Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? InEmpire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about ...thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"-an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear-including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory-Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory.
Empire of Conspiracyoffers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller'sCatch-22to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard'sHidden Persuadersto recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.
InSpeculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction-including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures-to ...illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination.
Carrington's argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the originalStar Trektelevision series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off seriesStar Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title,Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women inBuffy the Vampire Slayerand the Harry Potter series.Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.
Willa Cather's last novel set on the Great Plains,Lucy Gayheart, depicts a temperamental young woman, pianist Lucy Gayheart. In writing the novel, Cather drew on her lifelong interest in music, which ...plays an integral role in the book. The novel received very mixed responses among critics and reviewers after its 1935 publication.
Willa Cather's penultimate novel tells the story of young Lucy Gayheart from Haverford, Nebraska who escapes life in a small town around the turn of the century to pursue a career in music. In Chicago, she attracts the attention of an aging but charismatic singer, Clement Sebastian, and comes to the discovery that she was not born to be an artist. What follows is a tale of love and loss.
The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition includes a historical essay providing fresh insight into the novel and Cather's writing process, photographs and maps, and explanatory notes providing a full range of biographical and historical information. The novel, edited according to standards set by the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, presents a clean, authoritative text of the first edition.
The Gothic Novel in Ireland, 1760-1830 reveals how the Irish contribution to the rise of the gothic novel is all too frequently overlooked. Irish writers were actively engaged in shaping the form now ...conventionally understood as beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Obviously an important text in the evolution of the gothic mode, the ostensibly pioneering Castle of Otranto was actually preceded by two Irish novels: Thomas Leland’s Longsword (1762) and The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley (1760), by ‘A Young Lady’. Neither of these texts overshadows Walpole’s, but their omission from the literary history of the British gothic novel is nevertheless a telling indication of the exclusionary nature of current scholarly perspectives. Christina Morin’s adroit and percipient text reveals how the Gothic was very much an international genre.
The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy ...Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative’s reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.
Reading Digital Fiction offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of digital fiction from a cognitive and empirical perspective. Proposing ...the new concept of "medial reading", it argues for the centrality of an audience's interest in, awareness of and/or attention to the medium in which a text is produced and received, and which we argue should be applied to reader data across media. The book analyses and theorises five generations of digital fiction and their reading, including hypertext fiction, hypermedia fiction, narrative video games, app fiction, and virtual reality. It showcases medium- and platform-specific methods of qualitative reader response research across a variety of contexts and settings from screen-based and embodied interaction to gallery installation, and from reading group and individual interview to think-aloud methodologies. The book thus addresses the unique affordances of digital fiction reading by designing and reporting on new empirical studies focusing on hypertextuality, interactivity, immersion, medium-specific forms of textual "you", ontological ambiguity, reader orientation, and empathy. In so doing, the book refines, critiques, and expands cognitive, transmedial, and empirical narratology and stylistics by placing the reader of these new narratives front and centre.
The Planetary Humanism of European Women’s Science Fiction argues that utopian science fiction written by European women has, since the seventeenth century, played an important role in exploring the ...racial and gender possibilities of the outer limits of the humanist imagination. This book focuses on six works of science fiction from the UK, France, Spain, and Italy: Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium; Nicoletta Vallorani’s Sulla Sabbia di Sur and Il Cuore Finto di DR; Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe series; Elia Barcelo’s Consecuencias Naturales; and Historias del Crazy Bar, a collection of stories by Lola Robles and Maria Concepcion Regueiro. It sets these in conversation with key gender and critical race scholars: Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. It asserts that a key concern for feminism, anti- racism, and science fiction now is to seek inventive ways of returning to the question of the human in the context of increasing racial and gender divisions. Offering unique access to contemporary and historical women writers who have mobilised the utopian imagination to rethink the human, this book is of use to those conducting research in Gender Studies, Philosophy, History, and Literature.
PDF
