Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought PDF full book. Access full book title Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought by Adam Stock. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Adam Stock
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131732692X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Get Book Here
Book Description
Over the past few years, ‘dystopia’ has become a word with increasing cultural currency. This volume argues that we live in dystopian times, and more specifically that a genre of fiction called "dystopia" has, above others, achieved symbolic cultural value in representing fears and anxieties about the future. As such, dystopian fictions do not merely mirror what is happening in the world: in becoming such a ready referent for discussions about such varied topics as governance, popular culture, security, structural discrimination, environmental disasters and beyond, the narrative conventions and generic tropes of dystopian fiction affect the ways in which we grapple with contemporary political problems, economic anxieties and social fears. The volume addresses the development of the narrative methods and generic conventions of dystopian fiction as a mode of socio-political critique across the first half of the twentieth century. It examines how a series of texts from an age of political extremes contributed to political discourse and rhetoric both in its contemporary setting and in the terms in which we increasingly cast our cultural anxieties. Focusing on interactions between temporality, spatiality and narrative, the analysis unpicks how the dystopian interacts with social and political events, debates and ideas, Stock evaluates modern dystopian fiction as a historically responsive mode of political literature. He argues that amid the terrors and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century, dystopian fiction provided a unique space for writers to engage with historical and contemporary political thought in a mode that had popular cultural appeal. Combining literary analysis informed by critical theory and the history of political thought with archival-based historical research, this volume works to shed new light on the intersection of popular culture and world politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars in literary studies, cultural and intellectual history, politics and international relations.
Author: Adam Stock
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131732692X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 391
Get Book Here
Book Description
Over the past few years, ‘dystopia’ has become a word with increasing cultural currency. This volume argues that we live in dystopian times, and more specifically that a genre of fiction called "dystopia" has, above others, achieved symbolic cultural value in representing fears and anxieties about the future. As such, dystopian fictions do not merely mirror what is happening in the world: in becoming such a ready referent for discussions about such varied topics as governance, popular culture, security, structural discrimination, environmental disasters and beyond, the narrative conventions and generic tropes of dystopian fiction affect the ways in which we grapple with contemporary political problems, economic anxieties and social fears. The volume addresses the development of the narrative methods and generic conventions of dystopian fiction as a mode of socio-political critique across the first half of the twentieth century. It examines how a series of texts from an age of political extremes contributed to political discourse and rhetoric both in its contemporary setting and in the terms in which we increasingly cast our cultural anxieties. Focusing on interactions between temporality, spatiality and narrative, the analysis unpicks how the dystopian interacts with social and political events, debates and ideas, Stock evaluates modern dystopian fiction as a historically responsive mode of political literature. He argues that amid the terrors and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century, dystopian fiction provided a unique space for writers to engage with historical and contemporary political thought in a mode that had popular cultural appeal. Combining literary analysis informed by critical theory and the history of political thought with archival-based historical research, this volume works to shed new light on the intersection of popular culture and world politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars in literary studies, cultural and intellectual history, politics and international relations.
Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191088617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 569
Get Book Here
Book Description
Dystopia: A Natural History is the first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia. Taking the term to encompass both a literary tradition of satirical works, mostly on totalitarianism, as well as real despotisms and societies in a state of disastrous collapse, this volume redefines the central concepts and the chronology of the genre and offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of the subject. Part One assesses the theory and prehistory of 'dystopia'. By contrast to utopia, conceived as promoting an ideal of friendship defined as 'enhanced sociability', dystopia is defined by estrangement, fear, and the proliferation of 'enemy' categories. A 'natural history' of dystopia thus concentrates upon the centrality of the passion or emotion of fear and hatred in modern despotisms. The work of Le Bon, Freud, and others is used to show how dystopian groups use such emotions. Utopia and dystopia are portrayed not as opposites, but as extremes on a spectrum of sociability, defined by a heightened form of group identity. The prehistory of the process whereby 'enemies' are demonised is explored from early conceptions of monstrosity through Christian conceptions of the devil and witchcraft, and the persecution of heresy. Part Two surveys the major dystopian moments in twentieth century despotisms, focussing in particular upon Nazi Germany, Stalinism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. The concentration here is upon the political religion hypothesis as a key explanation for the chief excesses of communism in particular. Part Three examines literary dystopias. It commences well before the usual starting-point in the secondary literature, in anti-Jacobin writings of the 1790s. Two chapters address the main twentieth-century texts usually studied as representative of the genre, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The remainder of the section examines the evolution of the genre in the second half of the twentieth century down to the present.
Author: Edyta Materka
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253029090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Get Book Here
Book Description
Oral histories on life in the eastern German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Toward the end of the Second World War, Poland’s annexation of eastern German lands precipitated one of the largest demographic upheavals in European history. Edyta Materka travels to her native village in these “Recovered Territories,” where she listens carefully to rich oral histories told by original postwar Slavic settlers and remaining ethnic Germans who witnessed the metamorphosis of eastern Germany into western Poland. She discovers that peasants, workers, and elites adapted war-honed informal strategies they called “kombinacja” to preserve a modicum of local agency while surviving the vicissitudes of policy formulated elsewhere, from Stalinist collectivization to the shock doctrine of neoliberalism. Informality has taken many forms: as a way of life, a world view, an alternate historical text, a border memory, and a means of magical transformation during times of crisis. Materka ventures beyond conventional ethnography to trace the diverse historical, literary, and psychological dimensions of kombinacja. Grappling with the legacies of informality in her own transnational family, Materka searches for the “kombinator within” on the borderlands and shares her own memories of how the Polish diaspora found new uses for kombinacja in America. “Rare and exceptionally well-researched analysis of an invisible practice.” —Alena Ledeneva, University College London “Materka has produced an eloquently written, exciting, and meticulously analyzed ethnographic history that marks an alternative to the vast majority of strictly archival-based historical literature on the German-Polish borderlands. Within the field of Polish history, this book is also an important contribution as the first extensive work on the critical role of informality in the politics, society, and economy of People’s Poland.” —H-Poland “By concentrating on the local strategies of combination in the areas of uprootedness, Materka has made an interesting and valuable contribution to our knowledge of human behavior. References and the use of Polish words for important concepts are exemplary. . . . [H]er collection of narratives provides food for thought on the relation between formal regulation and human ingenuity.” —Baltic Worlds
Author: Shauna L. Shames
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548060
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Get Book Here
Book Description
Authoritarianism is on the march—and so is dystopian fiction. In the brave new twenty-first century, young-adult series like The Hunger Games and Divergent have become blockbusters; after Donald Trump’s election, two dystopian classics, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, skyrocketed to the New York Times best-seller list. This should come as no surprise: dystopian fiction has a lot to say about the perils of terrible government in real life. In Survive and Resist, Amy L. Atchison and Shauna L. Shames explore the ways in which dystopian narratives help explain how real-world politics work. They draw on classic and contemporary fiction, films, and TV shows—as well as their real-life counterparts—to offer funny and accessible explanations of key political concepts. Atchison and Shames demonstrate that dystopias both real and imagined help bring theories of governance, citizenship, and the state down to earth. They emphasize nonviolent resistance and change, exploring ways to challenge and overcome a dystopian-style government. Fictional examples, they argue, help give us the tools we need for individual survival and collective resistance. A clever look at the world through the lenses of pop culture, classic literature, and real-life events, Survive and Resist provides a timely and innovative approach to the fundamentals of politics for an era of creeping tyranny.
Author: K. G. Anderson
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 1682191273
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 440
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this diverse and vigorous mix of stories by newcomers and luminaries, writers offer their takes on what life might hold for us in the next few years. The resulting visions of war, oppression, and daily struggle are sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying (and occasionally both), but always thought-provoking.
Author: Lori Lansens
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683359968
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Get Book Here
Book Description
A teenage girl is running for her life in “a near-future that is stark, visceral and terrifyingly real” in this national bestselling dystopian thriller (Ami McKay, author of The Birth House). Taking place over the course of forty-eight pulse-pounding hours, This Little Light draws readers into a near-future world of born-again Christians and celebrity worship where abortion is illegal and surveillance is everywhere. Sixteen-year-old Rory Miller and her best friend, Fee, are on the run after a bomb explodes at their elite Christian private school inside their triple-gated California community. As Rory and Fee struggle to evade a media-frenzied search led by zealots and bounty hunters, Rory blogs their story in real time, determined to leave behind a record in their own words in case they don’t make it out alive. Author Lori Lansens weaves an intense, urgent, and enthralling read about an all-too-believable near future—and the world we already live in.
Author: Carrie Hintz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135373434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume examines a variety of utopian writing for children from the 18th century to the present day, defining and exploring this new genre in the field of children's literature. The original essays discuss thematic conventions and present detailed case studies of individual works. All address the pedagogical implications of work that challenges children to grapple with questions of perfect or wildly imperfect social organizations and their own autonomy. The book includes interviews with creative writers and the first bibliography of utopian fiction for children.
Author: David R. Bunch
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 168137255X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Get Book Here
Book Description
A collection of chilling and prescient stories about ecological apocalypse and the merging of human and machine. Welcome to Moderan, world of the future. Here perpetual war is waged by furious masters fighting from Strongholds well stocked with “arsenals of fear” and everyone is enamored with hate. The devastated earth is coated by vast sheets of gray plastic, while humans vie to replace more and more of their own “soft parts” with steel. What need is there for nature when trees and flowers can be pushed up through holes in the plastic? Who requires human companionship when new-metal mistresses are waiting? But even a Stronghold master can doubt the catechism of Moderan. Wanderers, poets, and his own children pay visits, proving that another world is possible. “As if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated,” wrote Brian Aldiss of David R. Bunch’s work. Originally published in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s and ’70s, these mordant stories, though passionately sought by collectors, have been unavailable in a single volume for close to half a century. Like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, Bunch coined a mind-bending new vocabulary. He sought not to divert readers from the horror of modernity but to make us face it squarely. This volume includes eleven previously uncollected Moderan stories.
Author: Gerard A. Hauser
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478608943
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this highly accessible new edition, Hauser systematically provides a humanistic account of what transpires when people communicate for some purpose. His masterful blend of classical and contemporary thinking about the use of language and the value of symbolic inducements for social cooperation illuminates fundamental rhetorical precepts and their implications for shaping human realities. The new chapter on publics theory complements the four chapters that introduce the broad themes and issues essential for a rhetorical approach to communication. The new chapter on narrative theory bridges the four chapters devoted to the content of rhetoric and the concluding chapters that emphasize symbolic processes by which humans induce social cooperation and constitute social reality. Throughout the text, Hauser skillfully underscores the power of language to present a particular reality. He explores the fundamental relationship between public discourse and judgment, helping students understand the core of rhetorics civic function. Through relevant, current examples, he illustrates how knowledge and power shape our social and political practices and how both are formed through discourse.
Author: Hanan Yoran
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739136496
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
Between Utopia and Dystopia offers a new interpretation of Erasmian humanism. It argues that Erasmian humanism created the identity of the universal and critical intellectual, but that this identity undermined the fundamental premises of humanist discourse. It closely reads several works of Erasmus and Thomas More, employing an interdisciplinary approach to the study of intellectual history, and adopting theoretical insights and methodological procedures from various disciplines.
