After the Storm 2060s-2071 McConnachie, David
Alternatives journal (Waterloo),
01/2021, Volume:
46, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The wildfires of the mid 2030s and early 2040s that devastated most of the northern Algonquin forests had shocked Canadians to their very core. Something so special, something so iconic...something ...that we so carelessly allowed to be destroyed by human-driven climate change. Except, the forest wasn't destroyed. It was damaged and it was hurt and its populations of trees and birds and animals and the like had been greatly reduced. But nature is resilient, and thanks to the help of some prescient humans, nature had managed to stage a comeback in the northern Algonquin forests. While the fires were truly cataclysmic, the self-preservation instincts of the animals coupled with the herculean efforts of scientists, researchers and conservationists had ensured that there would be a future for the forests, animal species and the broader biosphere of the Algonquin National Park.
Writing Fear Bowers, Katherine
2022, 2022-03-01
eBook
In Russia, gothic fiction is often seen as an aside – a literary curiosity that experienced a brief heyday and then disappeared. In fact, its legacy is much more enduring , persisting within later ...Russian literary movements . Writing Fear explores Russian literature’s engagement with the gothic by analysing the practices of borrowing and adaptation. Katherine Bowers shows how these practices shaped literary realism from its romantic beginnings through the big novels of the 1860s and 1870s to its transformation during the modernist period.
Bowers traces the development of gothic realism with an emphasis on the affective power of fear. She then investigates the hybrid genre’s function in a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address social and political issues such as urban life, the woman question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family. By mapping the myriad ways political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism, Writing Fear challenges the conventional literary history of nineteenth-century Russia.
Blakey Vermeule wonders how readers become involved in the lives of fictional characters, people they know do not exist.
Vermeule examines the ways in which readers’ experiences of literature are ...affected by the emotional attachments they form to fictional characters and how those experiences then influence their social relationships in real life. She focuses on a range of topics, from intimate articulations of sexual desire, gender identity, ambition, and rivalry to larger issues brought on by rapid historical and economic change. Vermeule discusses the phenomenon of emotional attachment to literary characters primarily in terms of 18th-century British fiction but also considers the postmodern work of Thomas Mann, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and Chinua Achebe.
From the perspective of cognitive science, Vermeule finds that caring about literary characters is not all that different from caring about other people, especially strangers. The tools used by literary authors to sharpen and focus reader interest tap into evolved neural mechanisms that trigger a caring response.
This book contributes to the emerging field of evolutionary literary criticism. Vermeule draws upon recent research in cognitive science to understand the mental processes underlying human social interactions without sacrificing solid literary criticism. People interested in literary theory, in cognitive analyses of the arts, and in Darwinian approaches to human culture will find much to ponder in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?
Literary fiction is a powerful cultural tool for criticizing governments and for imagining how better governance and better states would work. Combining political theory with strong readings of a ...vast range of novels, John Marx shows that fiction over the long twentieth century has often envisioned good government not in Utopian but in pragmatic terms. Early-twentieth-century novels by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster and Rabindrananth Tagore helped forecast world government after European imperialism. Twenty-first-century novelists such as Monica Ali, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Ondaatje and Amitav Ghosh have inherited that legacy and continue to criticize existing policies in order to formulate best practices on a global scale. Marx shows how literature can make an important contribution to political and social sciences by creating a space to imagine and experiment with social organization.
