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This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination. Comprised of thirteen chapters by an international group of academics, Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performan...
Although Wolfgang Iser is one of the most influential literary theorists of the twentieth century, there is no authoritative study about his oeuvre. The present work remedies that problem by analysing Iser’s German and English writings in detail. Apart from being the first comprehensive account of his work, this study also modifies the established view of Iser’s theory. In contrast to the idea that his only contribution to literary studies is the reception theory of the 1970s, this account demonstrates the importance of Iser’s work on history and anthropology from the 1950s and 1990s. Instead of exclusively focusing on familiar terms such as ‘indeterminacy’, this analysis also disc...
The imaginary as a critical concept originated in the twentieth century and has been theorized in diverse ways. It can be understood as a register of thought; the way we interpret the world; the universe of images, signs, texts, and objects of thought. In this volume, it is explored as it manifests itself in encounters between the verbal and the visual. A number of the essays brought together here explore the transposition of the imaginary in illustrations of texts and verbal renditions of images, as well as in comic books based on paintings or on verbal narratives. Others analyze ways in which books deal with film or television and investigate the imaginary in digital media. Special attention is paid to the imaginary of places and the relationship of the imaginary with memory. Written in English and French, these contributions by European and American scholars demonstrate the various concerns and approaches characteristic of contemporary scholarship in word and image studies.
While many of the essays focus on recent developments, they shed light on the evolution of this phenomenon since 1945.
Contemporary British and American fiction is defined by financial markets' power over the global publishing industry and the global economy.
"Funded in part by The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts"--Page 4 of cover.
A surprising investigation of a scientific instrument long at the pulse of medicine. This book explores the colorful past, present, and future of an instrument that is, quite literally, close to our hearts. The stethoscope has become the symbol of medicine itself—how did this come to be? What makes the stethoscope such a familiar yet charismatic object? Drawing from a range of fields including history, anthropology, science, technology, and sound studies, the book illustrates the variety of roles the stethoscope has played over time. It shows that the stethoscope is not, and has never been, a single entity. It is used to a variety of ends, serves several purposes, and is open to many interpretations. This variability is the key to the stethoscope’s enduring presence in the medical and popular imagination.
When violence breaks out at the stands of far-right publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Beatrice Deft is provoked into action. An alienated Australian high school teacher who finds herself at the centre of the global book industry, Beatrice encounters a cast of characters including the very hot Caspian Schorle (German police officer), Kurt Weidenfeld (left-wing German publisher), and White Storm (a neo-Nazi publishing organisation). Such is the premise of The Frankfurt Kabuff, a comic erotic thriller about the publishing industry originally self-published under the pseudonym Blaire Squiscoll. With The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition, Blaire Squiscoll is revealed as the pen name of Beth ...
Analysing how contemporary fiction explores climate change, Johns-Putra argues that literature can help us understand our obligations to the future.
This volume includes sources relating to a range of social and cultural contexts, including the proliferation of natural history crazes (ferns, aquaria, orchids, etc); debates about the social and environmental impacts of changing land use in town and country; debates about demographics, population, and resources inspired by Thomas Malthus; attempts to preserve landscapes (e.g., The Commons Preservation Society), debates about hunger, poverty, and disease in the countryside, particularly during the ‘Hungry Forties’, and relating to the Captain Swing and Chartist disturbances; the rise of land Utopianism and rural Utopian community projects; the rise of new forms of rural leisure; aesthet...