Genres of Doubt
Genres of Doubt

Author: Elizabeth M. Sanders

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2017-05-22

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1476665621

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Nineteenth-century Britain gave birth to the fantasy novel and the science fiction novel--two of today's most popular genres. During the same period, the traditional Christian beliefs that had underpinned British society for centuries faced new challenges as geological discoveries, the writings of Charles Darwin and exposure to other cultures gave rise to a Victorian "crisis of faith." These two shifts--one literary, one cultural--were deeply intertwined. The novel, a literary form that was developed as a vehicle for realism, when infused with unreal elements offered a space to ponder questions about the supernatural, the difference between belief and knowledge, and humanity's place in the world. The author explores how questions of meaning, identity and faith inspired the speculative fiction of today's novels, films, television shows and comics.

William Morris’s Utopianism
William Morris’s Utopianism

Author: Owen Holland

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-04

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 3319596020

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This book offers a new interpretation of William Morris’s utopianism as a strategic extension of his political writing. Morris’s utopian writing, alongside his journalism and public lectures, constituted part of a sustained counter-hegemonic project that intervened both into the life-world of the fin de siècle socialist movement, as well as the dominant literary cultures of his day. Owen Holland demonstrates this by placing Morris in conversation with writers of first-wave feminism, nineteenth-century pastoralists, as well as the romance revivalists and imperialists of the 1880s. In doing so, he revises E.P. Thompson’s and Miguel Abensour’s argument that Morris’s utopian writing should be conceived as anti-political and heuristic, concerned with the pedagogic education of desire, rather than with the more mundane work of propaganda. He shows how Morris’s utopianism emerged against the grain of the now-here, embroiled in instrumental, propagandistic polemic, complicating Thompson’s and Abensour’s view of its anti-political character.