Science Fiction and the Historical Novel

Days of Future Pasts

AvIan P. MacDonald,Kate Polak

Inbunden, Engelska, 2024

Del 83 i serien Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies

2 333 kr

Beställningsvara. Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar. Fri frakt över 249 kr.

Beskrivning

If you woke to realize that you could rewrite your yesterday without knowing the kind of tomorrow it would grant you, would you do it? Are the authors of our destiny working with an outline or spit-balling confusing plotlines? Since the past changes possible futures, to what alighting butterfly should we pay the most heed? This book explores the liminal space between speculative fiction and the historical novel. Staged as a transnational, multicultural conversation, it takes up a call originally made by Fredric Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future wherein he describes that flashpoint between speculative and historical genres as "the symptom of a mutation in our relationship to historical time itself." Drawing together postcolonial, feminist, cultural, Indigenous, and cognitive approaches, Science Fiction and the Historical Novel asks what the past can offer a future-oriented world, and how the future can be imagined in relation to a past that seeks narratives of inevitability rather than possibility. Engaged with the idea of the past as a model for the future, authors in this volume probe the extent to which historical scripts delimit possibilities, and how authors engaged with the practice of alternative pasts rewrite potentialities in the present.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2024-10-01
Mått:163 x 239 x undefined mm
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies
Antal sidor:288
Förlag:Liverpool University Press
ISBN:9781835538395

Utforska kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur

Mer om författaren

Ian P. MacDonald is Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University where he researches science fiction, utopia, and African speculative narratives. Kate Polak is Instructor of English and a research associate at Florida Atlantic University, where she continues to study the old lore in her work as a swamp witch.

Recensioner i media

"This well-conceived collection juxtaposes the historical novel and science fiction to ask questions about the genre of history itself. Introduced by a concise, lucid account of the controversies about history swirling around the contemporary culture wars, the wide variety of recent sf covered in the essays amply displays the formal and thematic possibilities of the genre." Professor John Rieder, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Innehållsförteckning

IntroductionIan P. MacDonald and Kate PolakThe Future of the Historical Novel: Freedom and Salvation in Jo Walton’s LentPhillip WegnerBad China and Good Chinese Fiction: What We Don’t Understand in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body TrilogyCao Xuenan"I Go Backward, Look Forward, As the Porcupine Does": History, Indigenous Futurity and Decolonizing the Culture Concept in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming HomeEric AronoffRealist Apocalypse and Pessimistic Aesthetics in Animal’s People and The God of Small ThingsRebecca OhBack to Gilead’s Future: (Re)visions of Critical Dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The TestamentsLuke Rodewald‘A Poor Sort of Memory’: Jamais Vu and the Historian as Archive in Tade Thompson’s Wormwood TrilogyIan MacDonaldConstructing a Post-Neoliberal Consciousness: The 1980s and/as Now in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like MeJackson AyresLiterary Activism, Fresh Registers and Ecocritical Debates in Immaculate Innocent Acan’s Short StoriesEdgar NabutanyiSettler Colonialism, Resource Extraction, and the Future of Canada: Reading Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow ThievesShannon LodoenImagining Past, Present, and Future: Totalization and the Face-to-Face Encounter in Carmen Boullosa’s Heavens on EarthPreston Waltrip"The Shape of Power is Always the Same”: The Power as Exposure TherapyKate PolakReimagining Contagion in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Bird Is Gone: A Monograph ManifestoGabriella FriedmanCritical AfterwordGerry Canavan