Libros a Descargar Gratis

Los últimos días de Nueva París

Autor: China Miéville

Número de Páginas: 158

Un thriller bélico sobre un cataclismo surrealista que nunca existió. Una novela sobre cómo sobrevivir en una ciudad imposible. China Miéville hace que se crucen hechos y personajes reales, reconfigurando la historia y el arte en algo completamente nuevo. Marsella, 1941. En el caos de la guerra, el ingeniero estadounidense Jack Parsons tropieza con un grupo clandestino antinazi, incluido el teórico surrealista André Breton. En los extraños juegos de los diplomáticos disidentes, los revolucionarios exiliados y los artistas de vanguardia, Parsons encuentra y canaliza la esperanza. Pero lo que involuntariamente desencadena es el poder de los sueños y las pesadillas, cambiando la guerra y el mundo para siempre. Año 1950. Thibaut, un luchador surrealista solitario, camina por una nueva y alucinógena París, donde los nazis y la Resistencia están atrapados en un conflicto interminable y las calles son acechadas por imágenes y textos que parecen cobrar vida con las fuerzas del Infierno. Para escapar de la ciudad, debe unirse a Sam, un fotógrafo estadounidense, y hacer causa común con una poderosa y enigmática figura... Pero Sam está siendo cazado. Y surgirán nuevos...

Kraken

Autor: China Miéville

Número de Páginas: 519

En lo más remoto del ala de investigación del museo de Historia Natural hay un preciado espécimen, algo único e insólito: un calamar gigante que se conserva en perfecto estado. Pero ¿qué consecuencias acarreará la repentina e inverosímil desaparición del animal? Para el conservador del museo, Billy Harrow, será el primer paso de un salto sin red hacia un Londres de cultos enfrentados, magia surrealista, apóstatas y asesinos. La criatura que ha estado custodiando podría ser algo más que una rareza biológica: hay quien asegura que se trata de un dios. Un dios que algunos esperan que acabe con el mundo.

El mar de hierro

Autor: China Miéville

Número de Páginas: 411

Sube a bordo del Medos y embárcate en una aventura sin igual. Sham viaja en el Medos, un tren que recorre los infinitos raíles que conforman el Mar de Hierro, en el que habitan numerosas criaturas monstruosas y se esconden terribles peligros. En los escombros de un tren descarrilado, Sham encuentra unas fotos que lo pondrán sobre la pista de algo que, hasta entonces, creía imposible. Pronto piratas, tripulaciones de trenes, monstruos y cazatesoros irán tras él y sus amigos, y la vida en el Mar de Hierro cambiará para siempre.

La estación de la calle Perdido (Bas-Lag 1)

Autor: China Miéville

Número de Páginas: 768

La estación de la calle Perdido es el aclamado thriller fantástico con que China Miéville dio inicio a su mítica trilogía «Bas-Lag», a la que le seguirán La cicatriz y El Consejo de Hierro. La metrópoli de Nueva Crobuzon se extiende en el centro de su desconcertante mundo. Los seres humanos, los mutantes y las razas arcanas se apiñan en la penumbra, bajo sus chimeneas; los ríos fluyen, viscosos, y las fábricas y las fundiciones martillan la noche. Durante más de mil años, el Parlamente y su brutal milicia han gobernado a una amplia gama de obreros, artistas, espías, magos, adictos y prostitutas. Ahora, al llegar un extraño con los bolsillos llenos y una demanda inalcanzable, algo impensable se libera. De pronto, la ciudad se ve atrapada por el terror, y el destino de millones de personas depende de un grupo de marginados que huyen de los legisladores y los delincuentes. El paisaje urbano se convierte en un campo de caza, las batallas se libran en las sombras de edificios extraños... y ya es tarde para escapar. Galardonado con el Premio Arthur C. Clarke de 2001 y el Ignotus de 2002. Con esta trilogía, Miéville empezó a fascinar a escritores, medios y lectores de ...

Embassytown

Autor: China Miéville

Número de Páginas: 416

Una de las novelas más icónicas de China Miéville, galardonada con el premio Locus a la mejor novela de ciencia ficción. En un original universo futurista se entremezclan intriga política, una sugerente historia personal y un estremecedor conflicto social que amenaza con desatar una guerra apocalíptica entre humanos y extraterrestres. En medio de la capital de un planeta ubicado en la más remota periferia del universo, se erige la Ciudad Embajada, un enclave diplomático asentado por colonos humanos. Aquí los humanos no son la única forma de vida inteligente. Avice, una de los colonos, goza de un raro y especial vínculo con los seres autóctonos, los enigmáticos Anfitriones... Aunque no puede hablar con ellos. Los únicos humanos que han dominado su peculiar Idioma son un pequeño cuadro de Embajadores. De repente el frágil equilibrio en que conviven humanos y extraterrestres se verá trastornado por la llegada de un nuevo Embajador. En cuanto los Anfitriones escuchen su insólito discurso, los cambios no se harán esperar. Y al avecinarse un cataclismo de proporciones incalculables, Avice se dará cuenta de que el único camino de salvación es que ella intente lo...

Representations of Political Resistance and Emancipation in Science Fiction

Autor: Judith Grant , Sean Parson

Número de Páginas: 271

In a world in which political opportunity and liberation seem far away, the genre of science fiction grows in cultural importance and popularity. The contributors to this collection are political and social theorists from a range of disciplines who use science fiction as inspiration for new theories and examples of speculative politics. In dystopian governments, they find locations and forms of resistance. Representations of Political Resistance and Emancipation in Science Fiction explores a range of political and social theoretical concerns for the twenty-first century. Contributors analyze themes of post-humanism, resistance, agency, political community making, and ethics and politics during the Anthropocene.

International Law Theories

Autor: Andrea Bianchi

Número de Páginas: 378

Two fish are swimming in a pond. 'Do you know what?' the fish asks his friend. 'No, tell me.' 'I was talking to a frog the other day. And he told me that we are surrounded by water!' His friend looks at him with great scepticism: 'Water? Whats that? Show me some water!' International lawyers often find themselves focused on the practice of the law rather than the underlying theories. This book is an attempt to stir up 'the water' that international lawyers swim in. It analyses a range of theoretical approaches to international law and invites readers to engage with different ways of legal thinking in order to familiarize themselves with the water all around us, of which we hardly have any perception. The main aim of this book is to provide interested scholars, practitioners, and students of international law and other disciplines with an introduction to various international legal theories, their genealogies, and possible critiques. By providing an analytical approach to international legal theory, the book encourages readers to enhance their sensitivity to these different approaches and to consider how the presuppositions behind each theory affect analysis, research, and practice ...

La chute de Londres

Autor: China Miéville

Número de Páginas: 75

Le livre des indignés londoniens. China Mieville nous livre un pamphlet sur l'état de la capitale anglaise à l'heure actuelle. À l'encontre de l'idéalisme des discours politiques, il oppose la vision d'un Londres populaire et de ses habitants, stigmatise l'oppression et l'indignité tout en déchiffrant les sentiments subversifs qui se répandent dans la société. C'est une promenade dans le Londres des manifestations contre l'austérité, du village de tentes de Saint Paul, des laveries automatiques, des squats et des quartiers oubliés. Ce sont aussi des interrogations sur l'accroissement sans fin des inégalités, le racisme, l'exploration du fossé des générations et du rêve d'une alternative sociale et politique. C'est l'effondrement d'un Londres lisse et consensuel. Pour China Mieville les bouleversements ont commencé, la chute est en marche. INÉDIT

Popular Fiction and Spatiality

Autor: Lisa Fletcher

Número de Páginas: 230

This volume moves the debate about literature and geography in a new direction by showing the significance of spatial settings in the enormous and complex field of popular fiction. Approaching popular genres as complicated systems of meaning, the collected essays model key theoretical and critical approaches for interrogating the meaning of space and place across diverse genres, including crime, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, and romance. Including topics such as classic English ghost stories, blockbuster Antarctic thrillers, prize-winning Montreal crime fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and China Miéville’s Bas-Lag, among others, this book brings together analyses of the real-and-imagined settings of some of the most widely read authors and texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how they have an immeasurable impact on our spatial awareness and imagination.

Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction

Autor: Anita Tarr , Donna R. White

Número de Páginas: 327

Contributions by Torsten Caeners, Phoebe Chen, Mathieu Donner, Shannon Hervey, Angela S. Insenga, Patricia Kennon, Maryna Matlock, Ferne Merrylees, Lars Schmeink, Anita Tarr, Tony M. Vinci, and Donna R. White For centuries, humanism has provided a paradigm for what it means to be human: a rational, unique, unified, universal, autonomous being. Recently, however, a new philosophical approach, posthumanism, has questioned these assumptions, asserting that being human is not a fixed state but one always dynamic and evolving. Restrictive boundaries are no longer in play, and we do not define who we are by delineating what we are not (animal, machine, monster). There is no one aspect that makes a being human—self-awareness, emotion, artistic expression, or problem-solving—since human characteristics reside in other species along with shared DNA. Instead, posthumanism looks at the ways our bodies, intelligence, and behavior connect and interact with the environment, technology, and other species. In Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, editors Anita Tarr and Donna R. White collect twelve essays that explore this new discipline's relevance in...

At the Mountains of Madness

Autor: H.p. Lovecraft

Número de Páginas: 221

Introduction by China Miéville Long acknowledged as a master of nightmarish visions, H. P. Lovecraft established the genuineness and dignity of his own pioneering fiction in 1931 with his quintessential work of supernatural horror, At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition’s uncanny discoveries–and their encounter with untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization–is a milestone of macabre literature. This exclusive new edition, presents Lovecraft’s masterpiece in fully restored form, and includes his acclaimed scholarly essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” This is essential reading for every devotee of classic terror.

Fairy Tales of London

Autor: Hadas Elber-aviram

Número de Páginas: 311

Finalist for the 2022 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies From the time of Charles Dickens, the imaginative power of the city of London has frequently inspired writers to their most creative flights of fantasy. Charting a new history of London fantasy writing from the Victorian era to the 21st century, Fairy Tales of London explores a powerful tradition of urban fantasy distinct from the rural tales of writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. Hadas Elber-Aviram traces this urban tradition from Dickens, through the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, the anti-fantasies of George Orwell and Mervyn Peake to contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers such as Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville.

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction

Autor: Jonathan Elmore

Número de Páginas: 179

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction is one of the first works to focus specifically on fiction’s engagements with human driven extinction. Drawing together a diverse group of scholars and approaches, this volume pairs established voices in the field with emerging scholars and traditionally recognized climate fiction ('cli-fi') with texts and media typically not associated with Anthropocene fictions. The result is a volume that both engages with and furthers existing work on Anthropocene fiction as well as laying groundwork for the budding subfield of extinction fiction. This volume takes up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies. In various and disparate ways, each chapter engages with the stories we tell about extinction, about the extinction of animal and plant life, and about the extinction of human life itself. Answering the call to action of extinction studies, these chapters explore what kinds of humanity caused this event and what kinds may live through it; what cultural assumptions and values led to this event and which ones could lead out of it; what relationships between human life and this planet allowed the sixth mass extinction...

Diffractive Reading

Autor: Kai Merten

Número de Páginas: 353

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different ‘agential cuts’ in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material;...

Vintage Tomorrows

Autor: James Carrott , Brian Johnson

Número de Páginas: 423

Can you imagine what today’s technology would have looked like in the Victorian Era? That’s the world Steampunk envisions: a mad-inventor collection of 21st Century-inspired contraptions powered by stream and driven by gears. It’s more than just a whimsical idea. In the past few years, the Steampunk genre has captivated makers, hackers, artists, designers, writers, and others throughout the world. In this fascinating book, futurist Brian David Johnson and cultural historian James Carrott offer insights into what Steampunk’s alternative history says about our own world and its technological future. Interviews with experts such as William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, James Gleick, and Margaret Atwood explore how this vision of stylish craftsmen making fantastic and beautiful hand-tooled gadgets has become a cultural movement—and perhaps an important countercultural moment. Steampunk is everywhere—as gadget prototypes at Maker Faire, novels and comic books, paintings and photography, sculptures, fashion design, and music. Discover how this elaborate view of a future that never existed can help us look forward.

The Crisis of Capitalism in the Contemporary Novel

Autor: Andrew Rowcroft

Número de Páginas: 206

This book explores the role of radical ideas in contemporary fiction by nine critically acclaimed authors--Jonathan Lethem, Dana Spiotta, China Mieville, Thomas Pynchon, Rachel Kushner, Teddy Wayne, Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson, and Kim Stanley Robinson. All of them share interests in the politics of the left, the problems of protracted economic crisis, and the potentiality of post-capitalist ideas. Novels by these authors, this book argues, are defined by an imperative to confront current anxieties in left-thought, while, at the same time, evincing a nuanced degree of self-consciousness about the legacy of political radicalisms, the costs they accrue, and where they have led.

Hay otros mundos pero están en Fantascy

Autor: Varios Autores

Número de Páginas: 42

Épicos, míticos, mágicos, distópicos, apocalípticos... Hay otros mundos, pero están en Fantascy. La literatura fantástica se ha vuelto imprescindible. Como género de entretenimiento, como fenómeno popular, pero también como alternativa para una realidad en revisión. Soñamos otros pasados, cuestionamos el presente, reinventamos el futuro. Exploramos universos, seguimos a héroes ignotos, descubrimos objetos, hábitos y criaturas. Y todo ello, porque está en nuestra naturaleza imaginar. Porque sabemos que hay otras formas de existir. Porque no podemos aceptar una lectura única del mundo. El sello Fantascy que publica a autores de la talla de Terry Pratchett, Trudi Canavan, Brent Weeks, China Miéville o Paolo Bacigalupi y apuesta por voces nacionales como Concepción Perea o Jesús Cañadas, pretende con este ebook gratuito ofrecer contenido e información extras como entrevistas a autores, imágenes inéditas, links a booktrailers, entre otras cosas, para promover la fantasía, la ciencia ficción y el terror de corte clásico. Te animamos a que lo descargues y disfrutes de la magia, la leyenda y los universos paralelos. Reseñas: «La literatura fantástica pasa por...

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature

Autor: Richard Bradford , Madelena Gonzalez , Stephen Butler , James Ward , Kevin De Ornellas

Número de Páginas: 911

THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume...

Representing Middle-earth

Autor: Robert T. Tally Jr.

Número de Páginas: 199

In such classic works as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien depicts a vast, complex world-system. Tolkien's Middle-earth comes to life with intensely detailed historical, geographical, and multicultural content, which is presented through different poetic forms that combine elements of epic, romance, myth, history, and the modern novel. This book analyzes Tolkien's project, paying attention to narrative form and its relation to social contexts, while also exploring his broader philosophical conception of history and the role of individual and collective subjects within it. Tolkien's published and posthumous writings, the film adaptations, and recent scholarship are all examined to provide an enlarged and refined critical perspective of these major works. Drawing upon Marxist literary theory and criticism, Robert T. Tally Jr. calls into question traditional views of race, class, morality, escapism, and fantasy more generally. Through close readings mixed with theoretical speculation, Representing Middle-earth allows readers see Tolkien's world, as well as our own, in a new light.

Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Autor: Christoph Reinfandt

Número de Páginas: 614

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.

Concepts for International Law

Autor: Jean D’aspremont , Sahib Singh

Número de Páginas: 957

Concepts shape how we understand and participate in international legal affairs. They are an important site for order, struggle and change. This comprehensive and authoritative volume introduces a large number of concepts that have shaped, at various points in history, international legal practice and thought; intimates at how the many projects of international law have grappled with, and influenced, the world through certain concepts; and introduces new concepts into the discipline.

Días de magia, noches de guerra

Autor: Clive Barker

Número de Páginas: 499

Los sueños pueden convertirse en pesadillas. Candy está en el archipiélago de Abarat, huyendo de isla en isla para que no la atrapen los asesinos enviados por Carrion, el Señor de la Medianoche, que conspira para que caiga sobre Abarat la oscuridad más absoluta. Por suerte, Candy ha comenzado a desarrollar asombrosos poderes mágicos y, junto a sus compañeros, la joven emprende una aventura donde tendrá que tomar decisiones que alterarán la vida de todos los que la rodean, justo cuando la batalla entre luz y oscuridad está a punto de comenzar. "Te mantiene enganchado a sus páginas con mucha facilidad." The New York Times Magazine "Una segunda entrega impresionante que revela su verdadera identidad en el asombroso clímax de la novela." Jennifer Hubert

Here Be Dragons

Autor: Stefan Ekman

Número de Páginas: 297

First in-depth study of the use of landscape in fantasy literature

Alterity and Capitalism in Speculative Fiction

Autor: Tomás Vergara

Número de Páginas: 210

Speculative fiction has been traditionally studied in Marxist literary criticism, following Darko Suvin’s paradigmatic model of science fiction, according to a hierarchical division of its multiple subgenres in terms of their assumed inherent political value. By drawing on an alternative genealogy of Marxist criticism, this book presents a non-hierarchical understanding of the estrangement connecting all varieties of speculative fiction, outlining the political potential shared across the spectrum of speculative fiction, along with the specific narrative strategies by which it critically engages with its historical context of production. This study’s main point of contention is that speculative fiction performs an estrangement effect on historical reality that can potentially render visible the role of fantasies in the organisation of capitalist social practice. This narrative effect enables an estranged perspective by which the novel interprets and conceptualises historical reality in a totalising manner.

Twenty-First-Century Popular Fiction

Autor: Bernice M. Murphy

Número de Páginas: 257

This groundbreaking collection provides students with a timely and accessible overview of current trends within contemporary popular fiction.

Notes on Vermin

Autor: Caroline Hovanec

Número de Páginas: 205

Vermin—rats, cockroaches, pigeons, mosquitoes, and other pests—are, to most people, objects of disgust. And vermin metaphors, likening human beings to these loathed creatures, appear in the ugliest forms of political rhetoric. Indeed, vermin imagery has often been used to denigrate poor, foreign, or racialized people. Yet many writers have reclaimed vermin, giving new meaning to creeping rodents, swarming insects, and wriggling worms. Notes on Vermin is an atlas of the literary vermin that appear in modern and contemporary literature, from Franz Kafka’s gigantic insect to Richard Wright’s city rats to Namwali Serpell’s storytelling mosquitoes. As parasites, trespassers, and collectives, vermin animals prove useful to writers who seek to represent life in the margins of power. Drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural studies, eco-Marxism, and biopolitics, this book explores four uses for literary vermin: as figures for the repressed thought, the uncommitted fugitive, the freeloading parasite, and the surplus life. In a series of short, accessible, interlinked essays, Notes on Vermin explores what animal pests can show us about our cultures, our environments, and ourselves.

The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human

Autor: Fabienne Collignon

Número de Páginas: 207

The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human defines, conceptualizes, and evaluates the insectile—pertaining to an entomological fascination—in relation to subject formation. The book is driven by a central dynamic between form and formlessness, further staging an investigation of the phenomenon of fascination using Lacanian psychoanalysis, suggesting that the psychodrama of subject formation plays itself out entomologically. The book’s engagement with the insectile—its enactments, cultural dreamwork, fantasy transformations—‘in-forming’ the so-called human subject undertakes a broader deconstruction of said subject and demonstrates the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation. It tracks the insectile across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film. The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human will be of interest for scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates in film studies, visual culture, popular culture, cultural and literary studies, comparative literature, and critical theory, offering the...

Out of Sync & Out of Work

Autor: Joel Burges

Número de Páginas: 267

Out of Sync & Out of Work explores the representation of obsolescence, particularly of labor, in film and literature during a historical moment in which automation has intensified in capitalist economies. Joel Burges analyzes texts such as The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wreck-It Ralph, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Iron Council, and examines their “means” of production. Those means include a range of subjects and narrative techniques, including the “residual means” of including classic film stills in a text, the “obstinate means” of depicting machine breaking, the “dated means” of employing the largely defunct technique of stop-motion animation, and the “obsolete” means of celebrating a labor strike. In every case, the novels and films that Burges scrutinizes call on these means to activate the reader’s/viewer’s awareness of historical time. Out of Sync & Out of Work advances its readers’ grasp of the complexities of historical time in contemporary culture, moving the study of temporality forward in film and media studies, literary studies, critical theory, and cultural critique.

New Directions in Popular Fiction

Autor: Ken Gelder

Número de Páginas: 473

This book brings together new contributions in Popular Fiction Studies, giving us a vivid sense of new directions in analysis and focus. It looks into the histories of popular genres such as the amatory novel, imperial romance, the western, Australian detective fiction, Whitechapel Gothic novels, the British spy thriller, Japanese mysteries, the 'new weird', fantasy, girl hero action novels and Quebecois science fiction. It also examines the production, reproduction and distribution of popular fiction as it carves out space for itself in transnational marketplaces and across different media entertainment systems; and it discusses the careers of popular authors and the various investments in popular fiction by readers and fans. This book will be indispensable for anyone with a serious interest in this prolific but highly distinctive literary field.

A Phenomenology of the Alien

Autor: Aaron B. Daniels

Número de Páginas: 178

A Phenomenology of the Alien: Encounters with the Weird and Inscrutable Other considers both literal and figurative experiences of the alien from a psychological, psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective. Throughout the book, the authors wrestle with the unexplained, ineffable, unspeakable, sublime, uncanny, abject and Miéville’s abcanny. This collection provides phenomenologies of encounters with the inscrutably alien from lights in the sky, dark corners of Weird fictional landscapes, architecture, technology, or the clinical symptom. The chapters examine fictional and nonfictional encounters with what exceeds the capacity to “make sense,” taking a new approach to the topic of alterity and inviting the reader to examine how these encounters reflect our contemporary condition culturally, individually, clinically, theologically and philosophically. Bridging cultural, psychoanalytic, literary, clinical, media, and religious studies, the novel approaches in this volume will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

A lomos de dragones

Autor: Isabel Clúa

Número de Páginas: 95

"Como cualquier otro género, la fantasía plantea un buen número de desafíos teóricos que tienen que ver con la noción misma de género literario. Aunque la clasificación de especies literarias tiene una tradición que se remonta a los orígenes de la reflexión sobre la literatura, la definición genérica resulta un proceso bastante más complejo que reconocer una serie de rasgos formales y temáticos que una serie de textos comparten y en virtud de la cual se agrupan de manera estable. La complejidad de este proceso tiene que ver con dos asuntos de índole diversa. Por un lado, como señala Derrida en su clásico "La ley del género" ("La loi du genre", 1986), delimitar un género, cualquier género, implica una lógica de pureza e impureza que es totalmente tautológica: se necesita un afuera, una serie de textos genéricamente impuros, para poder sostener la pureza teórica del género; de ahí que el autor replantee la relación entre texto/género y proponga más que la pertenencia de un texto a un género, la participación del texto en ciertos modelos genéricos. La idea de participación es también útil si nos desplazamos a un ámbito más pragmático: tal y como ...

Displaced

Autor: Kate Rose

Número de Páginas: 260

Through specific and rigorous analysis of contemporary literary texts, this book shows how writers from inside affected communities portray indigeneity, displacement, and trauma. In a world of increasing global inequality, this study aims to demonstrate how literature, and the study of it, can effect positive social change, notably in the face of global environmental, economic, and social injustice. This collection brings together a diverse and compelling array of voices from academics leading their fields around the world, to pioneer a new approach to literary analysis anchored in engagement with our changing world.

Spatialities of Speculative Fiction

Autor: Gwilym Lucas Eades

Número de Páginas: 203

This book examines science fiction, fantasy and horror novels utilizing a conceptual toolkit of the ten duties of speculative fiction. Building on previous work in the discipline of geography it will demonstrate the value of speculation in the visualisation of Anthropocene futures. The book presents insights into how novels produce specifically geographical knowledge about the world - spatialities - and how they use both literal maps and figurative counter-mappings to comment upon and shape futures. This book is about much more than science fiction. It covers areas of literature and para-literature associated with the "fantastic" and as such, looks also at works of fantasy and horror. The areas of overlap between these three categories of fantastic literature are posited as the most productive in the terms by which this book navigates, namely, spatiality. The book will explore, through the critical examination of a selection of key works of speculative fiction, how science-fictional and fantastic narratives are spatialized through both conceptual and literal mappings. This book is intended for both an academic and practitioner and for people interested in both producing scholarly...

Contesting Religious Identities

Autor: Bob E.j.h. Becking , Anna-marie J.a.c.m. Korte , Lucien Van Liere

Número de Páginas: 315

Religion is a hot topic on the public stages of ‘secular’ societies, not in its individualized liberal or orthodox form, but rather as a public statement, challenging the divide between the secular neutral space and the religious. In this new challenging modus, religion raises questions about identity, power, rationality, subjectivity, law and safety, but above all: religion questions, contests and even blurs the borders between the public and the private. These phenomena urge to rethink what are often considered to be clear differences between religions, between the public and the private and between the religious and the secular. In this volume scholars from a range of different disciplines map the different aspects of the dynamics of changing, contesting and contested religious identities.

Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction

Autor: Jason Haslam

Número de Páginas: 245

This book focuses on the interplay of gender, race, and their representation in American science fiction, from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first, and across a number of forms including literature and film. Haslam explores the reasons why SF provides such a rich medium for both the preservation of and challenges to dominant mythologies of gender and race. Defining SF linguistically and culturally, the study argues that this mode is not only able to illuminate the cultural and social histories of gender and race, but so too can it intervene in those histories, and highlight the ruptures present within them. The volume moves between material history and the linguistic nature of SF fantasies, from the specifics of race and gender at different points in American history to larger analyses of the socio-cultural functions of such identity categories. SF has already become central to discussions of humanity in the global capitalist age, and is increasingly the focus of feminist and critical race studies; in combining these earlier approaches, this book goes further, to demonstrate why SF must become central to our discussions of identity writ large, of the possibilities...

New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction

Autor: Donald M. Hassler , Clyde Wilcox

Número de Páginas: 384

Surveying the vast expanse of politically-charged science fiction, this book posits that the defining dilemma for these tales rests in whether identity and meaning germinate from progressive linear changes or progress, or from a continuous return to primitive realities of war, death and the competition for survival.

Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture

Número de Páginas: 257

Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture opens a dialogue between the literary and filmic works produced in Central Europe and in the Anglophone world. It relies on the concept of translocality to explore this corpus, offering new readings of contemporary Hungarian films as well as urban fiction and poetry in English. Calling attention to the role of affect in imagining city space, the volume investigates György Pálfi’s Taxidermia, Béla Tarr’s Family Nest, Teju Cole’s Open City, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, and Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights, among many other urban narratives. Contributors examine both widely explored emotions and under-researched affects, such as shame, fascination, and the role of withdrawal in contemporary literature and culture. Contributors: Tamás Bényei, Imola Bülgözdi, Fanni Feldmann, Zsolt Győri, Ágnes Györke, Brigitta Hudácskó, György Kalmár, Anna Kérchy, Márta Kőrösi, Jennifer Leetsch, Katalin Pálinkás, Miklós Takács, Pieter Vermeulen.

Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction

Autor: Tereza Dedinová , Weronika Laszkiewicz , Sylwia Borowska-szerszun

Número de Páginas: 277

In order to demonstrate that speculative fiction provides a valuable contribution to the discussion about the challenges of the Anthropocene, Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction investigates a range of novels whose subject matter pertains to various aspects of the Anthropocene. These include the destruction and protection of the natural environment, the relationship between human and non-human inhabitants of the planet, the role of myth in the shaping of and combat against the Anthropocene, the political dimensions of the Anthropocene, the ensuing threat of the Apocalypse, and the role of post-apocalyptic narratives. To explore these topics our authors examine the works of Patricia Briggs, M.R. Carey, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Stephenie Meyer, China Miéville, James Patterson, Maggie Stiefvater, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Scott Westfield. Their essays demonstrate that speculative fiction, given its ability to pursue scenarios of alternative history and present familiar things in an unfamiliar way, can alter the readers’ perception of their duties and responsibilities towards their communities and the world, so that the threat of human-wrought...

Those Outside

Autor: George Aichele , Richard G. Walsh

Número de Páginas: 236

Uses film and literature to engage the biblical texts and demonstrates the ways that the boundaries of canons are artificial and unhelpful. >

Global Dystopias

Autor: Junot Diaz

Número de Páginas: 209

Stories, essays, and interviews explore dystopias that may offer lessons for the present. As the recent success of Margaret Atwood's novel-turned-television hit Handmaid's Tale shows us, dystopia is more than minatory fantasy; it offers a critical lens upon the present. “It is not only a kind of vocabulary and idiom,” says bestselling author and volume editor Junot Diaz. “It is a useful arena in which to begin to think about who we are becoming.” Bringing together some of the most prominent writers of science fiction and introducing fresh talent, this collection of stories, essays, and interviews explores global dystopias in apocalyptic landscapes and tech futures, in robot sentience and forever war. Global Dystopias engages the familiar horrors of George Orwell's 1984 alongside new work by China Miéville, Tananarive Due, and Maria Dahvana Headley. In “Don't Press Charges, and I Won't Sue,” award-winning writer Charlie Jane Anders uses popularized stigmas toward transgender people to create a not-so-distant future in which conversion therapy is not only normalized, but funded by the government. Henry Farrell surveys the work of dystopian forebear Philip K. Dick and...