The premise of the present book is simple. Like the epic and the novel, science fiction is a literary form. By that we mean a historical narrative form, which is at the same time a narrative form of history—history understood, as in French or German, in the double meaning of story and history. The subject… Read More »
SAFE ABORTION / PAIN-FREE / SAME-DAY / CALL NOW In contemporary South Africa, these words may be found plastered on any public objects ranging from lamp posts to litter bins. Promotional flyers by traditional healers make similar claims alongside promises to bring back lost lovers, enhance penis length and more. The supposedly painless abortion is… Read More »
This book originated out of my desire to reclaim climate change fiction (cli-fi) from the view that it is primarily concerned with future disasters and written in modes that go beyond realism to encompass the horrors of the looming apocalypse. Brilliant though novels of this kind can be, they seemed to me to run the… Read More »
Chasing Freedom through Romantic Love in Popular and Literary Fiction In post-1990s India, romantic love is increasingly a fungible commodity. It is an emotion that is separable from the self and subject to a process of self-evaluation and rational judgment. It is evaluated because it must fulfill a function, that of confirming a revenue generating… Read More »
Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture documents a profound shift in the meaning of individual freedom in India. This change has occurred largely since the 1990s, when the Indian economy was liberalized. The idea of individual freedom, once capacious enough to include notions of political sovereignty, individual agency, and social and… Read More »
In this Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film we provide a concise introduction to how the interdisciplinary and intersectional endeavour of Age(ing) Studies has shaped and been shaped by literary and film studies in recent decades. We seek to explore how literary and filmic narratives have addressed, contributed to and shaped our understanding… Read More »
Guest post by Brett Ashley Kaplan Julie Mehretu’s multilayered, palimpsestic paintings insert memories of violence into politicized landscapes. There’s a work of unpacking that goes into experiencing these canvases as they swirl in and out of grids, colors competing with graffiti-esque spray paint, images conjured that fail to concretize. When confronted with her stunning canvases… Read More »
Androids, aliens, and ghosts: No longer solely the territory of science fiction, the Gothic, and horror, these creatures increasingly cross literary genres as humans renegotiate and rework our conceptualizations of humanity, animality, and life itself in response to ongoing challenges posed by technology, environmental crises, and alterity. Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts borrows from the strangeness, creativity, and freshness of these emerging and imaginary creatures in contemporary novels, comic book series, and children’s books to reconceptualize often intractable views of nonhuman animals. Because these liminal figures confront anthropocentrism, or human-centeredness, in ways that necessarily push against all forms of species dominance, the android, the alien, and the ghost are literary devices that help us to see nonhuman animals afresh and to fruitfully reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.
We’re celebrating the publication of Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century, in which John Limon traces the central theme of 21st-century United States fiction: the desire to escape at a time of inescapable globalization. This is an extract from the first chapter, Notes from Neverland.
