Evaporating Genres

Author : Gary K. Wolfe
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
ISBN 13 : 0819571040
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Evaporating Genres written by Gary K. Wolfe and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of provocative essays on how the fantastic genres evolve and grow In this wide-ranging series of essays, an award-winning science fiction critic explores how the related genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror evolve, merge, and finally "evaporate" into new and more dynamic forms. Beginning with a discussion of how literary readers "unlearned" how to read the fantastic during the heyday of realistic fiction, Gary K. Wolfe goes on to show how the fantastic reasserted itself in popular genre literature, and how these genres themselves grew increasingly unstable in terms of both narrative form and the worlds they portray. More detailed discussions of how specific contemporary writers have promoted this evolution are followed by a final essay examining how the competing discourses have led toward an emerging synthesis of critical approaches and vocabularies. The essays cover a vast range of authors and texts, and include substantial discussions of very current fiction published within the last few years.

Author : Rob Latham
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199838852
Total Pages : 641 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction written by Rob Latham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The excitement of possible futures found in science fiction has long fired the human imagination, but the genre's acceptance by academe is relatively recent. No longer marginalized and fighting for respectability, science-fictional works are now studied alongside more traditional art forms. Tracing the capacious genre's birth, evolution, and impact across nations, time periods, subgenres, and media, The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction offers an in-depth, comprehensive assessment of this robust area of scholarly inquiry and considers the future directions that will dictate the terms of the scholarly discourse. The Handbook begins with a focus on questions of genre, covering topics such as critical history, keywords, narrative, the fantastic, and fandom. A subsequent section on media engages with film, television, comics, architecture, music, video games, and more. The genre's role in the convergence of art and everyday life animates a third section, which addresses topics such as UFOs,

Author : Charul Palmer-Patel
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 042958136X
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Shape of Fantasy written by Charul Palmer-Patel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-23 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shape of Fantasy is an in-depth look at Heroic Epic Fantasy. It depicts structural and narrative patterns with models stemming from science and philosophy. Although Fantasy Fiction is generally defined by its impossibility, Fantasy Fiction not an illogical form. It is, in fact, governed by a sense of rules and structure, one that reflects our current understanding of space-time and cosmology. These models are an integral part of the structure of Heroic Epic Fantasy itself. Thus, this book introduces new ways of perceiving current productions of the Fantasy genre. In doing so, it also explores how Fantasy Fiction exhibits a conscious awareness of its own form.

Author : Matt Cardin
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1440842027
Total Pages : 1065 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Horror Literature through History [2 volumes] written by Matt Cardin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 1065 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set offers comprehensive coverage of horror literature that spans its deep history, dominant themes, significant works, and major authors, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice, as well as lesser-known horror writers. Many of today's horror story fans—who appreciate horror through movies, television, video games, graphic novels, and other forms—probably don't realize that horror literature is not only one of the most popular types of literature but one of the oldest. People have always been mesmerized by stories that speak to their deepest fears. Horror Literature through History shows 21st-century horror fans the literary sources of their favorite entertainment and the rich intrinsic value of horror literature in its own right. Through profiles of major authors, critical analyses of important works, and overview essays focused on horror during particular periods as well as on related issues such as religion, apocalypticism, social criticism, and gender, readers will discover the fascinating early roots and evolution of horror writings as well as the reciprocal influence of horror literature and horror cinema. This unique two-volume reference set provides wide coverage that is current and compelling to modern readers—who are of course also eager consumers of entertainment. In the first section, overview essays on horror during different historical periods situate works of horror literature within the social, cultural, historical, and intellectual currents of their respective eras, creating a seamless narrative of the genre's evolution from ancient times to the present. The second section demonstrates how otherwise unrelated works of horror have influenced each other, how horror subgenres have evolved, and how a broad range of topics within horror—such as ghosts, vampires, religion, and gender roles—have been handled across time. The set also provides alphabetically arranged reference entries on authors, works, and specialized topics that enable readers to zero in on information and concepts presented in the other sections.

Author : Ted Underwood
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022661283X
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Distant Horizons written by Ted Underwood and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as a traveler crossing a continent won’t sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can’t grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind Distant Horizons, which uses the scope of data newly available to us through digital libraries to tackle previously elusive questions about literature. Ted Underwood shows how digital archives and statistical tools, rather than reducing words to numbers (as is often feared), can deepen our understanding of issues that have always been central to humanistic inquiry. Without denying the usefulness of time-honored approaches like close reading, narratology, or genre studies, Underwood argues that we also need to read the larger arcs of literary change that have remained hidden from us by their sheer scale. Using both close and distant reading to trace the differentiation of genres, transformation of gender roles, and surprising persistence of aesthetic judgment, Underwood shows how digital methods can bring into focus the larger landscape of literary history and add to the beauty and complexity we value in literature.

Author : Peter Boxall
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110863687X
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018 written by Peter Boxall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1980 to the present, huge transformations have occurred in every area of British cultural life. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ushered in a new neoliberal era in politics and economics that dramatically reshaped the British landscape. Alongside this political shift, we have seen transformations to the public sphere caused by the arrival of the internet and of social media, and changes in the global balance of power brought about by 9/11, the emergence of China and India as superpowers, and latterly the British vote to leave the European Union. British fiction of the period is intimately interwoven with these historical shifts. This collection brings together some of the most penetrating critics of the contemporary, to explore the role that the British novel has had in shaping the cultural landscape of our time, at a moment, in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016, when the question of what it means to be British has become newly urgent.

Author : Christoph Reinfandt
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110369486
Total Pages : 613 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries written by Christoph Reinfandt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-06-12 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ̒The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genreʼ, ̒The Novel in the Economy’, ̒Genres’, ̒Gender’ (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ̒The Burden of Representationʼ (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.

Author : Joshua Miller
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108838278
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction written by Joshua Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the most exciting trends in 21st century US fiction's genres, themes, and concepts.

Author : John C. Tibbetts
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476627339
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub written by John C. Tibbetts and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horror novelist Peter Straub creates highly personalized fiction with an allusiveness and ambiguity that deny the genre's explicit nature. For him, the Gothic style is to be created and recreated in a changing world--Faustian pacts, buried secrets, haunted places, ghosts, vampires and succubi take on strange new shapes and effects. Stephen King describes Straub's style as "a synthesis of horror and beauty." Drawing on interviews with Straub and featuring an exclusive interview with King, this study explores the work of the author who has been called "a writer of rare wit and intelligence in a field beset with cynical potboilers" (Douglas E. Winter, Washington Post, October 14, 1984).

Author : Glyn Morgan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501350560
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imagining the Unimaginable written by Glyn Morgan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the Unimaginable examines popular fiction's treatment of the Holocaust in the dystopian and alternate history genres of speculative fiction, analyzing the effectiveness of the genre's major works as a lens through which to view the most prominent historical trauma of the 20th century. It surveys a range of British and American authors, from science fiction pulp to Pulitzer Prize winners, building on scholarship across disciplines, including Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and science fiction studies. The conventional discourse around the Holocaust is one of the unapproachable, unknowable, and the unimaginable. The Holocaust has been compared to an earthquake, another planet, another universe, a void. It has been said to be beyond language, or else have its own incomprehensible language, beyond art, and beyond thought. The 'othering' of the event has spurred the phenomenon of non-realist Holocaust literature, engaging with speculative fiction and its history of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the inhuman. This book examines the most common forms of nonmimetic Holocaust fiction, the dystopia and the alternate history, while firmly positioning these forms within a broader pattern of non-realist engagements with the Holocaust.