Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary

Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary

Author: Shazia Sadaf

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1000936929

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As the first book-length study of emergent Pakistani speculative fiction written in English, this critical work explores the ways in which contemporary Pakistani authors extend the genre in new directions by challenging the cognitive majoritarianism (usually Western) in this field. Responding to the recent Afro science fiction movement that has spurred non-Western writers to seek a democratization of the broader genre of speculative fiction, Pakistani writers have incorporated elements from djinn mythology, Qur'anic eschatology, "Desi" (South Asian) traditions, local folklore, and Islamic feminisms in their narratives to encourage familiarity with alternative world views. In five chapters, this book analyzes fiction by several established Pakistani authors as well as emerging writers to highlight the literary value of these contemporary works in reconciling competing cognitive approaches, blurring the dividing line between "possibilities" and "impossibilities" in envisioning humanity’s collective future, and anticipating the future of human rights in these envisioned worlds.


The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction

The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction

Author: Mark Bould

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-06-13

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 1040042953

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The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction provides an overview of the study of science fiction across multiple academic fields. It offers a new conceptualisation of the field today, marking the significant changes that have taken place in sf studies over the past 15 years. Building on the pioneering research in the first edition, the collection reorganises historical coverage of the genre to emphasise new geographical areas of cultural production and the growing importance of media beyond print. It also updates and expands the range of frameworks that are relevant to the study of science fiction. The periodisation has been reframed to include new chapters focusing on science fiction produced outside the Anglophone context, including South Asian, Latin American, Chinese and African diasporic science fiction. The contributors use both well- established critical and theoretical approaches and embrace a range of new ones, including biopolitics, climate crisis, critical ethnic studies, disability studies, energy humanities, game studies, medical humanities, new materialisms and sonic studies. This book is an invaluable resource for students and established scholars seeking to understand the vast range of engagements with science fiction in scholarship today.


Fictional Languages in Science Fiction Literature

Fictional Languages in Science Fiction Literature

Author: Israel A. C. Noletto

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-31

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1040024513

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Fictional Languages in Science Fiction Literature surveys a large number of fictional languages, those created as part of a literary world, to present a multifaceted account of the literary phenomenon of glossopoesis (language invention). Consisting of a few untranslated sentences, exotic names, or even fully-fledged languages with detailed grammar and vocabulary, fictional languages have been a common element of English-language fiction since Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Different notions of the functions of such fictional languages in narrative have been proposed: as rooted in phonaesthetics and contextual features, or as being used for characterisation and construction of alterity. Framed within stylistics and informed by narrative theory, literary theory, literary pragmatics, and semiotics, this study combines previous typologies into a new 5-part reading model comprising unique analytical approaches tailored to science fiction’s specific discourse and style, exploring the relationship between glossopoesis, world-building, storytelling, interpretation, and rhetoric, both in prose and paratexts.


Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities

Author: Aroosa Kanwal

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-01-31

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 1003835686

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Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contemporary drone warfare and its related catastrophes, postcolonial ethics in relation to the thanatopolitics of slow violence, dehumanization and the politics of death. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized and diverse acts of violence committed against Muslim communities, I call the postcolonial Muslim world ‘geographies of dehumanization’. The book investigates how ongoing legacies of contemporary forms of injustice and denial of subjecthood are represented, staged and challenged in a range of postcolonial anglophone Muslim texts, thereby questioning the idea of postcolonial ethics. One of the selling points of this book is the chapters on fictional representations by Muslim Myanmar and Uyghur writers as, to the best of my knowledge, no critical work or single authored book is available on Myanmar and Uyghur literature to date.


Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality

Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality

Author: Sarah Faber

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-11

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1003852963

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From early examples of queer representation in mainstream media to present-day dissolutions of the human-nature boundary, the Gothic is always concerned with delineating and transgressing the norms that regulate society and speak to our collective fears and anxieties. This volume examines British and American Gothic texts from four centuries and diverse media – including novels, films, podcasts, and games – in case studies which outline the central relationship between the Gothic and transgression, particularly gender(ed) and sexual transgression. This relationship is both crucial and constantly shifting, ever in the process of renegotiation, as transgression defines the Gothic and society redefines transgression. The case studies draw on a combination of well-studied and under-studied texts in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of transgression in the Gothic. Pointing the way forward in Gothic Studies, this original and nuanced combination of gendered, Ecogothic, queer, and media critical approaches addresses established and new scholars of the Gothic alike.


J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe

J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe

Author: Janka Kascakova

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-29

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1000958167

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This volume is a long overdue contribution to the dynamic, but unevenly distributed study of fantasy and J.R.R. Tolkien’s legacy in Central Europe. The chapters move between and across theories of cultural and social history, reception, adaptation, and audience studies, and offer methodological reflections on the various cultural perceptions of Tolkien’s oeuvre and its impact on twenty-first century manifestations. They analyse how discourses about fantasy are produced and mediated, and how processes of re-mediation shape our understanding of the historical coordinates and local peculiarities of fantasy in general, and Tolkien in particular, all that in Central Europe in an age of global fandom. The collection examines the entanglement of fantasy and Central European political and cultural shifts across the past 50 years and traces the ways in which its haunting legacy permeates and subverts different modes and aesthetics across different domains from communist times through today’s media-saturated culture.


Education Futures for School Leadership

Education Futures for School Leadership

Author: J-C Couture

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-21

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1040193099

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Education Futures for School Leadership is a comprehensive resource to support school leaders as they encounter the growing complexity and uncertainties that characterize life in schools today. Moving beyond conventional change management literature, this book invites current and aspiring school leaders to apply the interdisciplinary tools of futures studies and strategic foresight to their work. Given our shared global challenges, young people deserve schools that are agile, adaptive, and responsive to many possible futures. Driven by the imperatives of equity and inclusion, the authors provide practical, evidence-informed strategies, real-world examples, and use cases of futures thinking applied to school staff development and change strategies. Each chapter engages with key educational realities: differentiating instructional planning and assessment, the impacts of artificial intelligence and other technologies, the growing psycho-social issues young people are facing, and more. Informed by years of international collaboration with forward-thinking school leaders and scholars, this book is both a field guide and a call to action for navigating the influence of the future on our present moment and the challenges and promises shaping school life today.


Lovecraft in the 21st Century

Lovecraft in the 21st Century

Author: Antonio Alcala Gonzalez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1000531651

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Lovecraft in the 21st Century assembles reflections from a wide range of perspectives on the significance of Lovecraft’s influence in contemporary times. Building on a focus centered on the Anthropocene, adaptation, and visual media, the chapters in this collection focus on the following topics: Adaptation of Lovecraft’s legacy in theater, television, film, graphic narratives, video games and game artwork The connection between the writer’s legacy and his life Reading Lovecraft in light of contemporary criticism about capitalism, the posthuman, and the Anthropocene How contemporary authors have worked through the implicit racial and sexual politics in Lovecraft’s fiction Reading Lovecraft’s fiction in light of contemporary approaches to gender and sexuality


Globalization and Literature

Globalization and Literature

Author: Suman Gupta

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-30

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0745658199

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This book presents a state-of-the-art overview of the relationship between globalization studies and literature and literary studies, and the bearing that they have on each other. It engages with the manner in which globalization is thematized in literary works, examines the relationship between globalization theory and literary theory, and discusses the impact of globalization processes on the production and reception of literary texts. Suman Gupta argues that, while literature has registered globalization processes in relevant ways, there has been a missed articulation between globalization studies and literary studies. Examples are given of some of the ways in which this slippage is now being addressed and may be taken forward, taking up such themes as the manner in which anti-globalization protests and world cities have figured in literary works; the ways in which theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism, familiar in literary studies, have diverged from and converged with globalization studies; and how industries to do with the circulation of literature are becoming globalized. This book is intended for university-level students and teachers, researchers, and other informed readers with an interest in the above issues, and serves as both a survey of the field and an intervention within it.


English as a Global Language

English as a Global Language

Author: David Crystal

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-03-29

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1107611806

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Written in a detailed and fascinating manner, this book is ideal for general readers interested in the English language.