This book provides a critical survey of the gothic texts of late twentieth-century and contemporary Scottish women writers including Kate Atkinson, Ellen Galford, A.L. Kennedy, Ali Smith and Emma ...Tennant focusing on four themes: quests and other worlds, witches, doubles and ghosts.
Though set in other worlds populated by alien beings, science fiction is a site where humans can critique and re-imagine the paradigms that shape this world, from fundamentals such as the sex and ...gender of the body to global power relations among sexes, races, and nations. Feminist thinkers and writers are increasingly recognizing science fiction's potential to shatter patriarchal and heterosexual norms, while the creators of science fiction are bringing new depth and complexity to the genre by engaging with feminist theories and politics. This book maps the intersection of feminism and science fiction through close readings of science fiction literature by Octavia E. Butler, Richard Calder, and Melissa Scott and the movies The Matrix and the Alien series. Patricia Melzer analyzes how these authors and films represent debates and concepts in three areas of feminist thought: identity and difference, feminist critiques of science and technology, and the relationship among gender identity, body, and desire, including the new gender politics of queer desires, transgender, and intersexed bodies and identities. She demonstrates that key political elements shape these debates, including global capitalism and exploitative class relations within a growing international system; the impact of computer, industrial, and medical technologies on women's lives and reproductive rights; and posthuman embodiment as expressed through biotechnologies, the body/machine interface, and the commodification of desire. Melzer's investigation makes it clear that feminist writings and readings of science fiction are part of a feminist critique of existing power relations—and that the alien constructions (cyborgs, clones, androids, aliens, and hybrids) that populate postmodern science fiction are as potentially empowering as they are threatening.
WINNER of the Association of Jewish Libraries' Judaica Reference AwardProvides critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fiction
This collection of essays represents ...a new departure for, and a potentially (re)defining moment in, literary Jewish Studies. It is the first volume to bring together 28 chapters covering a wide range of American, British, South African, Canadian and Australian Jewish fiction.
The volume is divided into 3 parts - American Jewish Fiction; British Jewish Fiction; and International and Transnational Anglophone Jewish Fiction - but many of the essays cross over these boundaries and speak to each other implicitly, as well as, on occasion, explicitly. Extending and redefining the canon of modern Jewish fiction, the volume juxtaposes major authors with more marginal figures, revising and recuperating individual reputations, rediscovering forgotten and discovering new work, and in the process remapping the whole terrain. This volume opens windows onto vistas that previously had been obscured and opens doors for the next generation of studies that could not proceed without a wide-ranging, visionary empiricism grounding their work.
Key FeaturesHighlights the rich diversity of the field and identifies its key themes, including immigration, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, Judaism, assimilation, antisemitism and ZionismAnalyses the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situates them in historical contextDiscusses the place of Anglophone Jewish fiction in relation to critical debates concerning transatlanticism and transnationalism; ethnicity and identity politics; postcolonial studies, feminist studies and Jewish StudiesWith a preface by Mark Shechner, the volume's contributors include Vicki Aarons (Trinity University, Texas), Debra Shostak (Wooster College, Ohio), Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia), Efraim Sicher (Ben-Gurion University), Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern University), Sue Vice (University of Sheffield), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Ruth Gilbert (University of Winchester), Beate Neumeier (University of Cologne) and Sandra Singer (University of Guelph)
By examining the feminist interventions of contemporary women writers working in this subgenre, Johnsen advances the existing critical discussion of women's crime fiction. The writers studied here ...bring research expertise to bear on their chosen historical settings, creating a powerful but widely accessible statement about women in history.
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Postcolonialism and Science Fiction explores intersections and interactions between the genre of science fiction and the theory and practice of postcolonialism, concentrating primarily on ...contemporary science fiction from the 1950s to the present day. The book argues that several of the foundational myths of science fiction – the 'other', or the stranger, and the strange and foreign land – are shared at the heart of colonialism, and that postcolonial science fiction has developed unique and creative ways of overcoming and dispelling these myths. Using close readings and thematic studies, ranging from lively discussions of Japanese and Canadian science fiction to a thorough and incisive deconstruction of race and (post)colonialism in the online game World of Warcraft , Postcolonialism and Science Fiction is the first comprehensive study of the complex and developing relationship between the two areas. It will be of interest to fans, researchers, students and anyone else interested in science fiction, postcolonial studies, or both.
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First full-length study to explore the relationship between postcolonialism and science fiction Lots of academic (and popular) interest in titles on science fiction Discusses wide range of sci-fi texts, including very recent titles Speaks to current and exciting debates within both science fiction and postcolonial studies Breadth of focus, both in terms of texts covered and geographical context
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JESSICA LANGER received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2009. She has published widely on postcolonial theory and practice and science fiction literature, film, video games and other media; her work ranges across a variety of geographical contexts including Canada, Japan and India. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
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Grounded in the latest scholarship and cultural production, this book explores intersections and interactions between the science fiction and the theory and practice of postcolonialism
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Using close readings and thematic studies of contemporary science fiction and postcolonial theory, ranging from discussions of Japanese and Canadian science fiction to a deconstruction of race and (post)colonialism in World of Warcraft, This book is the first comprehensive study of the complex and developing relationship between the two areas.
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Acknowledgements
Introduction: Elephant-Shaped Holes
A Question of History: Geographical/Historical Context
Diaspora and Locality
Race, Culture, Identity and Alien/Nation
Hybridity, Nativism and Transgression
Indigenous knowledge and Western science
Conclusion: Filling Holes, Breaking Boundaries
Bibliography
Index
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'Jessica Langer's crisp study performs timely and acute analyses of issues of racial identity, problems of diaspora and locality, the clash of indigenous and Western forms of knowledge, and the play of historical continuity and discontinuity at the conjuncture of science fiction, colonialism, and postcolonial studies. It should become a central reference in this growing field.' – Professor John Rieder, Department of English, UH M?noa, USA
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut ...Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.
The Noir Atlantic follows the influence of African American author Chester Himes on Francophone African crime fiction. In 1953, Himes emigrated to Paris; he struggled there, just as he had in the ...United States. In 1957, his luck changed: the famous French Série noire brought out the first installment of his “Harlem” crime series, La reine des pommes. Suddenly, he was a household name in France. Later, he would also have a significant influence on Francophone African writers; for them, Himes’s blend of absurdist humor and violence offered an alternative to a high literary paradigm implanted during the colonial era. Likewise, his heterogeneous identity as American, black, and a writer of “French” bestsellers modeled an escape from the centripetal pull of the Métropole. Starting with Abasse Ndione’s depictions of Senegal’s marijuana-smoking subculture in La Vie en spirale (1982) and ending with Mongo Beti’s 2001 Branle-bas en noir et blanc, set in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Francophone African crime fiction rejected French criteria of literary success; it embraced a new postcolonial aesthetic that emphasized entertaining the reader while making a living. The Noir Atlantic demonstrates why turning to what this study calls a “frivolous literary” mode represented a profound shift in perspective that anticipated more recent developments such as littérature monde.
Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides ...extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings." Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.
