Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Science Fiction & Fantasy

Visions of post-apocalyptic worlds have proved to be irresistible for many 21st-century writers, from literary novelists to fantasy and young adult writers. Exploring a wide range of texts, from the works of Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Perrotta and Emily St. John Mandel to young adult novels such as Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games series, this is the first critical introduction to contemporary apocalyptic fiction.

Exploring the cultural and political contexts of these writings and their echoes in popular media, Apocalyptic Fiction also examines how...

Law brings certainty to life. Its production of and reliance upon rational text as the predominant way of knowing about, and thus judicially managing, the world enables law to give practical and certain answers to difficult and complex moral, judicial and philosophical questions. But law s conscious certainty involves the denial of alternative ways of knowing, and a repression of the aesthetic and the visual within dominant forms of legal knowledge. Tapping into the recent turn towards literary, cultural and visual concerns in legal studies, this book examines the critical value that...

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the storyworlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing, and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of transmedia storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field...

Since it first aired in 2011, Game of Thrones galloped up the ratings to become the most watched show in HBO's history. It is no secret that creator George R.R. Martin was inspired by late 15^th century Europe when writing A Song of Ice and Fire, the sprawling saga on which the show is based. Aside from the fantastical elements, Game of Thrones really does mirror historic events and bloody battles of medieval times--but how closely?

Game of Thrones versus History: Written in Blood is a collection of thought-provoking essays by medieval...

If you are at all familiar with Tolkien's work, then Bilbo's cry - proclaiming the arrival of Eagles - will be no stranger to you. Indeed, these plot-armoured birds are somewhat of a hallmark of the Master of Middle-Earth, one rejoiced over and lampooned in equal measure by both lovers and critics of his writing.

But they are misunderstood. Tolkien's Eagles cannot be taken literally; they are a narrative embodiment of the unlooked-for grace, the redemptive turn - winged harbingers of Tolkien's concept of eucatastrophe.

Anna Thayer has been fascinated, inspired and led by this...

'Before Einstein' examines the discourse of hyperspace philosophy and its position within the network of 'new' ideas at the end of the nineteenth century. Hyperspace philosophy grew out of the concept of a fourth spatial dimension, an idea that became increasingly debated amongst mathematicians, physicists and philosophers during the 1870s and 80s. English mathematician and hyperspace philosopher Charles Howard Hinton was the chief populariser of the fourth dimension in Europe and North America. The influence of his writings, many of which were published as a series under the title of...

The year is 2117. The United World Science Foundation has sanctioned a team of geologists to explore the remote minor planet known as Sedna. About one-half the diameter of Pluto, Sedna orbits twice as faraway from Earth as Pluto is, and at this distance, it receives only weak sunlight and is dark, cold, and forbidding. Discovered in the first decade of the twenty first century, the first astronauts landed on its surface in 2087. This geological team will be the first scientists to explore the surface of this remote icy world. Astronomers have been unable to explain the unusual mass,...