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Hidden Topographies
This book examines dystopian fiction’s recent paradigm shift towards urban dystopias. It links the dystopian tradition with the literary history of the novel, spatio-philosophical concepts against the backdrop of the spatial turn, and systems-theory. Five dystopian novels are discussed in great detail: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and The City & The City (2009), City of Bohane (2011) by Kevin Barry, John Berger’s Lilac and Flag (1992), and Divided Kingdom (2005) by Rupert Thomson. The book includes chapters on the literary history of the dystopian tradition, the referential interplay of maps and literature, urban spaces in literature, borders and transgressions, and on systems-theory as a tool for charting dystopian fiction. The result is a detailed overview of how dystopian fiction constantly adapts to – and reflects on – the actual world.
China Miéville
The chapters in this collection respond to the range of interests that have shaped Miéville's fiction from his influential role in contemporary genre debates, to his ability to pose serious philosophical questions about state control, revolutionary struggle, regimes of apartheid, and the function of international law in a globalized world. This collection demonstrates how Miéville's fictions offer a striking example of contemporary literature's ability to imagine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism at a time of crisis for leftist ideas within the political realm.
Temporalities in/of Crises in Anglophone Literatures
Literary works play a crucial role in modelling and conceptualising temporalities. This becomes particularly apparent in times of crises, which put conventionalised temporal patterns and routines under pressure. During crises, past, present, and future appear to collapse into each other and give way to temporal disjunction and rupture. Offering pluralised and context-sensitive approaches to temporalities in and of crises, this volume explores how literature’s engagement with crises suggests both the need for and possibility of rethinking ‘time’. The volume is committed to examining the affordances of specific genres and their potential in pointing beyond temporalities of crises to facilitate a sense of futurity. Individual essays are grounded in recent theories of temporality and literary form, which are related to novel advancements in ecocriticism, queer studies, affect theory, and postcolonial studies. The chapters cover a broad range of examples from different literary genres to reveal the knowledge of literature about temporalities in and of crises.
Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ̒The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genreʼ, ̒The Novel in the Economy’, ̒Genres’, ̒Gender’ (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ̒The Burden of Representationʼ (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.
Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts
Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the “spatial turn,” contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text—as well as other media—and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.
Staging Authority
Staging Authority: Presentation and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a comprehensive handbook on how the presentation, embodiment, and performance of authority changed in the long nineteenth century. It focuses on the diversification of authority: what new forms and expressions of authority arose in that critical century, how traditional authority figures responded and adapted to those changes, and how the public increasingly participated in constructing and validating authority. It pays particular attention to how spaces were transformed to offer new possibilities for the presentation of authority, and how the mediatization of presence affected traditional authority. The handbook’s fourteen chapters draw on innovative methodologies in cultural history and the aligned fields of the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, gender studies, media studies, and sound studies.
Postfaktisches Erzählen?
Gibt es ein postfaktisches Erzählen? In öffentlichen Diskursen ist derzeit häufig kritisch von einem ‚postfaktischen Zeitalter‘ die Rede. Zugleich wächst die Sehnsucht nach neuen, ebenso glaubhaften wie visionären Narrativen, die wesentliche Grundlagen unseres sozialen, kulturellen und politischen Miteinanders in einer als krisenhaft empfundenen Umbruchsituation neu erzählen und die sich, so die Hoffnung, gegen die Lügengeschichten der Populisten durchsetzen können. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist in jüngster Zeit eine Debatte um die Bedeutung, die Funktion und den Nutzen des Konzepts des ‚postfaktischen Erzählens‘ entstanden. Unter Rückgriff auf Theorien, Erkenntnisse und Methoden der Erzählforschung wird in den Beiträgen dieses interdisziplinären Bandes das Verhältnis des ‚Post-Faktischen‘ zum Narrativen untersucht und zugleich eine Bestimmung der Kernbegriffe der Debatte wie ‚post-faktisch‘ und ‚post-truth‘, ‚Wirklichkeit‘ und ‚Wahrheit‘, ‚Ereignisse‘ und ‚Geschehen‘ sowie ‚Erzählungen‘, ‚Geschichten‘ und ‚Narrative‘ angestrebt.
Cartography
Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include. In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.
Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Side-Stepping Normativity: Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner discusses Sylvia Townsend Warner's highly innovative narrative style, which does not conform to conventional modernist or postmodernist standards, and explores how Warner's short stories shift to off-centre positions. Side-Stepping Normativity further outlines the way in which Warner constantly challenges the categories we apply to classify our surroundings and analyses how Warner succeeds in creating queer, that is, non-heteronormative as well strange and peculiar stories without explicitly opposing the so-called norms of her time. In this, Side-Stepping Normativity joins a vibrant conversation in queer studies which revolves around the question how critics can approach literary texts from a non-antagonistic position. Rather than focussing on the role of the critic, however, this thesis shows that Warner's texts have long achieved what queer theorists seek to achieve on an analytical level.
Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction
The heroic romance is one of the West's most enduring narratives, found everywhere, from religion and myth to blockbuster films and young adult literature. Within this story, adolescent girls are not, and cannot be, the heroes. They are, at best, the hero's bride, a prize he wins for slaying monsters. Crucially, although the girl's exclusion from heroic selfhood affects all girls, it does not do so equally- whiteness and able-bodiedness are taken as markers of heightened, fantasy femininity. Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction explores how the young female-heroes of mythopoeic YA, a Tolkienian-inspired genre drawing on myth's world-creating power and YA's liminal potential, disrupt the conventional heroic narrative. These heroes, such as Tamora Pierce's Alanna the Lioness, Daine the Wildmage, and Marissa Meyer's Cinder and Iko, offer a model of being-hero, an embodied way of living and being in this world that disrupts the typical hero's violent hierarchy, isolating individuality, and erasure of difference. In doing so, they push the boundaries of what it means to be a hero, a girl, and even human.
