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Essays exploring interrelated strands of material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing, through a rich variety of case studies.Much as the complexities of climate change and the Anthropocene have queried the limits and exclusions of literary representation, so, too, have the challenges recently presented by climate activism and intersectional environmentalism, animal rights, and even the power of material forms, such as oil, plastic, and heavy metals. Social and protest movements have revived the question of whether there can be such a thing as an activist ecocriticism: can such an approach only concern itself with consciousness, or might it politicise literar...
This volume brings together scholarly theories and practices on speculative fiction from the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, that are all rooted in similar values, culture, and history yet are independent and unique societies. The book exhibits both the convergences and the diversity of the Nordics in fiction and fandom as well as in research. It traces the roots of Nordic speculative fiction, how it has developed over time, and how the changes in Nordic environments and societies caused by overhanging shared global issues – such as climate change, mass migration, and technological acceleration – find space in speculative practices. The first of...
(Eco)Anxiety in Nuclear Holocaust Fiction and Climate Fiction: Doomsday Clock Narratives demonstrates that disaster fiction— nuclear holocaust and climate change alike— allows us to unearth and anatomise contemporary psychodynamics and enables us to identify pretraumatic stress as the common denominator of seemingly unrelated types of texts. These Doomsday Clock Narratives argue that earth’s demise is soon and certain. They are set after some catastrophe and depict people waiting for an even worse catastrophe to come. References to geology are particularly important— in descriptions of the landscape, the emphasis falls on waste and industrial bric- a- brac, which is seen through the ...
This book addresses the legacy of World War II on male identity and reinvention. It considers some of the many ways in which popular culture of the time sought to mediate these difficult transitions, exploring films, popular fiction, memoir and biography.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) was an interesting and idiosyncratic character, to say the least. He was a mathematics lecturer at Cambridge University and a deacon in the Anglican Church. Obviously a very bright man he suffered from physical impairments such as partial deafness and a stammer which, perhaps, made him reserved and slightly aloof from the society of the day. He also had a predilection for young female companionship, which would seem highly contentious to us today but was, perhaps, more acceptable (and possibly entirely innocent) in the latter part of the 19th century. The books can be read on a number of levels. They originally emerged from a boat trip that Dodg...
In the world of books and literature, “hype” is associated with bestsellerism - the books that sell the most, are read by vast numbers, and constantly talked about in media and staff rooms. Often, it is the success in itself that generates an interest because popularity begets popularity. Quite often though, a hyped bestseller is met with a skeptic criticism of poor language, a badly constructed plot, a predictable story line, or all three. The bestseller phenomenon is sometimes conceived as a threat against “real” literature. Research into the creation, reception, and meaning of bestsellers is utterly scarce and Hype: Bestsellers and Literary Culture is an important contribution to ...
This book explores what science fiction can tell us about the human condition in a technological world, with the ethical dilemmas and consequences that this entails. This book is the result of the joint efforts of scholars and scientists from various disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach sets an example for those who, like us, have been busy assessing the ways in which fictional attempts to fathom the possibilities of science and technology speak to central concerns about what it means to be human in a contemporary world of technology and which ethical dilemmas it brings along. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate what can be achieved in approaching science fiction as a kind of imaginary laboratory for experimentation, where visions of human (or even post-human) life under various scientific, technological or natural conditions that differ from our own situation can be thought through and commented upon. Although a scholarly work, this book is also designed to be accessible to a general audience that has an interest in science fiction, as well as to a broader academic audience interested in ethical questions.
This book questions why so many mothers leave their families in twenty-first-century Swedish literature, analyzing literary representations of maternal abandonment in relation to sociopolitical discourses. The volume draws on a queer-theoretical framework in order to highlight norm-critical dimensions, failure, and resistance in literature about motherhood. Jenny Björklund argues that novels about mothers who leave can be understood as ways to problematize and challenge Swedish-branded values like gender equality and a progressive family politics that promotes ideals of involved parenthood, the nuclear family, and pronatalism. The book also raises questions beyond the Swedish context about maternal ambivalence, family politics, and privilege and discusses how literature can work as resistance and provide alternatives to the current social order.
An exploration of politics and the role of the 'soft sciences' in Science Fiction.