You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This is the second edition, updated and in large part rewritten. It includes, on a high-density diskette, a reconstruction (Palingenesia) of the 2,609 rescripts. This reference will enable scholars to read the texts chronologically and to judge the soundness of the arguments advanced.
Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and through related concepts, such as psychology, gender and postmodernism. The author also explores representations of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies.
The concept of possible worlds, originally introduced in philosophical logic, has recently gained interdisciplinary influence; it proves to be a productive tool when borrowed by literary theory to explain the notion of fictional worlds. In this book Ruth Ronen develops a comparative reading of the use of possible worlds in philosophy and in literary theory, and offers an analysis of the way the concept contributes to our understanding of fictionality and the structure and ontology of fictional worlds. Dr Ronen suggests a new set of criteria for the definition of fictionality, making rigorous distinctions between fictional and possible worlds; and through specific studies of domains within fictional worlds - events, objects, time, and point of view - she proposes a radical rethinking of the problem of fictionality in general and fictional narrativity in particular.
Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre. Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive `encyclopaedia'. He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers. Reading by Starlight includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney.
None
In Starboard Wine, Samuel Delany explores the implications of his now-famous assertion that science fiction is not about the future. Rather, it uses the future as a means of talking about the present and its potentiality. By recognizing a text's specific "difference", we begin to see the quality of its particulars. Through riveting analyses of works by Joanna Russ, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Thomas M. Disch, Delany reveals critical strategies for reading that move beyond overwrought theorizing and formulaic thinking. Throughout, the author performs the kinds of careful inquiry and urgent speculation that he calls others to engage in.
Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw first appeared in 1977. Its demonstration that science fiction is a special language, rather than gadgets and green-skinned aliens, had an impact that reverberates today in science fiction criticism. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared.
This text provides an excellent introduction and overview of Narratology, a rapidly growing field in the humanities. Literary narratologists have provided many key concepts and analytical tools which are widely used in the interdisciplinary analysis of such narrative features as plot, point of view, speech presentation, ideological perspective and interpretation. The introduction explains the central concepts of narratology, their historical development, and draws together contemporary trends from many different disciplines into common focus. It offers a compendium of the development of narratology from classical poetics to the present. The essays are all prefaced by individual forewords helping the reader to place each individual selection in context. Recent developments are assessed across disciplines, highlighting the mutual influences of narratology and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, film and media studies.