Speculative Wests investigates representations of the American West in terms of both region and genre, looking at speculative westerns (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) as well as at other speculative texts that feature western settings.
In Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, Cat Moir offers a new interpretation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. The reception of Bloch’s work has seen him variously painted as a naïve realist, a romantic nature philosopher, a totalitarian thinker, and an irrationalist whose obscure literary style stands in for a lack of systematic rigour. Moir challenges these conceptions of Bloch by reconstructing the ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions of his speculative materialism. Through a close, historically contextualised reading of Bloch’s major work of ontology, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance), Moir presents Bloch as one of the twentieth century’s most significant critical thinkers.
"An all-out women-driven, queer, transgender, multiracial takeover of the Old West . . . and that's exactly what Melissa Lenhardt delivers in her unapologetically badass western, Heresy." - New York Times "Lenhardt has created a bold new story where women have taken their rightful place in the narrative of the Outlaw Western genre; where wit, wisdom and wiles could mean the difference between life and death, and where the fellowship of women bested every challenge." -- Kathleen Kent Margaret Parker and Hattie LaCour never intended to turn outlaw. After being run off their ranch by a greedy cattleman, their family is left destitute. As women alone they have few choices: marriage, lying on their backs for money, or holding a gun. For Margaret and Hattie the choice is simple. With their small makeshift family, the gang pulls off a series of heists across the West. Though the newspapers refuse to give the female gang credit, their exploits don't go unnoticed. Pinkertons are on their trail, a rival male gang is determined to destroy them, and secrets among the group threaten to tear them apart. Now, Margaret and Hattie must find a way to protect their family, finish one last job, and avoid the hangman's noose. "Readers who relish an unusual narrative structure will enjoy this unique take on the traditional western." -- Booklist
Gottlieb juxtaposes the Western dystopian genre with Eastern and Central European versions, introducing a selection of works from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. She demonstrates that authors who write about and under totalitarian dictatorship find the worst of all possible worlds not in a hypothetical future but in the historical reality of the writer's present or recent past. Against such a background the writer assumes the role of witness, protesting against a nightmare world that is but should not be. She introduces the works of Victor Serge, Vassily Grossmam, Alexander Zinoviev, Tibor Dery, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, and Istvan Klima, as well as a host of others, all well-known in their own countries, presenting them within a framework established through an original and comprehensive exploration of the patterns underlying the more familiar Western works of dystopian fiction.
Exploring the history of contemporary legal thought on the rights and status of the West's colonized indigenous tribal peoples, Williams here traces the development of the themes that justified and impelled Spanish, English, and American conquests of the New World.
Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation focuses on the process of translation and its implications. The volume explores the translation of works of science fiction (SF) from one language to another and the translation of SF tropes, terms, and ideas of SF theory into cultures outside the West. Providing a comprehensive examination of the state of translation into English, the essays consider how representative the body of translated work of SF is from the source language/culture. It also considers the social, political, and economic choices in selecting a work to translate. The book illustrates the dramatic growth both in SF production outside the Anglosphere, the translation of works from other languages into English, and the practice of translating English-language SF into other languages. Altogether, the essays map the theory, practice, and business of SF translation around the world.
The first book-length study to explore the importance of genre fiction for the body of literature we call lesbian modernismElizabeth English explores the aesthetic dilemma prompted by the censorship of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Faced with legal and financial reprisals, women writers were forced to question how they might represent lesbian identity and desire. Modernist experimentation has often been seen as a response to this problem, but English breaks new ground by arguing that popular genre fictions offered a creative strategy against the threat of detection and punishment. Her study examines a range of responses to this dilemma by offering illuminating close readings of fantasy, crime, and historical fictions written by both mainstream and modernist authors. English introduces hitherto neglected women writers from diverse backgrounds and draws on archival material examined here for the first time to remap the topography of 1920s-1940s lesbian literature and to reevaluate the definition of lesbian modernism.Key Features:Rethinks the lesbian modernist project to demonstrate that genre fiction not only influenced modernist writers such as Woolf and Stein but also found its way into their ostensibly highbrow workBrings to light hitherto neglected mainstream writers working in popular genres who contributed to the lesbian modernist aestheticSituates Katharine Burdekin within the context of lesbian modernism for the first time, employing hitherto unseen archive material (including letters and manuscripts)Divided into three broad multi-author genres (fantasy, historical and detective fictions), the study covers popular fictions such as utopian writing, the supernatural, historical biography, historical romance, and the classic country-house crime novel
This book shows that mysticism is incomplete without scientific rationalism, and that our current social and political projects cannot be completed without assimilating the values and practices of mysticism. It discusses cross-cultural ethics, mysticism and value theory, mysticism and metaphysics, mysticism and the theory of knowledge, ethics and religion, parapsychology, patriarchy, and social and political history.