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Alien Plots: Female Subjectivity and the Divine in the Light of James Tiptree's 'a Momentary Taste of Being'

Inez ven der Spek

At the heart of this study is a science fiction story by James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon-Bradley, 1916–1987) about a brother and a sister (and fifty-eight other human beings) who encounter an alien ... More

At the heart of this study is a science fiction story by James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon-Bradley, 1916–1987) about a brother and a sister (and fifty-eight other human beings) who encounter an alien while on a starship travelling to discover a habitable planet. The book includes an outline of Tiptree's work and of her remarkable life as the only child of jungle explorers, as a painter, an American agent during and after World War II, an experimental psychologist, and a female science fiction writer in male disguise.Less

American Travel and Empire

David Seed

Susan Castillo (ed.)

In this collection, leading scholars in the field examine the interfaces between narratives of travel and of empire. The term ‘American’, used here in the hemispheric sense, and ‘American travel ... More

In this collection, leading scholars in the field examine the interfaces between narratives of travel and of empire. The term ‘American’, used here in the hemispheric sense, and ‘American travel writing’ include both writing about America by visitors and writings by Americans abroad. The contributors are recognized specialists in different periods of American literature and travel writing. The chapters explore the ways in which descriptions of the landscapes and peoples of colonized territories shaped perceptions of these areas; the transmission of images and metaphors between colony and metropole; the othering of non-scribal cultures as ‘primitive’ or ‘wild’; the deployment of representations of encounters between European and other cultures in order to critique or reinforce European or American values and cultural practices; and the tacit assumptions of cultural or economic hegemony underlying U.S. or European travel writing.Less

Amorous Aesthetics: Intellectual Love in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, 1788-1853

Seth T. Reno

Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling ... More

Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being. Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics,through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, this book shows intellectual love to be a pillar of Romanticism.Less

Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal

Sherryl Vint

This book uses readings of science fiction texts to explore how animals are central to our perception of humanity. Arguing that the academic field of animal studies and the popular genre of science ... More

This book uses readings of science fiction texts to explore how animals are central to our perception of humanity. Arguing that the academic field of animal studies and the popular genre of science fiction share a number a critical concerns, the author expresses an urgent need to reconsider the human–animal boundary in a world of genetic engineering, factory farming, species extinctions, and increasing evidence of animal intelligence, emotions, and tool use. Mapping the complex terrain of human relations with non-human animals, the book offers an intervention into the contentious ongoing discussions of the post-human.Less

Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader

Peter Wright

Attending Daedalus is the first book-length study of Gene Wolfe's four-volume The Book of the New Sun and its sequel, The Urth of the New Sun, known collectively as ‘The Urth Cycle’. Rejecting the ... More

Attending Daedalus is the first book-length study of Gene Wolfe's four-volume The Book of the New Sun and its sequel, The Urth of the New Sun, known collectively as ‘The Urth Cycle’. Rejecting the conventional spiritual reading of the text, the book employs evolutionary theory to argue for a controversial secular reception of a narrative in which Wolfe plays an elaborate game with his reader. After exposing the concealed story at the heart of Wolfe's novels, it adopts a variety of approaches to establish Wolfe as the designer of an intricate textual labyrinth intended to extend into the reading experience his thematic preoccupations with subjectivity, the unreliability of memory, the manipulation of individuals by social and political systems, and the psychological potency of myth, faith and symbolism. Drawing evidence not only from the first thirty years of Wolfe's career but from sources as diverse as reception theory, palaeontology, the Renaissance Hermetic tradition, mythology and science fiction's subgenre of dying sun literature, the book provides a comprehensive and closely argued analysis of one of the key works of twentieth-century science fiction.Less

Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today

Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur (eds)

Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of critical urgency to probe the notion of ‘the contemporary’, and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. ... More

Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of critical urgency to probe the notion of ‘the contemporary’, and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Consisting of twenty-two critical essays written by scholars in the field of French studies, the volume offers a sustained reflection on the status of the contemporary in French culture and takes a close look at the contemporary moment itself, as well as its concomitant discourse of crisis. The volume is split into four sections. The first section, ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’, offers distinct disciplinary approaches to broader questions about time, period, and categorization. The second section, ‘Contemporary Politics and French Thought’, brings broader theoretical inquiries to bear on the political sphere. The third section, ‘The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives’, rearticulates the concern that the difficult negotiation of the past continues to haunt the present. The fourth section, ‘Writing the Contemporary Self’, features essays that probe the limits of autobiographical writing and self-representation. The fifth section, ‘Novel Rereadings’, offers new interpretations of monumental works of French fiction by literary giants such as Flaubert, Colette, Proust, Beckett. The sixth and final section, ‘Memory: Past and Future’, concludes with three different approaches to memory and representation. The essays in this volume, organised by theme rather than by definitions or denotations, encourage an expansive and elastic theoretical framework that charts a broad conceptual course and attempts to define what it means to ‘be contemporary’ both broadly and in terms of practice.Less

Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century

Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi (eds)

Black Intersectionalities goes beyond conventional identity studies to offer a critique of identity categories themselves. Markers of identity are too often assigned, examined, and theorized as ... More

Black Intersectionalities goes beyond conventional identity studies to offer a critique of identity categories themselves. Markers of identity are too often assigned, examined, and theorized as definitive binaries that fail to take into account the dynamism of individuality and its relationship to the social whole, relegating people to either male or female, straight or gay, black or white, and so on. Focusing on the way identity is both constructed and constructive, the authors in this collection progress beyond prescribed categories, seeking to develop new types of interdisciplinary frameworks in which subjective and political spaces can at once be universalized and kept particular. In doing so they offer a truer concept of identity – as imagined, plural, and continuously shifting.Less

Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology

Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (eds)

This book explores the central but often critically neglected role of knowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for Black ‘freedom’ and emancipation. The collection examines the ... More

This book explores the central but often critically neglected role of knowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for Black ‘freedom’ and emancipation. The collection examines the structural subjugation and condemnation of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples globally within the past 500 years of trans-Atlantic societies of Western modernity, doing so in connection to the population's dehumanization and/or invisibilization within various epistemic formations of the West. In turn, the collection foregrounds the extent to which the ending of this imposed subjugation/condemnation has necessarily entailed critiques of, challenges to, and counter-formulations against and beyond knowledge and epistemic formations that have worked to ‘naturalize’ this condition within the West's various socio-human formations. The chapters engage primarily with knowledge formations and practices generated from within the discourse of ‘race’, but also doing so in relation to other intersectional socio-human discourses of Western modernity. They engage as well the critiques, challenges, and counter-formulations put forth by specific individuals, schools, movements, and/or institutions — historic and contemporary — of the Black world. Through these examinations, the contributors either implicitly point towards, or explicitly take part in, the formation of a new kind of critical — but also emancipatory — epistemology.Less

Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant

Nick Nesbitt

Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to perimetric Critical Theory. The book argues that their singular project has been to ... More

Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to perimetric Critical Theory. The book argues that their singular project has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start indelibly marked by the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism. Chapters and sections address figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Baron de Vastey, Victor Schoelcher, Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, while an extensive theoretical introduction defines the essential parameters of ‘Caribbean Critique.’Less

Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature

Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, and Stephen Shapiro

This book attempts to resituate the problem of ‘world literature’, considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined ... More

This book attempts to resituate the problem of ‘world literature’, considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. The implications of this theory for cultural analysis have received relatively little attention, even though it might be said to draw attention to a central arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of ‘world literature’ and ‘modernism’, on the other, that this work looks for its specific contours. The first two chapters argue for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. The four substantive chapters that follow explore a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of world-literary comparativism is dramatically highlighted. The novel is treated paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a ‘modernising’ import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other non-literary and archaic cultural forms.Less

Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction

Jesper Gulddal, Alistair Rolls, and Stewart King (eds)

This book offers a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about crime fiction. Academic studies in the genre have historically been encumbered by a set of restrictive ... More

This book offers a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about crime fiction. Academic studies in the genre have historically been encumbered by a set of restrictive preconceptions, largely drawn from attitudes to popular fiction: that the genre does not warrant detailed critical analysis; that genre norms and conventions matter more than textual individuality; and that comparative or transnational perspectives are secondary to the study of the core British-American canon. This study challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction and proposes that crime fiction, far from being static and staid, must be seen as a genre constantly violating its own boundaries. Centred on three axes of mobility, the essays present new, mobile reading practices that realize the genre’s full textual complexity, without being limited by the authoritative self-interpretations that crime narratives tend to provide. The book demonstrates how we can venture beyond the restrictive notions of ‘genre’, ‘formula’, ‘popular’ or ‘lowbrow’ to develop instead a concept of genre that acknowledges its mobility. Finally, it establishes a global and transnational perspective that challenges the centrality of the British-American tradition and recognizes that the global history of crime fiction is characterized, not by the existence of parallel, national traditions, but rather by processes of appropriation and transculturation.Less

Cuba's Wild East: A Literary Geography of Oriente

Peter Hulme

This book recounts a literary history of modern Cuba that has four distinctive and interrelated characteristics. Oriented to the east of the island, it looks aslant at a Cuban national literature ... More

This book recounts a literary history of modern Cuba that has four distinctive and interrelated characteristics. Oriented to the east of the island, it looks aslant at a Cuban national literature that has sometimes been indistinguishable from a history of Havana. Given the insurgent and revolutionary history of that eastern region, it recounts stories of rebellion, heroism and sacrifice. Intimately related to places and sites which now belong to a national pantheon, its corpus — while including fiction and poetry — is frequently written as memoir and testimony. As a region of encounter, that corpus is itself resolutely mixed, featuring a significant proportion of writings by US journalists and novelists as well as by Cuban writers.Less

Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire

Jane Hiddleston

This book analyses the work of six francophone intellectuals writing in the lead-up to the decolonisation of many of France's colonies in the 1950s and 60s. While figures such as Senghor, Césaire, ... More

This book analyses the work of six francophone intellectuals writing in the lead-up to the decolonisation of many of France's colonies in the 1950s and 60s. While figures such as Senghor, Césaire, Fanon, Amrouche, Feraoun and Kateb were all educated, indeed immersed, in French culture and language, they intervened in political debates surrounding decolonisation and sought to contribute to the reinvention of local cultures in a gesture of resistance to the ongoing French presence. Despite their pivotal role during this period of upheaval, however, their project was fraught with tensions that form the focus of this study. In particular, these writers reflect on the relation between universalism and particularism in intellectual work, and struggle to avoid the traps associated with an over-investment in either perspective. They also all learn from metropolitan French humanist thought but strive continually to reinvent that humanism so as to account for colonised experience and culture. Finally, their work readdresses the ongoing question of the relation between literature or culture and politics, and testifies to a moment of intense dialogue, and potential conflict, between contrasting but complementary spheres of activity.Less

Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality

Gwyneth Jones

Gwyneth Jones’s Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality is a collection of critical essays, speeches and reviews, split into three sections: ‘All Science is Description’, ‘Science, ... More

Gwyneth Jones’s Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality is a collection of critical essays, speeches and reviews, split into three sections: ‘All Science is Description’, ‘Science, Fiction and Reality’, and ‘The Reviews’. The book looks at 20th century science fiction through a feminist lens and explores the evolution of science fiction and fantasy writing during an era of scientific and technological development. From a feminist point of view, Jones discusses the relationships between men and women in science fiction and unpacks the significance of the power imbalances that come out of those relationships. Jones also addresses the increasing closeness in the barriers between science fiction and reality and offers insightful predictions towards the future.Less

Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory

Michael Syrotinski

As postcolonial studies shift to a more comparative approach, one of the most intriguing developments has been within the Francophone world. A number of genealogical lines of influence are now being ... More

As postcolonial studies shift to a more comparative approach, one of the most intriguing developments has been within the Francophone world. A number of genealogical lines of influence are now being drawn connecting the work of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory – Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak – to an earlier generation of French (predominantly poststructuralist) theorists. Within this emerging narrative of intellectual influences, the importance of the thought of Jacques Derrida, and the status of deconstruction generally, has been acknowledged, but has not until now been adequately accounted for. This book looks at the underlying conceptual tensions and theoretical stakes of what the author terms a ‘deconstructive postcolonialism’, and argues that postcolonial studies stand to gain ground in terms of political forcefulness and philosophical rigour by turning back to, and not away from, deconstruction.Less

Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction

Jeanne Cortiel

This major study of the work of Joanna Russ provides an introduction to the major feminist issues relevant to her work and assesses its development. The book looks at the function of woman-based ... More

This major study of the work of Joanna Russ provides an introduction to the major feminist issues relevant to her work and assesses its development. The book looks at the function of woman-based intertextuality. Although it deals principally with Russ's novels, it also examines her short stories, and the focus on critically neglected texts is a particularly valuable feature of the study.Less