Download Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction PDF

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 9781570035852
Pages : 248 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (57 downloads)

Download Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction PDF Format Full Free by Darren Harris-Fain and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 explores the major trends and developments during three decades that witnessed science fiction's most dramatic progression from subliterary escapist entertainment to a more sophisticated literature of ideas. Darren Harris-Fain suggests that to understand American science fiction fully, it is essential to realize that the current field with all its variety results from the proceeding decades of writings. In addition, he contends that although much science fiction of merit was written in America prior to 1970, the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic improvement in quality, even as the field fragmented into a variety of subgenres and as writers sought to transcend earlier critical dismissals. Harris-Fain discusses significant and representative works, most of which mainstream literary scholars and critics ignore, as he charts the historical and literary development of contemporary American science fiction. the internal divisions along both literary and political lines experienced during the Vietnam era; the influence of the feminist movement and other contemporary concerns; the increasing contributions of female, African American, and gay and lesbian writers; and the emergence of such significant trends as hard science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, and shared-world stories. Harris-Fain also considers literary science fiction's relationship to the mass media, the effects the popularity of fantasy has on the field, and academia's continued misprizing of the genre.


Download Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction PDF

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction

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Publisher : Understanding Contemporary Ame
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ISBN 13 : 9780872498709
Pages : 300 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (872 downloads)

Download Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction PDF Format Full Free by Thomas D. Clareson and published by Understanding Contemporary Ame. This book was released on 1992 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One of the most knowledgeable scholars of American science fiction has produced an admirable study of the first major period of the field. Focusing on the elemental novels, Clareson argues that during this era most of the primary themes were developed. He supported this thesis with a breadth of knowledge, a clarity of writing, & a genuine affection for science fiction rare in scholars of the field. . .'--Booklist.


Download Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory PDF

Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 9781570034985
Pages : 236 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (57 downloads)

Download Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory PDF Format Full Free by Michael Paul Spikes and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revised edition of Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, Michael P. Spikes adds Stanley Fish and Susan Bordo to the critics whose careers, key texts, and central assumptions he discusses in introducing readers to developments in American literary theory during the past thirty-five years. Underscoring the largely heterogeneous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics, along with Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edward W. Said, and Stephen Greenblatt, represent, Spikes offers concise analyses of their principal claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism, and feminism.


Download Teaching Science Fiction PDF

Teaching Science Fiction

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Publisher : Springer
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ISBN 13 : 0230300391
Pages : 266 pages
Rating : 4.3/5 (3 downloads)

Download Teaching Science Fiction PDF Format Full Free by A. Sawyer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching Science Fiction is the first text in thirty years to explore the pedagogic potential of that most intellectually stimulating and provocative form of popular literature: science fiction. Innovative and academically lively, it offers valuable insights into how SF can be taught historically, culturally and practically at university level.


Download The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction PDF

The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
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ISBN 13 : 1107052467
Pages : 291 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (52 downloads)

Download The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction PDF Format Full Free by Eric Carl Link and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience.


Download Science Fiction PDF

Science Fiction

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Publisher : Polity
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ISBN 13 : 0745628931
Pages : 320 pages
Rating : 4.9/5 (628 downloads)

Download Science Fiction PDF Format Full Free by Roger Luckhurst and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005-05-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new and timely cultural history of science fiction, Roger Luckhurst examines the genre from its origins in the late nineteenth century to its latest manifestations. The book introduces and explicates major works of science fiction literature by placing them in a series of contexts, using the history of science and technology, political and economic history, and cultural theory to develop the means for understanding the unique qualities of the genre. Luckhurst reads science fiction as a literature of modernity. His astute analysis examines how the genre provides a constantly modulating record of how human embodiment is transformed by scientific and technological change and how the very sense of self is imaginatively recomposed in popular fictions that range from utopian possibility to Gothic terror. This highly readable study charts the overlapping yet distinct histories of British and American science fiction, with commentary on the central authors, magazines, movements and texts from 1880 to the present day. It will be an invaluable guide and resource for all students taking courses on science fiction, technoculture and popular literature, but will equally be fascinating for anyone who has ever enjoyed a science fiction book.


Download Contemporary American Science Fiction Film PDF

Contemporary American Science Fiction Film

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Publisher : Routledge
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ISBN 13 : 1000540642
Pages : 236 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (54 downloads)

Download Contemporary American Science Fiction Film PDF Format Full Free by Terence McSweeney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary American Science Fiction Film explores and interrogates a diverse variety of popular and culturally relevant American science fiction films made in the first two decades of the new millennium, offering a ground-breaking investigation of the impactful role of genre cinema in the modern era. Placing one of the most popular and culturally resonant American film genres broadly within its rich social, historical, industrial, and political context, the book interrogates some of the defining critical debates of the era via an in-depth analysis of a range of important films. An international team of authors draw on case studies from across the science fiction genre to examine what these films can tell us about the time period, how the films themselves connect to the social and political context, how the fears and anxieties they portray resonate beyond the screen, and how the genre responds to the shifting coordinates of the Hollywood film industry. Offering new insights and perspectives on the cinematic science fiction genre, this volume will appeal primarily to scholars and students of film, television, cultural and media studies, as well as anyone interested in science fiction and speculative film.


Download Science Fact and Science Fiction PDF

Science Fact and Science Fiction

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Publisher : Routledge
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ISBN 13 : 1135923744
Pages : 576 pages
Rating : 4.7/5 (923 downloads)

Download Science Fact and Science Fiction PDF Format Full Free by Brian Stableford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-06 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction is a literary genre based on scientific speculation. Works of science fiction use the ideas and the vocabulary of all sciences to create valid narratives that explore the future effects of science on events and human beings. Science Fact and Science Fiction examines in one volume how science has propelled science-fiction and, to a lesser extent, how science fiction has influenced the sciences. Although coverage will discuss the science behind the fiction from the Classical Age to the present, focus is naturally on the 19th century to the present, when the Industrial Revolution and spectacular progress in science and technology triggered an influx of science-fiction works speculating on the future. As scientific developments alter expectations for the future, the literature absorbs, uses, and adapts such contextual visions. The goal of the Encyclopedia is not to present a catalog of sciences and their application in literary fiction, but rather to study the ongoing flow and counterflow of influences, including how fictional representations of science affect how we view its practice and disciplines. Although the main focus is on literature, other forms of science fiction, including film and video games, are explored and, because science is an international matter, works from non-English speaking countries are discussed as needed.


Download Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature PDF

Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 9781570033797
Pages : 304 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (57 downloads)

Download Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature PDF Format Full Free by Deborah L. Madsen and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the work of six notable authors, this text reveals characteristic themes, images and stylistic devices that make contemporary Chicana writing a vibrant and innovative part of a burgeoning Latina creativity.


Download Science Fiction After 1900 PDF

Science Fiction After 1900

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Publisher : Routledge
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ISBN 13 : 1136761195
Pages : 286 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (761 downloads)

Download Science Fiction After 1900 PDF Format Full Free by Brooks Landon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.


Download Modern Science Fiction: A Critical Analysis PDF

Modern Science Fiction: A Critical Analysis

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Publisher : McFarland
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ISBN 13 : 1476673195
Pages : 214 pages
Rating : 4.1/5 (673 downloads)

Download Modern Science Fiction: A Critical Analysis PDF Format Full Free by James Gunn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Gunn--one of the founding figures of science fiction scholarship and teaching--wrote in 1951 what is likely the first master's thesis on modern science fiction. Portions were in the short-lived pulp magazine Dynamic but it has otherwise remained unavailable. Here in its first full publication, the thesis explores many of the classic Golden Age stories of the 1940s and the critical perspective that informed Gunn's essential genre history Alternate Worlds and his anthology series The Road to Science Fiction. The editor's introduction and commentary show the historical significance of Gunn's work and its relevance to today's science fiction studies.


Download Understanding Gish Jen PDF

Understanding Gish Jen

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 1611175895
Pages : 152 pages
Rating : 4.8/5 (175 downloads)

Download Understanding Gish Jen PDF Format Full Free by Jennifer Ann Ho and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jennifer Ann Ho introduces readers to a “typical American” writer, Gish Jen, the author of four novels, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town; a collection of short stories, Who’s Irish?; and a collection of lectures, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Jen writes with an engaging, sardonic, and imaginative voice illuminating themes common to the American experience: immigration, assimilation, individualism, the freedom to choose one’s path in life, and the complicated relationships that we have with our families and our communities. A second-generation Chinese American, Jen is widely recognized as an important American literary voice, at once accessible, philosophical, and thought-provoking. In addition to her novels, she has published widely in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Yale Review. Ho traces the evolution of Jen’s career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice. In the process she shows why Jen’s observations about life in the United States, though revealed through the perspectives of her Asian American and Asian immigrant characters, resonate with a variety of audiences who find themselves reflected in Jen’s accounts of love, grief, desire, disappointment, and the general domestic experiences that shape all our lives. Following a brief biographical sketch, Ho examines each of Jen’s major works, showing how she traces the transformation of immigrant dreams into mundane life, explores the limits of self-identification, and characterizes problems of cross-national communication alongside the universal problems of aging and generational conflict. Looking beyond Jen’s fiction work, a final chapter examines her essays and her concerns and stature as a public intellectual, and detailed primary and secondary bibliographies provide a valuable point of departure for both teaching and future scholarship.


Download Understanding Don DeLillo PDF

Understanding Don DeLillo

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 1611174457
Pages : 168 pages
Rating : 4.4/5 (174 downloads)

Download Understanding Don DeLillo PDF Format Full Free by Henry Veggian and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don Delillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo’s work through the three phases of the author’s career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the more substantial works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the “smaller” but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to Delillo’s principal concerns—the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power—and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions that inform writings about DeLillo’s work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through the major novels of the author’s career. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author’s work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In a concluding chapter, Veggian engages DeLillo’s notable examples of other modes, particularly the short story that, he shows, reveals important insights into his “modular” working method as well as the evolution of his novels.


Download Understanding Colum McCann PDF

Understanding Colum McCann

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 1611172217
Pages : 256 pages
Rating : 4.2/5 (172 downloads)

Download Understanding Colum McCann PDF Format Full Free by John Cusatis and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Colum McCann chronicles the Irish-born writer's journey to literary celebrity from his days as a teenage sportswriter for the Irish Press in the 1970s, through the publication of his award-winning first story, "Tresses," in 1990, to his winning the 2009 National Book Award in fiction for the international bestseller Let the Great World Spin. In this first critical study of McCann's body of work, John Cusatis provides an introduction to McCann's life and career; an overview of his major themes, style, and influences; and close readings of his two short story collections and five novels. Cusatis traces McCann's redefinition of the Irish novel, exploring the author's propensity for transcending aesthetic, cultural, ethnic, geographical, and social boundaries in his ascent from the status of "Irish novelist" to "international novelist." In the process, this study illuminates the various incarnations of McCann's perennial subject: exile, both geographical and emotional. Cusatis also delineates how the influences of McCann's Irish upbringing, penchant for international travel, and exhaustive and eclectic reading of literature manifest themselves in his fiction. Close attention is given to McCann's stylistic trademarks, such as his poetic voice, use of Christian symbolism, Irish and classical mythology, intertextuality, multiple viewpoints, nonlinear plot structure, and the merger of what McCann deems "factual truth" and "textual truth." Understanding Colum McCann makes use of the existing body of published interviews, profiles, and critical articles, as well as a decade of correspondence between Cusatis and McCann. With international interest in McCann on the rise, this first full-length study of his career to date serves as an ideal point of entrance for students, scholars, and serious readers, and offers the biographical and critical foundation necessary for a deeper understanding of McCann's fiction.


Download Understanding David Mamet PDF

Understanding David Mamet

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 1611172004
Pages : 160 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (172 downloads)

Download Understanding David Mamet PDF Format Full Free by David Murphy and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding David Mamet analyzes the broad range of David Mamet's plays and places them in the context of his career as a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction prose as well as drama. Over the past three decades, Mamet has written more than thirty produced plays and garnered recognition as one of the most significant and influential American playwrights of the post-World War II generation. In addition to playwriting and directing for the theater, Mamet also writes, directs, and produces for film and television, and he writes essays, fiction, poetry, and even children's books. The author remains best known for depicting men in gritty, competitive work environments and for his vernacular dialogue (known in the theater as "Mametspeak"), which has raised the expletive to an art form. In this insightful survey of Mamet's body of work, Brenda Murphy explores the broad range of his writing for the theater and introduces readers to Mamet's major writing in other literary genres as well as some of his neglected pieces. Murphy centers her discussion around Mamet's most significant plays—Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, The Cryptogram, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Edmond, The Woods, Lakeboat, Boston Marriage, and The Duck Variations—as well as his three novels—The Village, The Old Religion, and Wilson. Murphy also notes how Mamet's one-act and less known plays provide important context for the major plays and help to give a fuller sense of the scope of his art. A chapter on his numerous essays, including his most anthologized piece of writing, the autobiographical essay "The Rake," reflects Mamet's controversial and evolving ideas about the theater, film, politics, religion, and masculinity. Throughout her study Murphy incorporates references to Mamet's popular films as useful waypoints for contextualizing his literary works and understanding his continuing evolution as a writer for multiple mediums.


Download Understanding Adrienne Rich PDF

Understanding Adrienne Rich

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 1611177006
Pages : 144 pages
Rating : 4.0/5 (177 downloads)

Download Understanding Adrienne Rich PDF Format Full Free by Jeannette E. Riley and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2016-08-31 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most celebrated American poets of the past half century, Adrienne Rich was the recipient of awards ranging from the Bollingen Prize, to the National Book Award, to the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. In Understanding Adrienne Rich, Jeannette E. Riley assesses the full scope of Rich’s long career from 1957 to her death in 2012 through a chronological exploration of her poetry and prose. Beginning with Rich’s first two formally traditional collections, published in the late 1950s, then moving to the increasingly radical collections of the 1960s and 1970s, Riley details the evolution of Rich’s feminist poetics as she investigated issues of identity, sexuality, gender, the desire to reclaim women’s history, the dream of a common language, and a separate community for women. Riley then tracks how Rich’s writing shifted outward from the 1980s and 1990s to the end of her career as she evaluated her own life and place within her society. Rich examined her country’s history as well, asking readers to consider what responsibility each person has—individually and communally—for changing the conditions under which we live. This book documents Rich’s developing charge that poetry carries the ability to create social change and engage people in the democratic process. Throughout, Understanding Adrienne Rich interweaves explications of Rich’s poetry with her prose, offering a close look at the development of the author’s voice from formalist poet, to feminist visionary, to citizen poet. In doing so, this volume provides a survey of Rich’s career and her impact on American literature and politics.


Download Understanding Etheridge Knight PDF

Understanding Etheridge Knight

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Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
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ISBN 13 : 1611172632
Pages : 176 pages
Rating : 4.6/5 (172 downloads)

Download Understanding Etheridge Knight PDF Format Full Free by Michael S. Collins and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2013-01-23 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Etheridge Knight introduces readers to a major—but understudied—American poet. Etheridge Knight (1931–1991) survived a shrapnel wound suffered during military service in Korea, as well as a drug addiction that led to an eight-year prison sentence, to publish five volumes of poetry and a small cache of powerful prose. His status in the front ranks of American poets and thinkers on poetry was acknowledged in 1984, when he won the Shelley Memorial Award, which had previously gone, as an acknowledgement of "genius and need," to E. E. Cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W. S. Merwin. In this first book-length study of Knight and his complete body of work, Michael Collins examines the poetry of a complex literary figure who, following imprisonment, transformed his life to establish himself as a charismatic voice in American poetry and an accomplished teacher at institutions such as the University of Hartford, Lincoln University, and his own Free Peoples Poetry Workshops. Beginning with a concise biography of Knight, Collins explores Knight's volumes of poetry including Poems from Prison, Black Voices from Prison, Born of a Woman, and The Essential Etheridge Knight. Understanding Etheridge Knight brings attention to a crucial era in African American and American poetry and to the literature of the incarcerated while reflecting on the life and work of an original voice in American poetry.