Suchergebnisse

"The Ruins of Urban Modernity examines Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day through the critical lens of urban spatiality. Navigating the textual landscapes of New York, Venice, London, Los Angeles and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Against the Day reimagines urban modernity at the turn of the 20th century. As the complex novel collapses and rebuilds anew the spatial imaginaries underlying the popular fictions of urban modernity, Utku Mogultay explores how such creative disfiguration throws light on the contemporary urban world. Through critical spatial readings, he considers how Pynchon historicizes issues ranging from the commodification of the urban landscape to the politics of place-making. In Mogultay's reading, Against the Day is shown to offer an oblique negotiation of postmodern urban spaces, thus directing our attention to the ongoing erosion of sociospatial diversity in North American cities and elsewhere."--Bloomsbury Publishing

Review of: Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities, Kristina Busse (2017)
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 254 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-60938-514-9, p/bk, $45.00

The New Feminist Literary Studies presents sixteen essays by leading and emerging scholars that examine contemporary feminism and the most pressing issues of today. The book is divided into three sections. This first section , 'Frontiers', contains essays on issues and phenomena that may be considered, if not new, then newly and sometimes uneasily prominent in the public eye: transfeminism, the sexual violence highlighted by #MeToo, Black motherhood, migration, sex worker rights, and celebrity feminism. Essays in the second section, 'Fields', specifically intervene into long-constituted or relatively new academic fields and areas of theory: disability studies, eco-theory, queer studies, and Marxist feminism. Finally, the third section, 'Forms', is dedicated to literary genres and tackles novels of domesticity, feminist dystopias, young adult fiction, feminist manuals and manifestos, memoir, and poetry. Together these essays provide new interventions into the thinking and theorising of contemporary feminism.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of the United States of America as a new nation. This development brought with it new ideologies and social and political change; included in these changes was the way that sexual conduct outside of marriage was dealt with. Because the emerging legal system became less concerned with matters of morality, some people became frightened that sexual promiscuity would become rampant. The sentimental novel or seduction tale became a means of attempting to control sexual behavior when the law was not able to step in. The way that madness, a term used to describe a variety of mental disorders, was understood was also changing in the post-Revolutionary era. As historian Roy Porter points out, mental illness has a complex history in which it is used by society for a variety of reasons and perceptions of it have changed depending on the needs of a particular group of people. Early American culture was no different. Mental illness became something to discuss and write about, and the medical documents presented it in such a way that it fit the goals of the sentimental novelist well. Sentimental Novelists typically used mental illness and eventual death as a way to punish those characters who committed sexual misconduct. Not all novelists bought into the link between sexual misconduct and mental illness, however. Writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Charles Brockden Brown believed that the relationship between the two was much more complex. Charles Brockden Brown brings to life many of Wollstonecraft's philosophies in his fiction and pushes very strongly for women's rights using his American brand of Gothic fiction. He destabilizes the idea that sexual misconduct in and of itself could cause mental illness in three of his novels: Wieland, Ormond, and Arthur Mervyn. This thesis examines Charles Brockden Brown's novels in relation to sentimental novels and shows that while he does not dispute the ability of grief and other emotions to cause mental illness, he also does not attempt to scare readers but instead uses mentally ill characters in his novels to push for social change and more rights for women.

Chad is a pivot country between North and Central Africa. It is rarely covered as a place of literature, thus Global Voices interviewed francophone novelist Nétonon Noël Ndjékéry.

Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth — geoengineering — is receiving serious consideration as a way to address climate change. Contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change is influenced by science fiction, and terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and others a motif for thinking in complex ways about our impact on planetary environments. This book asks how science fiction has imagined how we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron's blockbuster Avatar (2009), in stories by such writers as Olaf Stapledon, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Pamela Sargent, Frederick Turner and Kim Stanley Robinson. It argues for terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis and the politics of colonisation and habitation. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world.

Introduction: Black Power Creolized -- The Long Caribbean Seventies -- Sylvia Wynter's Decolonial Humanism -- Black Power Revolution in Trinidad -- Carnival, Calypso & the Black Power 'Rebellion' -- Caribbean Black Power in Cinema and Fiction -- Epilogue: Rastafari, Reggae and Black Power.