Storyworlds constitute more than just the set dressing for events. They encompass the context, the time frame, the rules of the game and the interlocking systems which shape and constrain those who live in that world and what they can do. When a world has been built effectively, it can be extraordinarily powerful.
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 »
An excerpt from Mask by Sharrona Pearl Masks enable. They provide literal and metaphorical cover for that which we wish to ignore, obscure, hide from ourselves. In this way they enable and even create our own hypocrisies in a variety of contexts: for football players, whose masks simultaneously protect and endanger; for women’s faces and… Read More »
Guest post by Hsuan L. Hsu, author of Air Conditioning Because they were available long before artificial cooling, heating technologies are at the center of many early Western writings that reflect the cultural underpinnings of thermal comfort and air conditioning. Among the most eloquent examples of ambient temperature as a precondition for thought is the… Read More »
Much of The A-Z of Jane Austen pays attention to what you might call the ‘surface’ of Austen’s writings – to activities such as dance or matchmaking, for example, whose centrality in her storylines might seem to go without saying. In so doing I’m making the case that readings of Austen don’t necessarily have to… Read More »
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.
