River: Genre-Neering a Future in The Sharing Knife SeriesSylvia KelsoPain Made Holy: Narratives of Disability and Pain in The Curse of ChalionJoanne WoiakSection 4: Potential Futures and Imagined PastsQueering Barrayar: The Uterine Replicator in Gentleman Jole and the Red QueenJey Saung‘What you need is a liege lord’: Futuristic Feudalism in The Warrior’s ApprenticeSarah LindsayWomb with a View: Ectogenesis in Ethan of Athos and Brave New WorldAlly WolfeSection 5: Holy FamiliesThe Holy Family: Divine Queerness in The Curse of Chalion and The Hallowed HuntRobin Anne ReidThe Bastard Balances All: The Essential Other in Bujold’s Queer TheologyMeg MacDonaldSection 6: Beyond the BooksThe Naismith Stratagem: Authenticity and Adaptation in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga: Sourcebook and Roleplaying GameJennifer Woodward and Peter WrightCanon Compliance and Creative Analysis in Vorkosigan Saga Fan FictionKristina Busse
£34.99
Liverpool University Press Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French
Book SynopsisThe study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. This is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought’s entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF.Table of ContentsPart One: Evolutionary and Ecological ShiftsIntroduction1. From Spears to Spaceships: Alien Encounters in the SF of J.H. Rosny aîné2. Becoming Orangutan: Animal Encounters in the Fiction of Éric ChevillardPart Two: Posthuman Bodies, Posthuman Minds3. Cyborg Encounters in the Fiction of Jean-Claude Dunyach and Ayerdhal4. Encounters with Posthuman Women in the Films of Luc BessonConclusion
£95.00
Liverpool University Press David Peace
Book SynopsisThis book is an exciting and accessible account of an author whose work has played a significant role in shaping contemporary British literature. Drawing on literary theory and genre studies, it provides a detailed analysis of David Peace’s writing, as well as the socio-cultural contexts of its production and dissemination. It covers the full body of Peace’s work to date, with a particular focus on his more recent writing (including his latest book Tokyo Redux), and also includes an interview with the author. This book positions Peace as one of the most dynamic British novelists of the twenty-first century.Table of ContentsBiographical Outline Introduction: David Peace and His Work Rape and Rhubarb Redux: The Red Riding Quartet (1999-2002) Acid Shanklyism: Red or Dead (2013) Authorial Afterlives: Patient X (2018) We Are All Ghosts Now: The Tokyo Trilogy (2007-2021)
£33.00
Liverpool University Press Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental
Book SynopsisThis volume explores Italian science fiction from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, covering literary texts, films, music and visual works by figures as diverse as Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Peter Kolosimo, Primo Levi, Antonio Margheriti, Gilda Musa and Roberto Vacca. It broadens the horizons of both Italian studies and the environmental humanities by addressing a long-neglected genre, and expands our understanding of relations between the ecological, the imaginary and the sociopolitical. The chapters draw on a variety of methodological frameworks, including animal studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, eco-media studies, energy humanities and posthumanism. The reader will gain insights into consequential topics such as anthropocentrism/speciesism, ecomodernist thought, environmental justice struggles at the planetary and regional level, non-human and new materialist ontologies, utopian/dystopian philosophies and prospects for transitioning beyond the crisis of petro-modernity through the construction of post-depletion futures. Open Access versions of the introduction and six of the book chapters are available on the Liverpool University Press website.Trade Review‘This collection of essays takes the reader to the uncanny territory of Italian science fiction, a world animated by apocalyptic fantasies and ecological dystopias, consumerist annihilations and nonhuman socialities. In an epoch of multiple planetary crises, this revelatory book is a must-read for any archaeologist of the present.’ Federico Luisetti, University of St. Gallen‘If Italian culture has an ecological unconscious, that unconscious is embodied in science fiction. Rarely do so many creative motifs converge in the imagination of our species and the planet within a single literary genre: there are the anxieties of the automaton as an other-than-human, encounters with our spatio-temporal otherness, technological apocalypses, dilemmas of hybridity with real and imaginary life forms, and the desires of new socio-energetic utopias. With a perspective that encompasses cinema, art, and literature, ranging from great classics like Buzzati, Levi, Calvino, and Scerbanenco to “alien archaeologies” and solarpunk, Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities retrieves this unconscious and inaugurates the entrance of Italian science fiction into the international eco-literary canon. A futuristic and pioneering book that rightfully joins the essential references of environmental humanities studies.’ Serenella Iovino, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillTable of ContentsIntroduction: Greening Italian Science Fiction – New Approaches to a Long-Lasting Genre Daniel A. Finch-Race, Emiliano Guaraldo, Marco Malvestio Section I: Science in the Anthropocene Herbert Pagani’s Mégalopolis: A Rock Opera between Dystopian Science Fiction and Ecological Utopia Eleonora Lima Cultural and Ecological Extinction in Primo Levi’s Science-Fiction Michele Maiolani What Kind of Science? Italian Science Fiction Writers against the Economic Boom Daniele Comberiati Section II: Visions of Extinction Ecofeminist Care at the End of the World: Collaborative Survival in Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna and Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s L’isola delle Madri Raffaella Baccolini and Chiara Xausa Barbarism, Animalization, and the End of the World: Fantasies of Regression and Mutation in Italian Science Fiction Simona Micali A Post-Apocalyptic Garden of Eden. Marco Ferreri’s Il Seme dell’Uomo Emiliano Guaraldo Section III: Urban Landscapes and Industrial Capitalism in a Rapidly Changing Country Industrial Wonders and Pitfalls in Émile Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il sera en l’an 3000 (1846) and Agostino della Sala Spada’s Nel 2073! (1874) Daniel A. Finch-Race Spaceships in the Anthropocene: Peter Kolosimo and the End of (Our) Times Marco Malvestio Uncanny Spaces in Inhuman Times: The Art of Giacomo Costa Matteo Gilebbi Against Eco-Fascism: Space and Place in Tullio Avoledo’s Furland Florian Mussgnug Section IV: Posthuman, More-than-Human, and Interspecies Relations Green Traces: Vegetal Imagination in Italian Science Fiction from Gilda Musa to Solarpunk Enrico Cesaretti Bonsai Children, Enchanted Gardens: Nature as Artifice in Paolo Zanotti’s Dystopian Fairy Tale Valentina Fulginiti ‘All We Need is Love’?: Eros, Agape, and Koinonia in the Time of Mass Extinction Danila Cannamela Eco-Horror: Human-Animal Encounters in Italian Science-Fiction Films Robert A. Rushing Solarpunk, or rather Solartivismo: An Interview with Francesco Verso Arielle Saiber
£65.00
Liverpool University Press The Culture of The Culture : Utopian Processes
Book SynopsisIn a career that spanned over thirty years, Iain M. Banks became one of the best-loved and most prolific writers in Britain, with his space opera series concerned with the pan-galactic utopian civilisation known as "the Culture" widely regarded as his most significant contribution to science fiction. The Culture of "The Culture" focuses solely on this series, providing a comprehensive, thematic analysis of Banks’s Culture stories from Consider Phlebas to The Hydrogen Sonata. It explores the development of Banks’s political, philosophical and literary thought, arguing that the Culture offers both an image of a harmonious civilisation modelled on an alternative socialist form of globalisation and a critique of our neo-liberal present. As Joseph Norman explains, the Culture is the result of an ongoing utopian process, attempting through the application of technoscience to move beyond obstacles to progress such as imperialism, capitalism, the human condition, religious dogma, patriarchy and crises in artistic representation. The Culture of "The Culture" defines Banks’s creation as culture: a utopian way of doing, of being, of seeing: an approach, an attitude and a lifestyle that has enabled, and is evolving alongside, utopia, rather than an image of a static end-state.Trade Review'[The Culture of "The Culture"] stands as an invaluable contribution to the study of Banks’s CULTURE series, in particular its relation to the space opera subgenre and the history of utopian thinking.' Chad Andrews, Science Fiction Studies‘Norman provides a deep, thorough overview of the complex world of the Culture and the ways in which it both fulfills and belies our assumptions about a utopian society… optimism drives Banks’ work, and it goes far in explaining why the Culture sequence remains not only eminently and beautifully readable but an emotional necessity for this historical moment.’ Jeremy Brett, SFRA ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Interventions, Imperialism, the Technologiade2. Thinking the Break: The Culture as Postscarcity Utopia3. Senescence, Rejuvanessence, and (Im)mortality: The Culture and the Posthuman4. Feminist Space Opera and the Handy Man5. Secularism, Humanism and the Quasi-religious Culture 6. Art in Utopia and Utopian Art: the Culture of 'the Culture'Conclusion
£29.99
Liverpool University Press Representations of China in Latin American
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. Representations of China in Latin American Literature (1987-2016) analyses contemporary Latin American novels in which China is the main theme. Using ‘China’ as a multidimensional term, it explores how the novels both highlight and undermine assumptions about China that have shaped Latin America’s understanding of ‘China’ and shows ‘China’ to be a kind of literary/imaginary ‘third’ term which reframes Latin American discourses of alterity. On one level, it argues that these texts play with the way that ‘China’ stands in as a wandering signifier and as a metonym for Asia, a gesture that essentialises it as an unchanging other. On another level, it argues that the novels’ employment of ‘China’ resists essentialist constructions of identity. ‘China’ is thus shown to be serving as a concept which allows for criticism of the construction of fetishized otherness and of the exclusion inherent in essentialist discourses of identity. The book presents and analyses the depiction of an imaginary of China which is arguably performative, but which discloses the tropes and themes which may be both established and subverted, in the novels. Chapter One examines the way in which ‘China’ is represented and constructed in Latin American novels where this country is a setting for their stories. The novels studied in Chapter Two are linked to the presence of Chinese communities in Latin America. The final chapter examines novels whose main theme is travel to contemporary China. Ultimately, in the novels studied in this book ‘China’ serves as a concept through which essentialist notions of identity are critiqued.Trade Review“This original book highlights representations of China by Argentinian, Mexican, Colombian, and Uruguayan authors. The author is well-read in the field and has many interesting insights into the literature, the field, and the positionality of these representations in Latin America. Moreover, the theories that the author uses are up-to-date and underscore many of the author’s arguments.” - Zelideth RivasTable of ContentsTable of contentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. In 'China': Novels by Latin American authors set in China2. China here: Remapping Latin America3. Next stop: 'China'Epilogue
£38.36
Liverpool University Press Don Paterson
Book SynopsisDon Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain's major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.Table of ContentsBiographical OutlinePrologue1. For the Hell of It: Nil Nil (1993)2. Which Man I Am: God's Gift to Women (1997)3. Not Your Name, Not Mine: The Eyes (1999)4. Shrewd Obliquity of Speech: Landing Light (2003)5. Breath, You Invisible Poem: Orpheus (2006)6. None of This Matters: Rain (2009)Coda: 40 Sonnets (2015) and Zonal (2020)
£18.99
Liverpool University Press Michel Faber
Book SynopsisThis book by Rodge Glass, the award-winning novelist, short story writer and biographer, is the first ever detailed assessment of Michel Faber’s life and work across genre and form. It draws on intimate, wide-ranging interviews with the author over a two-year period and investigates previously unexplored archival material, from the Canongate Books records to Faber’s own personal archive, to bring fresh perspectives to light. Glass presents detailed interrogations of unpublished texts, including a novel, A Photograph of Jesus, as well as providing deep dives into Faber’s most celebrated works such as Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White. Known for his hybrid creative-critical approach, Glass uses Faber’s interest in generosity and compassion in writing as a focus for this study. Grouping his works by ‘World’, the book ranges across poetry, short stories, novels and novellas to make an argument for Faber as a writer who has consistently sought to explore narrow emotional territory, that of the human instinct to seek connection with others, even if genuine connection seems unlikely or impossible. Glass draws on individual case studies across Faber’s hugely diverse body of work in a way that will be both- interesting for fans and informative for students of Faber’s writing.Table of ContentsBiographical Outline Introduction Faber’s World of the Short Story Faber’s World of The Novella (or, The Medium-Sized Story) Faber’s World of the Novel Faber’s World of The Crimson Petal Faber’s World of Verse Faber, Out of Time Select Bibliography: Books, Essays, Interviews, Criticism
£33.00
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Literature and Ageing
Book SynopsisNew approaches to the topics of old age and becoming old depicted in a range of texts from modern literature. The central focus of this book is the experience of growing old as represented in literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day: an experience shaped by changes in longevity, a new science of senescence, the availability of state pensions, and other phenomena of recent history. The collection considers the increasing prominence of stories of ageing, challenging the idea that old age is an uneventful time outside of the parameters of literary narrative. Instead, age increasingly is the story. As the older population swells, political crises are construed as the old stealing from the young, and the rights of older people are sacrificed to the economics of care, it becomes ever more important to think about and question, as literature does, the symbolic aspects of ageing - the cultural imaginary that determines the way that society sees old age. The work in this volume explores age stories in relation to futurity, precarity and climate change. It brings to light narratives of resistance to colonial imperialism and reproductive futurism framed in terms of age; and tests the lived experience of growing old and the challenge it offers to individualistic conceptions of selfhood, work and care. The literary works examined - hailing from England, North America, Japan and the Caribbean, and including texts by Margaret Drabble, Samuel Beckett and Matthew Thomas - ask how we feel about ageing - so often the determinant of how we think about it.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Difference that Time Makes - Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen On Not Knowing How to Feel - Helen Small Ageing in the Anthropocene: The View From and Beyond Margaret Drabble's The Dark Flood Rises - Kathleen Woodward Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction - Sarah Falcus Grandpaternalism: Kipling's Imperial Care Narrative' - Jacob Jewusiak "I Could Turn Viper Tomorrow": Challenging Reproductive Futurism in Merle Collins's The Colour of Forgetting - Emily Timms Critical Interests and Critical Endings: Dementia, Personhood and End of Life in Matthew Thomas's We Are Not Ourselves - Elizabeth Barry Self-Help in the Historical Landscape of Ageing, Dementia, Work and Gender: Narrative Duplicities and Literature in a "Changing Place Called Old Age" - David Amigoni Toying with the Spool: Happiness in Old Age in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape - Peter Svare Valeur Afterword: When Age Studies and Literary-Cultural Studies Converge: Reading "The Figure of the Old Person" in an Era of Ageism - Margaret Morganroth Gullette
£38.00
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Studies in Medievalism XXXI: Politics and
Book SynopsisEssays on the use, and misuse, of the Middle Ages for political aims. Like its two immediate predecessors, this volume tackles the most pressing and contentious issue in medievalism studies: how the Middle Ages have been subsequently deployed for political ends. The six essays in the first section directly address that concern with regard to Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges's contemporaneous responses to the 1871 Commune; the hypocrisy of the Robinhood App's invocation of their namesake; misunderstood parallels and differences between the Covid-19 pandemic and medieval plagues; Peter Gill's reworking of a major medieval Mystery play in his 2001 The York Realist; celebrations of medieval monks by the American alt-right; and medieval references in twenty-first-century novels by the American neo-Nazi Harold A. Covington. The approaches and conclusions of those essays are then tested in the second section's seven articles as they examine widely discredited alt-right claims that strong kings ruled medieval Finland; Norse medievalism in WWI British and German propaganda; post-war Black appropriation of white jousting tournaments in the Antebellum South; early American references to the Merovingian Dynasty; Rudyard Kipling's deployment of the Middle Ages to defend his beliefs; the reframing of St. Anthony by Agustina Bessa-Luís's 1973 biography of him; and post-medieval Portuguese reworkings of the Goat-Foot-Lady and other medieval legends.Table of ContentsI: Politics and Medievalism (Studies) Public Medievalism: Fustel de Coulanges and the Case for "Diplomatic Negotiations" - Elizabeth Emery Rob from the Rich: The Neomedievalism of the Robinhood Stock App - Valerie B. Johnson Pandemic Politics: Deploying the Plague - M. J. Toswell Peter Gill and the Queering of the York Realist - Kevin J. Harty To be a Monkish Man: Medievalism, Monasticism, Education, and Gender in the United States' Culture Wars - Jacob Doss Political Fictions: The "Aryan" Medievalisms of Harold A. Covington - Helen Young II: Other Responses to Medievalism The Ancient Finnish Kings and their Swedish Archenemy: Nationalism, Conspiracy Theories, and Alt-Right Memes in Finnish Online Medievalism - Reima Välimäki and Heta Aali The Politics of Norse Medievalism in the British Press During the First World War - Grace Khuri A Tournament of Black Knights - Alexandria, Virginia, 1865 - Emancipationists Mobilize the Medieval - Whitney Leeson "Eternal Legends of the Crimes of Man": The Merovingian Dynasty in Early American Media (1720-1820) - Gregory I. Halfond Writing, Men, Empire: Kipling's Medievalist Imagination - Richard Utz Agustina Bessa-Luís's Reinvention of St. António: A Loving Saint without an Altar - Ana Maria Machado Celtic Imaginary: From Medieval Dama-Pé-de-Cabra to Nineteenth-century Patriotic Versions - Angélica Varandas
£71.25
James Currey A Companion to Mia Couto
Book SynopsisThis new research in English on the work of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto provides a comprehensive introduction to the critical terrain of Couto's literary thought. Already well-established in the Lusophone world, Mia Couto is increasingly acknowledged as a major voice in World literature. Winner of the Camões Prize for Literature in 2013, the most prestigious literary prize honouring Lusophone writers, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Yet, despite this high profile there are very few full-length critical studiesin English about his writing. Mia Couto is known for his imaginative re-working of Portuguese, making it distinctively Mozambican in character. This book brings together some of the key scholars of his work such as Phillip Rothwell, Luís Madureira, and his long-time English translator David Brookshaw. Contributors examine not only his early works, which were written in the context of the 16-year post-independence civil war in Mozambique, but alsothe wide span of Couto's contemporary writing as a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. There are contributions on his work in ecology, theatre and journalism, as well as on translation and Mozambican nationalist politics. Most importantly the contributors engage with the significance of Couto's writing to contemporary discussions of African literature, Lusophone studies and World literature. Grant Hamilton is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the editor of Reading Marechera (James Currey, 2013). David Huddart is Associate Professor of English literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kongand is author of Involuntary Associations: World Englishes and Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2014]Trade ReviewThe essays here illuminate the work of Mia Couto in an effort to move beyond the easy categories so often applied to his work, in particular that of magic realist. The texts here demonstrate the need for Western audiences and critics, in particular, to reinvent the lexicon we use to discuss Couto's work in the same way he has reinvented Portuguese: they show in great detail the way in which the writer's poetic prose extends far beyond aesthetic considerations in service of a larger project so often misunderstood by readers and critics alike. This is a welcome aide to understanding one of today's most important writers.' - -- Eric M. B. Becker, translator of Mia Couto and editor of Words without BordersTable of ContentsIntroduction - Grant Hamilton and David Huddart An Interview with Mia Couto [translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw] - Grant Hamilton and David Huddart Mia Couto in Context - David Brookshaw Uma coisa fraterna: Mia Couto & the Mutumbela Gogo Theatre Group - Luis Madureira Reading Raiz de Orvalho: Counterpointing Literary Genres in the Work of Mia Couto - Elena Brugioni Spaces of Magic: Mia Couto's Relational Practice - Irene Marques Mia Couto or the Art of Storytelling - Patrick Chabal The Multiple Worlds of Mia Couto - Bill Ashcroft "Ask Life": Animism & the Metaphysical Detective - David Huddart Mia Couto & Translation - Stefan Helgesson Jesusalém: Empty Fathers & Women's Texts - Phillip Rothwell Trauma: Repetition & Pure Repetition in The Tuner of Silences - Grant Hamilton Seeing Like a Crocodile Bird: Mia Couto's The Last Flight of the Flamingo - Andrew Mahlstedt Mia Couto & Nostalgia: Reading The Last Flight of the Flamingo - Emily Chow Mia Couto, Contexts & Issues: A Bibliographic Essay - Grant Hamilton and David Huddart
£65.00
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Gender Violence in Twenty-First-Century Latin
Book SynopsisHow do contemporary female authors in Latin America tackle gender violence in their writings? This book analyses the portrayal of violence against women in the works of ten contemporary Latin American female authors: Alejandra Jaramillo Morales, Laura Restrepo, Ena Lucia Portela, Wendy Guerra, Selva Almada, Claudia Pineiro, Diamela Eltit, Carla Guelfenbein, Lydia Cacho and Fernanda Melchor. Governments in Latin America have routinely failed to protect women from abuse, threats, censorship, repressive policies on reproduction rights, forced displacement, sex trafficking, disappearances and femicides, and this book beats a new path through these burning issues by drawing on the knowledges encapsulated by sociology as much as the visions articulated by literature. Through an exploration of works published in the twenty-first century by women writers from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba and Mexico, this volume reconceptualises positions of privilege and power in the region and provides new readings about the meaning of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.Table of ContentsIntroduction I: Columbia 1. Sadistic Sexual Femicide in Alejandra Jaramillo Morales's Acaso la muerte - Stephen M. Hart 2. Political Madness in Laura Restrepo's Delirio - Stephen M. Hart II: Cuba 3. Homophobia in Ena Lucía Portela's Cien botellas en una pared - María E. López 4. Racism and gender violence in Wendy Guerra's Negra - María E. López III: Argentina 5. Femicide in rural Argentina in Selva Almada's Chicas muertas - María E. López 6. The control over women's bodies in Claudia Piñeiro's Quién no - María E. López IV: Chile 7. The Posthuman Female Body in Lockdown in Diamela Eltit's Fuerzas especiales - Stephen M. Hart 8. The Distant Death of a Female Body in Carla Guelfenbein's Contigo en la distancia - Stephen M. Hart V: Mexico 9. Derogary hegemonic masculinity into Lydia Cacho's Ellos hablan - María E. López 10. Abjection of the female body inFernanda Melchor's Temporada de huracanes- María E. López Conclusion Bibliography
£71.25
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Introduction to a Postnational History of
Book SynopsisA sophisticated introduction to contemporary Basque literature that chronicles its growth and success after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. By developing a new theory of postnationalism about the relationship between minor and major literatures, this book chronicles the growth and success of Basque literature after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco (1975), and the historical and literary struggles that took place in its aftermath in order to achieve global recognition: the reduction of Basque literature to a representation of an exotic and magic place and people (the Basque Country), best exemplified by Bernardo Atxaga's novel Obabakoak (1988). The book also deploys postnationalist theory in order to chronicle the way in which women's literature challenged and changed this model in the 1990s and paved the way for what is now a complex and diverse literature. JOSEBA GABILONDO is an Associate Professor in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies, Michigan State University.Trade ReviewGabilondo's compilation and translations are essential to understand Basque literature and its postnational context. His well-researched monographs are crucial references to any serious study of minority literatures in general and Basque letters in particular, and Remnants of a Nation is indeed a significant contribution. * Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature *Table of ContentsIntroduction: On the English Translation Postnationalism and Basque Literary History Minor and Major Literatures: A Postnationalist Approach From National to Postnational: A Postnational History of Twentieth-Century Basque Literature Postcolonial and Postnational Literatures: Obabakoak (1988-92) On Canon Formation: Ethiopia (1978) The Legacy of Modernism: from Ethiopia to Obabakoak Before Babel: Globalization, Ethnic Hybridity, and Enjoyment Terrorism as Memory: Historical Novels and Masochist Masculinity Maternal Exile: Women Writers, Cultural Politics, and Individual Utopia Melancholic Migrancy: Writing a Postnational Lesbian Self Nationalist Crisis: Women's Literature and Neoliberalism Epilogue: Basque Literatures 2001-17 Works Cited
£80.75
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Filial Crisis and Erotic Politics in Black Cuban
Book SynopsisAn affective reading of twentieth-century Afro-Cuban literature focussing on a set of concerns ranging from the filial to the erotic. This book proposes an affective reading of twentieth-century Afro-Cuban literature through its focus on a set of concerns ranging from the filial to the erotic. Existing scholarship on black Cuban literature tends to privilege national political and economic discourses often focusing solely on the dynamics of race in the Revolution and the place of the black writer/artist within the nation's cultural institutions. And while there is substantial engagementwith feminist and queer articulations of desire within Cuban literary studies, there remains an urgent need for a sustained analysis of black Cuban writing which investigates its preponderant concerns with themes of family, love and erotic politics-a need fully addressed in this timely book. CONRAD MICHAEL JAMES is Associate Professor of World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston.Table of ContentsIntroduction The Poetry of Race and Sex in the Early Twentieth Century: Nicolás Guillén's Libidinal Politics Crisis and Transgression in the Poetry of Excilia Saldaña Dangerous Patriarchs: Sex and the Dynamics of Literary Vengeance Rebellious Women and Men Without Futures Mothers, Maids and Mistresses: Las criadas de La Habana Afterword Bibliography
£66.50
Springer International Publishing AG Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction
Book SynopsisThis open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences. Table of Contents1. Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering: From Normal and Natural to Not-at-all2. One Hand Clapping: The Loneliness of Motherhood in Lucia Berlin’s “Tiger Bites”3. “their mothers, and their fathers, and everyone in between”: Queering Motherhood in Trans Parent Memoirs by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Trystan Reese4. Struggling to Become a Mother: Literary Representations of Involuntary Childlessness5. Orality/Aurality and Voice of the Voiceless Mother in Abla Farhoud’s Happiness Has a Slippery Tail6. From Survivor to Im/migrant Motherhood and Beyond: Margit Silberstein’s Postmemorial Autobiography, Förintelsens Barn7. The (M)other’s Voice: Representations of Motherhood in Contemporary Swiss Writing by Women8. Contested Motherhood in Autobiographical Writing: Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti9. A Plea for Motherhood: Mothering and Writing in Contemporary Norwegian Literature
£42.74
Springer International Publishing AG Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction
Book SynopsisThis open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences. Table of Contents1. Ambivalent Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering: From Normal and Natural to Not-at-all2. One Hand Clapping: The Loneliness of Motherhood in Lucia Berlin’s “Tiger Bites”3. “their mothers, and their fathers, and everyone in between”: Queering Motherhood in Trans Parent Memoirs by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Trystan Reese4. Struggling to Become a Mother: Literary Representations of Involuntary Childlessness5. Orality/Aurality and Voice of the Voiceless Mother in Abla Farhoud’s Happiness Has a Slippery Tail6. From Survivor to Im/migrant Motherhood and Beyond: Margit Silberstein’s Postmemorial Autobiography, Förintelsens Barn7. The (M)other’s Voice: Representations of Motherhood in Contemporary Swiss Writing by Women8. Contested Motherhood in Autobiographical Writing: Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti9. A Plea for Motherhood: Mothering and Writing in Contemporary Norwegian Literature
£33.24
Diaphanes AG Pynchon′s Sound of Music
Book SynopsisPynchon's Sound of Music is dedicated to cataloging, exploring, and interpreting the manifold manifestations of music in Thomas Pynchon’s work. An original mix of close and distant readings, this monograph employs a variety of disciplines—from literary studies and musicology to philosophy, media theory, and history—to explain Pynchon through music and music through Pynchon. Encyclopedic and eclectic in its approach, Pynchon’s Sound of Music discusses the author’s use of instruments such as the kazoo, harmonica, and saxophone and embarks on close readings of the most salient and musically tantalizing passages. Zooming out to a bird’s eye view, Christian Hänggi puts Pynchon’s historical musical references and allusions into perspective to trace the trends and tendencies in the development of the author’s interest in music. A treasure trove for fans and an invaluable source for future scholarship, this book includes the Pynchon Playlist, a catalog of over 900 musical references in Pynchon’s oeuvre, and an exhaustive index of more than 700 appearances of musical instruments.
£30.40
Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic Writing Underground: Reflections on Samizdat
Book SynopsisIn this collection of writings produced between 2000 and 2018, the pioneering literary historian of the Czech underground, Martin Machovec, examines the multifarious nature of the underground phenomenon. After devoting considerable attention to the circle surrounding the band The Plastic People of the Universe and their manager, the poet Ivan M. Jirous, Machovec turns outward to examine the broader concept of the underground, comparing the Czech incarnation not only with the movements of its Central and Eastern European neighbors, but also with those in the world at large. In one essay, he reflects on the so-called Půlnoc Editions, which published illegal texts in the darkest days of the late forties and early fifties. In other essays, Machovec examines the relationship between illegal texts published at home (samizdat) and those smuggled out to be published abroad (tamizdat), as well as the range of literature that can be classified as samizdat, drawing attention to movements frequently overlooked by literary critics. In his final, previously unpublished essay, Machovec examines Jirous’s “Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival” not as a merely historical document, but as literature itself.
£17.66
Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic From Laughter to Forgetting: A Source-Book of
Book SynopsisA comprehensive reader on the Czech literary avant-garde. In recent years a prominent trend in the study of European modernism and the avant-garde has been increased attention to texts and traditions that have long stood in the shadow of the French, German, and British traditions that dominate the canon. Yet this more expansive view of European modernism and the avant-garde has been hindered by the limited range of texts available outside the original languages. This book addresses that problem by offering a wide-ranging selection of literary, theoretical, and documentary sources from one of the most dynamic and original European avant-garde traditions: that of the first Czechoslovak Republic and of the Bohemian lands. The Czech avant-garde is in many respects the ideal “alternative” avant-garde to present in detail to a wider readership: it tracks Central European developments and was often influential internationally while being deeply embedded in particular cultural dynamics that produced original forms. This volume returns interwar Czech avant-garde writings to their place as a firmly embedded component of the European avant-garde.Table of Contents1. The Laughter of the Avant-Garde (1918-1929): Proletarian Art, Poetism, Constructivism Section IntroductionCapek, Karel: “Kritika slov”Capek, Josef: Nejskromnejší umení [extracts]Weiner, Richard: Trásnicky dejinných dnu [extracts]Šalda, F. X.: “O úpadku literatury—i mnohých vecí jiných... ”Hora, Josef: “K novému umení”U. S. DevetsilNeumann, Stanislav K.: “Devetsil”Teige, Karel: “Novým smerem”Teige, Karel: “Obrazy a predobrazy”Capek, Karel: “Poznámka k stati Karla Teiga ‘Obrazy a predobrazy‘“Capek, Karel: “Proc nejsem komunistou”Teige, Karel: “S novou generací”Vancura, Vladislav: “Rád nové tvorby”Götz, František: “O Hosta a o ty, kterí stojí za ním”Teige, Karel: “O expresionismu”Götz, František: “Trochu polemiky, trochu vyznání”Wolker, Jirí: “Proletárské umení”Literární skupina: “Naše nadeje, víra a práce”Šíma, Josef: “Reklama”Schulz, Karel: “Poetika”Štyrský, Jindrich: “Obraz”Teige, Karel: “Foto Kino Film”Teige, Karel: “Poetismus”Nezval, Vítezslav: “Papoušek na motocyklu cili o remesle básnickém”Cerník - Halas - Václavek: “Dosti Wolkera!”Nezval, Vítezslav: “Film”Teige, Karel: “Poezie pro pet smyslu”Teige, Karel: “Dada”Teige, Karel: “Vudce ceské moderny”Teige, Karel: “K teorii konstruktivismu”Kupka, František: “Tvorení v umení výtvarném”Rykr, Zdenek: TeigismTeige, Karel: “Slova, slova, slova”Štyrský, Jindrich a Toyen: “Populární uvedení do artificielismu”Voskovec, Jirí: “Želva, o které se nikdo nezminuje”Obrtel, Vít: “Harmonie”Nezval, Vítezslav: “Návestí o poetismu”Nezval, Vítezslav: “Kapka inkoustu”Teige, Karel: “Ultrafialové obrazy cili artificielismus”Teige, Karel: “Manifest poetismu”Klíma, Ladislav: Vterina a Vecnost [extracts]2. A Generation Splits: Avant-Garde in Crisis (1929-1932)Section IntroductionŠtyrský, Jindrich: “Koutek generace I”Štyrský, Jindrich: “Malá prolegomena”Václavek, Bedrich: “O marxistickou teorii umen픊toll, Ladislav: “Lidé v ‘ laboratori‘”Václavek, Bedrich: “Konec ‘revolucní‘ avantgardy”Obrtel, Vít: “O stavbe veží”Brouk, Bohuslav: “Na obranu individualismu”Obrtel, Vít: “Právo na teorii”Navrátil, Václav: “Kvart”Jakobson, Roman: “O dnešním brusicství ceském” [extracts]Capek, Josef: “Krize charakteru”3. Complicating the Real (1933-1938): Surrealism and Prague School Polyfunctionalism Section IntroductionTeige, Karel: “Básen, svet, clovek”Teige, Karel: “Deset let surrealismu” [extracts]Teige, Karel: “Socialistický Realismus a surrealismu” [extracts]Weiner, Richard: Lazebník (Poetika)Štyrský, Jindrich: “Surrealistické malírství (nekolik poznámek)”Štyrský, Jindrich: “ Surrealistická fotografie”Štyrský, Jindrich and Vítezslav Nezval: “Pokus o poznání iracionality fotografie”Štyrský, Jindrich et al: “Pokus o poznání iracionality plnicího pera”Toyen: TBCNezval, Vítezslav: “K ceskému surrealismu”Mukarovský, Jan: “Místo estetické funkce mezi ostatními”Mukarovský, Jan: “Individuum v umení”Mukarovský, Jan: “Dialektické rozpory moderního umení”Mukarovský, Jan: “Francouzská poezie Karla Capka”Ladislav Novomeský: “Cesko-slovenský kulturní vztah“Kalandra, Záviš: “Nadskutecno v Surrealismu“Kalandra, Záviš: “Cin André Bretona“Kalandra, Záviš: “Princip slasti a princip reality v umení“Chalupecký, Jindrich: “Slovo o situaci nadrealismu u nás“Brouk, Bohuslav: “Máchuv kult“Cerný, Václav: “Surrealismus proti proudu“4. Deaths of the Avant-garde (1938-1942): The Myth of EverydaynessSection IntroductionNavrátil, Václav: “K novému mýtu“Navrátil, Václav: “O krizi krizeologie“Navrátil, Václav: “O smutku, lásce a jiných vecech“Rykr, Zdenek: “K našemu modernímu umení“Soucková, Milada: “K novému románu“Chalupecký, Jindrich: “Smysl moderního umení“Chalupecký, Jindrich: “Svet, v nemž žijeme“Chalupecký, Jindrich: “Umení napodobí skutecnost“Kolár, Jirí: Nový don Quijote [extracts]
£34.20
Leiden University Press Big Books in Times of Big Data
Book Synopsis
£38.25
Editorial A Contracorriente 2666: en búsqueda de la totalidad perdida
Book SynopsisEs 2666 de Roberto Bolano una novela total? Pueden coexistir fragmentos y totalidades en un mismo libro? Hay una columna vertebral que estructure la multitud de espacios, personajes y temas representados en 2666? Estas y otras preguntas son el objeto de estudio del presente libro, donde la cuestion de la totalidad - concepto omnipresente en los estudios del escritor chileno, si bien poco explorado - es el tema principal.
£29.95
Taylor & Francis Ltd Contemporary Native Fiction Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance Narrative Theory and Culture
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£128.25
Taylor & Francis Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£128.25
Taylor & Francis No Dialect Please Youre a Poet English Dialect in Poetry in the 20th and 21st Centuries Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£128.25