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The bags-to-ashes story of an impoverished North London pensioner who gets voted the eleventh most influential woman on the planet, and becomes richer than the Queen. "It's a life affirming read that crams in dozens of smart ideas that challenge you to change your life too." "My friends are now obsessed with starting their own Hundred. It's actually becoming a movement for God's sake." "Tales of good old fortune in a bad new world." "A friend asked whether it's a novel, or somebody famous' disguised biography? It's a good question - and I'd love it to be my disguised biography!"
Acclaimed as a work of genius when first published in 1895, The Time Machine represents a revolution in storytelling. H. G. Wells's first--and greatest--novel has been recognized worldwide as a founding text of the science fiction genre and one of the most seminal narratives of the last hundred years. This collection of essays offers a series of original, penetrating, and wide-ranging perspectives on Wells's masterpiece by an international group of major Wells and science fiction scholars. The authors explore such textual topics as the narrative techniques and mythological undertones of the novel as well as its contribution to modern ideas of time and evolution and its focusing of the intellectual cross-currents of the late nineteenth century. This insightful volume captures the innovative imagination, richness, and fascinating ambiguity that resulted in a classic literary work and demonstrates that Wells's novel is both a visionary story and an unstoppable idea.
H. G. Wells—the inventor of the concept of the time machine and the phrase "the Shape of Things to Come"—described his life's work as one of "critical anticipation." Shadows of the Future identifies the attempt to imagine possible futures as the unifying principle behind Wells's diverse and sometimes wayward literary career. The book unravels the complex layers of meaning in The Time Machine, and shows how throughout his life he sought to exploit the potential of literary and cultural prophecy in new ways. Described by John Middleton Murry as "the last prophet of bourgeois Europe," he was also its first futurologist. In Shadows of the Future Wells's assumption of the prophet's role is re...
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.
The writings of H.G. Wells have had a profound influence on literary and cinematic depictions of the present and the possible future, and modern science fiction continues to be indebted to his "scientific romances," such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Interpreted and adapted for more than a century, Wells's texts have resisted easy categorization and are perennial subjects for emerging critical and theoretical perspectives. The author examines Wells's works through the post-structuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Via this critical perspective, concepts now synonymous with science fiction--such as time travel, alien invasion and transhumanism--demonstrate the intrinsic relevance of Wells to the genre and contemporary thought.
Explores the influence that public opinion polling, and the developing idea of a public consciousness in the British mid-century, had upon the literature of the period. It traces the emergence and growing dominance of public opinion research in cultural and governmental bodies, and the ways in which it came to be aestheticized by British writers.
H. G. Wells and All Things Russian is a fertile terrain for research and this volume will be the first to devote itself entirely to the theme. Wells was an astute student of Russian literature, culture and history, and the Russians, in turn, became eager students of Wells’s views and works. During the Soviet years, in fact, no significant foreign author was safer for Soviet critics to praise than H. G. Wells. The reason was obvious. He had met – and largely approved of – Lenin, was a close friend of the Soviet literary giant Maxim Gorky and, in general, expressed much respect for Russia’s evolving Communist experiment, even after it fell into Stalin’s hands. While Wells’s attitude towards the Soviet Union was, nevertheless, often ambivalent, there is definitely nothing ambiguous about the tremendous influence his works had on Russian literary and cultural life.
All the surviving records of the old Corporation, from the first charter under King John in 1200 to its dissolution in 1835; particularly rich in medieval legal records, Tudor and Stuart financial records. Ipswich received its first charter from King John in 1200; the Corporation records survive from 1255, placing the borough archive among the earliest in England, antedated only by Leicester, Shrewsbury, Wallingford, London and Exeter. The archive is particularly rich in records of the medieval courts, most notably perhaps those of the Court of Petty Pleas, whose cases touched almost every aspect of town life, and those of the Petty Court of Recognizances -in effect a register of deeds furni...
Explores the life and work of W. Warren Wagar.