Paul Alkon concentrates on several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction: Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Time Machine. The author sets these works in the context of their time and place of origin, and discusses the genre in general and its relation to other kinds of literature.
Paul Alkon concentrates on several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction: Frankenstein, Twenty Tho...
For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance "Epigone," which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age.
Paul Alkon's...
For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then i...
"Defoe and Fictional Time "shows Defoe's relevance to issues now central to criticism of the novel; relationships between narrative time and clock time, the influence of time concepts shared by writers and their audience, and above all the questions of how fiction shapes the phenomenal time of reading. Paul K. Alkon offers first a study of time in Defoe's fiction, with glances at Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne; and second a theoretical discussion of time in fiction. Arguing that eighteenth-century views of history account for the strange chronologies in "Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack,...
"Defoe and Fictional Time "shows Defoe's relevance to issues now central to criticism of the novel; relationships between narrative time and clock tim...
