Science Fiction Before 1900

Science Fiction Before 1900 PDF Author: Paul K. Alkon
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415938877
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.

Science Fiction Before 1900

Science Fiction Before 1900 PDF Author: Paul K. Alkon
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415938877
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.

Science Fiction Before 1900

Science Fiction Before 1900 PDF Author: Paul K. Alkon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134980566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.

Science Fiction After 1900

Science Fiction After 1900 PDF Author: Brooks Landon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136761195
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Science Fiction Before 1900

Science Fiction Before 1900 PDF Author: Paul K. Alkon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134980493
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.

Origins of Futuristic Fiction

Origins of Futuristic Fiction PDF Author: Paul K. Alkon
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337722
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age. Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, the forgotten writings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are the precursors of such well-known masterpieces of the form as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984. The first secular story to break the imaginative barrier against tales of the future, Epigone marked the emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, The Year 2440, The Last Man, and The World As It Will Be. Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional Le roman de l'avenir, "the novel of the future." Both a narrative of the future and a poetics of the new genre, this book identified in the previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which the possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In the introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of the futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define the aesthetics of a major transformation in the relation between literature and time still stands as the basis for the poetics of futuristic fiction. Tracing the early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the key works of the earliest writers of the genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about the formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of the future could achieve their full power in the works of later novelists.

The Cambridge History of Science Fiction

The Cambridge History of Science Fiction PDF Author: Gerry Canavan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316733017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction across national and genre boundaries, and trace its intellectual and creative roots in the philosophical and fantastic narratives of the ancient past. Science fiction as a literary genre is the central focus of the volume, but fundamental to its story is its non-literary cultural manifestations and influence. Coverage thus includes transmedia manifestations as an integral part of the genre's history, including not only short stories and novels, but also film, art, architecture, music, comics, and interactive media.

Defoe and Fictional Time

Defoe and Fictional Time PDF Author: Paul K. Alkon
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337714
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Defoe and Fictional Time shows Defoe's relevance to issues now central to criticism of the novel; relationships between narrative time and clock time, the influence of time concepts shared by writers and their audience, and above all the questions of how fiction shapes the phenomenal time of reading. Paul K. Alkon offers first a study of time in Defoe's fiction, with glances at Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne; and second a theoretical discussion of time in fiction. Arguing that eighteenth-century views of history account for the strange chronologies in Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Alkon explores Defoe's innovative use of narrative sequences, frequency, spatial form, chronology, settings, tempo, and the reader's cumulative memories of a text. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year is the first portrayal of a public duration—passing time shared by an entire population during a crisis—ranking Defoe among the most creative writers who have explored the way in which fictional time may influence reading time.

Three Science Fiction Novellas

Three Science Fiction Novellas PDF Author: J. H. Rosny
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819572306
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
“Probably the greatest of all French-speaking science-fiction writers [after Jules Verne] . . . I was unprepared for the power and beauty.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post To the short list that includes Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as founding fathers of science fiction, the name of the Belgian writer J.-H. Rosny Aîné must be added. He was the first writer to conceive, and attempt to narrate, the workings of aliens and alternate life forms. His fascination with evolutionary scenarios, and long historical vistas, from first man to last man, are important precursors to the myriad cosmic epics of modern science fiction. Until now, his work has been virtually unknown and unavailable in the English-speaking world, but it is crucial for our understanding of the genre. Three wonderfully imaginative novellas are included in this volume. “The Xipehuz” is a prehistoric tale in which the human species battles strange geometric alien life forms. “Another World” is the story of a mysterious being who does not live in the same acoustic and temporal world as humans. “The Death of the Earth” is a scientifically uncompromising Last Man story. The book also includes an insightful critical introduction that places Rosny’s work within the context of evolutionary biology. “Rosny was a species pluralist, and believed that human beings are no more entitled than any other creature to reign supreme. He would have felt right at home among the Men In Black.” —Laura Miller, The New Yorker

The History of Science Fiction

The History of Science Fiction PDF Author: A. Roberts
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230554652
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece up to the present day. The author is both an academic literary critic and acclaimed creative writer of the genre. Written in lively, accessible prose it is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and SF fandom.

Novel Science

Novel Science PDF Author: Adelene Buckland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226079686
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Novel Science is the first in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the “heroic age” of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and give shape and meaning to millions of years of previously undiscovered earth history. Borrowing from the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science, discovered many of the creatures we now call the dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the sequence and structure of stratified rock. As Adelene Buckland shows, they did this by rejecting the grand narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully recording minute details and leaving the big picture for future generations to paint. Buckland also reveals how these scientists—just as they had drawn inspiration from their literary predecessors—gave Victorian realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the too-seductive sweep of story.