Search Results for speculative fiction

...Angela S. Allan Abstract This article reads Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990) and Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014) as works of speculative fiction that engage with the scientific concept of “the system” that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. It tracks...

...John Plotz This piece asks what relation the turn toward a new era of patrimonial capitalism—traced in Thomas Piketty's recent work—bears to the modern rise of fantasy worlds and speculative fiction. The problem of justifying distinction in a world that presumes common humanity beneath surface...

...Matthew Hart Abstract This essay considers a late novel sequence by the British speculative fiction writer J. G. Ballard (1930–2009). Although Ballard is often celebrated as a great iconoclast, there is arguably no postwar novelist with a more recognizable style. The essay analyzes Cocaine Nights...

.... Field theory envisions money's value as arising from and shifting with the market or social environment from which it arises. This essay examines how the field theory of money can be linked with money's role in three contemporary examples of speculative fiction: Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men , Tom...

... by documenting the affinities between planetarity's redemptive, world-building ambitions, on one hand, and both Kantian cosmopolitanism and turn-of-the-twentieth-century articulations of “planetary consciousness” (as particularly evident in speculative fiction) on the other. The common denominator...

... of speculative genres as narrative toolboxes for imagining ecological futures is increasingly discussed. 1 This strain of scholarship emerges from the more general consensus that over the past few decades there has been a “genre turn,” meaning a notable increase in literary authors adopting genre fiction...

... seriously, such as Ingrid Thaler, regard them as vehicles of a timeless and transhistorical allegory of gender oppression (21–25). But as I shall argue, the novel’s uneasy mixture of genre elements from fugitive slave nar- ratives and women’s speculative fiction of the 1970s reflects a distinctive...

...Lisa Zunshine My essay emphasizes the social aspect of our engagement with fictional narratives by drawing on cognitive scientists' research into “theory of mind,” also known as “mind reading”: our evolved adaptation for explaining people's behavior in terms of their mental states, such as thoughts...

... enigmatic photographs that allow plenty of play for the observer's imaginative speculation (including work by Jeff Wall, Justine Kurland, Lynne Cohen, and Connie Samaras), I ask why there should be such a discrepancy between fictional and nonfictional understandings of the work that can be done...

... as primordially marked by patriarchal constraints, predicated on the (self‐)objectification and subjection of women. This article offers a speculative reading of Sand's early fictions as anticipating similar “antisex” attitudes in later twentieth‐century feminism (the so‐called antipornography feminism...

...Bill Solomon This essay adopts Susan Stewart's notion of distressed genres as a way to interrogate the seemingly nostalgic strain of American modernist fiction produced in the early decades of the twentieth century. The first section reads Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio alongside Walter...

... inclination toward retrospection. Comparable forms of nostalgia for the Edwardian period persist in 1930s fiction and are explored in this essay, along with an inheritance of modernist narrative techniques, in novels including The Memorial, Eyeless in Gaza, A Scots Quair , and Coming Up for Air . The essay...

... recent special issue of the Journal of American Studies , titled “Fictions of Speculation,” interest in the form of finance's proleptic and analeptic reorganizations of temporal experience leads to a focus on the close fit between financial speculation and speculative fiction's expertise in “what-wasn't...

... final article puts this possibility on the table. In it, Ryan Trimm brings us back to the question of money—its philosophy and sociological impact—as a means of structuring not only social relations but the novelistic form. Looking at a recent crop of speculative fiction—Hari Kunzru's 2011 Gods Without...

... of independence on the African continent” no longer appears a dominant literary-political project ( 288 ). “In an era of increasingly inescapable global interconnection . . . new forms of political organization must be sought,” she concludes, and the speculative fiction of sub-Saharan Africa is poised to do...

... speculative fiction. For a novel whose first Canadian edition featured a T. S. Eliot–like parched, barren desert landscape on the cover and whose plot imagines the entire human race being more or less annihilated by a brutal, fast-acting global pandemic, reviewers sure found Oryx and Crake funny...

... Anthropocene terraforming urban ecology urban literature speculative fiction When we think of “the land” and its literary representations, what usually comes to mind are the rural landscapes of Thomas Hardy or Willa Cather, the wild landscapes of James Fenimore Cooper, the social meanings of land...

... Economy of Property in Austen’s Emma.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 ( 1990 ): 229 –54. Tuite , Clara . Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon . Cambridge: Cambridge UP "AFall in Bread": Speculation and the Real in Emma...

... Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction .” J19 5 . 1 ( 2017 ): 21 – 50 . LaRoche Cheryl Janifer . Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance . Urbana : U of Illinois P , 2014 . Madera Judith . Black Atlas: Geography...

.... Schmitt's critique of liberalism helps clarify the underlying political stakes of this speculative fiction—that is, Liu's instructive break not only from conventions of realist form but also from the novel's presumptive allegiance to liberal democracy. Although scholars may retain a foundational historical...