Category Archives: Contemporary Literature
Barbara Kingsolver’s World, Revised Edition
An excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver’s World, Revised Edition by Linda Wagner-Martin Demon Copperhead In recent interviews, Kingsolver has frequently introduced the theme that she loves her adopted territory of Appalachia (growing up in Kentucky put her near this region but not precisely in it). Once she married Stephen Hopp and eventually moved to his small … Read More »
Inside the New Directions in Religion and Literature series
Guest post by Emma Mason It is nearly twenty-five years since Mark and I met at the inaugural conference of the British Association of Victorian Studies in 2000. Both of us had recently completed our PhDs and, working as we did on religion and literature, experienced literary studies as not always hospitable towards Christian scholarship.… Read More »
Alice Munro’s Late Style: ‘Writing is the Final Thing’
In the early 1970s I was lucky enough to run across the writing of Alice Munro—it grabbed me from the opening line of the first story I ever read (“Material” [1973]: “I don’t keep up with Hugo’s writing”) and I haven’t waivered since. Just then I was about to begin graduate school and Munro’s “Material”… Read More »
Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction
This interdisciplinary study traces the imaginative and narrative projections of Victorian women’s dress from the nineteenth century to the present day. The first full-length study to examine the remediation of Victorian clothes in the neo-Victorian novel, it investigates and attends to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian dress in the contemporary cultural… Read More »
The Dark Matter of Children’s Fantastika Literature: Speculative Entanglements
What is Fantastika? Fantastika is a word to describe fiction that deals in fantastical and speculative imaginings of all kinds. As an umbrella term used by critics and writers, Fantastika incorporates children’s and young adult literatures, as well as a range of genres and subgenres that cluster, like interconnected constellations, around the triple suns of… Read More »
On the Idea of a Handbook to the Works of J. M. Coetzee: ‘Preposterous [?]’
Guest post by Andrew van der Vlies and Lucy Valerie Graham If assembling a collection purporting to be a readers’ companion to the work of any author is a difficult undertaking – will it be up to date on publication? for how long afterwards? how comprehensive can one reasonably suggest the contents will be? – initiating… Read More »
Science Fiction and Narrative Form
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 »
Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction: Transforming Reproductive Agency
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 »
Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change
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 »