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H. G. Wells wasn't the only nineteenth-century writer to dream of a time machine. The Spanish playwright Enrique Gaspar published El anacronópete—"He who flies against time"—eight years before Wells's influential work appeared. The novel begins at the 1878 Paris Exposition, where Dr. Don Sindulfo unveils his new invention—which looks like a giant sailing vessel. Soon the doctor embarks on a voyage back in time, accompanied by a motley crew of French prostitutes and Spanish soldiers. The purpose of his expedition is to track down the imprisoned wife of a third-century Chinese emperor, believed to possess the secret to immortality. A classic tale of obsession, high adventure, and star-crossed love, The Time Ship includes intricately drawn illustrations from the original 1887 edition, and a critical introduction that argues persuasively for The Time Ship's historical importance to science fiction and world literature.
A satirical take on time travel, written before HG Wells, that starts in Paris in the late nineteenth century and takes the reader to China, Pompeii, and Mount Ararat at all the key moments in history. Witty and playful, it is at once a biting commentary on human arrogance as well as a lively panorama of 19th-century cultural life seen largely through the eyes of an eccentric Spaniard.
A Tale of Survival is an explosive story that is much more than a simple memoir of an Hispanic woman: it is an important, quintessential American story of adversity and perseverance. This is a brutally honest and provocative tale of not merely survival but success from one who came from a time and place where success and upward mobility for a Mexican-American was not only unlikely but damn near impossible. Unlike some other Hispanic memoirs, Grace Flores-Hughes describes her childhood and transition to adulthood and beyond, against the tapestry of the modern Hispanic experience and the sometimes turbulent era of the rebellious baby-boomer generation. She writes of assimilation, racial and et...
This “stimulating contribution to literary theory” reveals the deeply philosophical concerns and developments behind popular time travel sci-fi (London Review of Books). In Time Travel, literary theorist David Wittenberg argues that time travel fiction is not mere escapism, but a narrative “laboratory” where theoretical questions about storytelling—and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity—are presented in story form. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, Wittenberg links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in the popularization of science, from nineteenth-century evolutionary b...
This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity. Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws ...
Ríos-Font re-reads nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish texts and authors that have tested the boundary between high and low, repositioning them within Spanish critical tradition. Through these self-reflexive readings, the book explores how the definition of literature has changed in more than two centuries of modernity in Spain, and the institutional and cultural negotiations behind this change."--Jacket.
The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.