Author: Martyn Colebrook
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786442255
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
This collection of 12 new essays brings together prominent literary experts to explore the importance of Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks, both his mainstream and science fiction work. It considers Banks as a habitual border crosser who makes things fresh and new by subversive and transgressive strategies. The essays are divided into four thematic areas--the Scottish context, the geographies of his writing, the impact of genre and a combined focus on gender, games and play--and will be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary literature, Scottish literature and science fiction.
The Transgressive Iain Banks
Author: Martyn Colebrook
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786442255
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
This collection of 12 new essays brings together prominent literary experts to explore the importance of Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks, both his mainstream and science fiction work. It considers Banks as a habitual border crosser who makes things fresh and new by subversive and transgressive strategies. The essays are divided into four thematic areas--the Scottish context, the geographies of his writing, the impact of genre and a combined focus on gender, games and play--and will be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary literature, Scottish literature and science fiction.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786442255
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
This collection of 12 new essays brings together prominent literary experts to explore the importance of Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks, both his mainstream and science fiction work. It considers Banks as a habitual border crosser who makes things fresh and new by subversive and transgressive strategies. The essays are divided into four thematic areas--the Scottish context, the geographies of his writing, the impact of genre and a combined focus on gender, games and play--and will be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary literature, Scottish literature and science fiction.
The Transgressive Iain Banks
Author: Martyn Colebrook
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476602921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
This collection of 12 new essays brings together prominent literary experts to explore the importance of Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks, both his mainstream and science fiction work. It considers Banks as a habitual border crosser who makes things fresh and new by subversive and transgressive strategies. The essays are divided into four thematic areas--the Scottish context, the geographies of his writing, the impact of genre and a combined focus on gender, games and play--and will be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary literature, Scottish literature and science fiction.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476602921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207
Book Description
This collection of 12 new essays brings together prominent literary experts to explore the importance of Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks, both his mainstream and science fiction work. It considers Banks as a habitual border crosser who makes things fresh and new by subversive and transgressive strategies. The essays are divided into four thematic areas--the Scottish context, the geographies of his writing, the impact of genre and a combined focus on gender, games and play--and will be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary literature, Scottish literature and science fiction.
The Quarry
Author: Iain M. Banks
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 0316281840
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Eighteen-year-old Kit is weird: big, strange, odd, socially disabled, on a spectrum that stretches from "highly gifted" at one end, to "nutter" at the other. At least Kit knows who his father is; he and Guy live together in a decaying country house on the unstable brink of a vast quarry. His mother's identity is another matter. Now, though, his father's dying, and old friends are gathering for one last time. "Uncle" Paul's a media lawyer now; Rob and Ali are upwardly mobile corporate bunnies; pretty, hopeful Pris is a single mother; Haze is still living up to his drug-inspired name twenty years on; and fierce, protective Hol is a gifted if acerbic critic. As young film students they lived at Willoughtree House with Guy, and they've all come back because they want something. Kit, too, has his own ulterior motives. Before his father dies he wants to know who his mother is, and what's on the mysterious tape they're all looking for. But most of all he wants to stop time and keep his father alive. Fast-paced, gripping and savagely funny, The Quarry is a virtuoso performance whose soaring riffs on the inexhaustible marvel of human perception and rage against the dying of the light will stand among Iain Banks' greatest work.
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 0316281840
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Eighteen-year-old Kit is weird: big, strange, odd, socially disabled, on a spectrum that stretches from "highly gifted" at one end, to "nutter" at the other. At least Kit knows who his father is; he and Guy live together in a decaying country house on the unstable brink of a vast quarry. His mother's identity is another matter. Now, though, his father's dying, and old friends are gathering for one last time. "Uncle" Paul's a media lawyer now; Rob and Ali are upwardly mobile corporate bunnies; pretty, hopeful Pris is a single mother; Haze is still living up to his drug-inspired name twenty years on; and fierce, protective Hol is a gifted if acerbic critic. As young film students they lived at Willoughtree House with Guy, and they've all come back because they want something. Kit, too, has his own ulterior motives. Before his father dies he wants to know who his mother is, and what's on the mysterious tape they're all looking for. But most of all he wants to stop time and keep his father alive. Fast-paced, gripping and savagely funny, The Quarry is a virtuoso performance whose soaring riffs on the inexhaustible marvel of human perception and rage against the dying of the light will stand among Iain Banks' greatest work.
Iain M. Banks
Author: Paul Kincaid
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252099567
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
The 1987 publication of Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas helped trigger the British renaissance of radical hard science fiction and influenced a generation of New Space Opera masters. The thirteen SF novels that followed inspired an avid fandom and intense intellectual engagement while Banks's mainstream books vaulted him to the top of the Scottish literary scene. Paul Kincaid has written the first study of Iain M. Banks to explore the confluence of his SF and literary techniques and sensibilities. As Kincaid shows, the two powerful aspects of Banks's work flowed into each other, blurring a line that critics too often treat as clear-cut. Banks's gift for black humor and a honed skepticism regarding politics and religion found expression even as he orchestrated the vast, galaxy-spanning vistas in his novels of the Culture. In examining Banks's entire SF oeuvre, Kincaid unlocks the set of ideas Banks drew upon, ideas that spoke to an unusually varied readership that praised him as a visionary and reveled in the distinctive character of his works. Entertaining and broad in scope, Iain M. Banks offers new insights on one of the most admired figures in contemporary science fiction.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252099567
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
The 1987 publication of Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas helped trigger the British renaissance of radical hard science fiction and influenced a generation of New Space Opera masters. The thirteen SF novels that followed inspired an avid fandom and intense intellectual engagement while Banks's mainstream books vaulted him to the top of the Scottish literary scene. Paul Kincaid has written the first study of Iain M. Banks to explore the confluence of his SF and literary techniques and sensibilities. As Kincaid shows, the two powerful aspects of Banks's work flowed into each other, blurring a line that critics too often treat as clear-cut. Banks's gift for black humor and a honed skepticism regarding politics and religion found expression even as he orchestrated the vast, galaxy-spanning vistas in his novels of the Culture. In examining Banks's entire SF oeuvre, Kincaid unlocks the set of ideas Banks drew upon, ideas that spoke to an unusually varied readership that praised him as a visionary and reveled in the distinctive character of his works. Entertaining and broad in scope, Iain M. Banks offers new insights on one of the most admired figures in contemporary science fiction.
The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks
Author: Simone Caroti
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476620407
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
This critical history of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels covers the series from its inception in the 1970s to the The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), published less than a year before Banks' death. It considers Banks' origins as a writer, the development of his politics and ethics, his struggles to become a published author, his eventual success with The Wasp Factory (1984) and the publication of the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987). His 1994 essay "A Few Notes on the Culture" is included, along with a range of critical responses to the 10 Culture books he published in his lifetime and a discussion of the series' status as utopian literature. Banks was a complex man, both in his everyday life and on the page. This work aims at understanding the Culture series not only as a fundamental contribution to science fiction but also as a product of its creator's responses to the turbulent times he lived in.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476620407
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
This critical history of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels covers the series from its inception in the 1970s to the The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), published less than a year before Banks' death. It considers Banks' origins as a writer, the development of his politics and ethics, his struggles to become a published author, his eventual success with The Wasp Factory (1984) and the publication of the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987). His 1994 essay "A Few Notes on the Culture" is included, along with a range of critical responses to the 10 Culture books he published in his lifetime and a discussion of the series' status as utopian literature. Banks was a complex man, both in his everyday life and on the page. This work aims at understanding the Culture series not only as a fundamental contribution to science fiction but also as a product of its creator's responses to the turbulent times he lived in.
Transgression and Its Limits
Author: Matt Foley
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527551938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
Transgression and Its Limits is a long overdue collection that reads the complex relationship between artistic transgressions and the limits of law and the subject. In mid-twentieth century theoretical understandings of transgressive culture, it is the existence of the limit that guarantees the possibility and success of the transgression. While the limit calls for obedience, it also tempts with the possibility of violation. To breach the limits of the acceptable is to simultaneously define them. However, this classical understanding of transgression may no longer apply under the conditions of post-modernity, late-capitalism, and the simulated or empty transgressions that this period of the simulacra encourages. Context becomes paramount in reading the myriad forms of transgression that encompass politics, aesthetics and the ethics of the obscene; while a range of theoretical perspectives are employed in order to elucidate the economies at work underneath the seemingly transgressive act. The essays selected include explorations of transgression in cinema, photography, art, law, music, philosophy, technology, and both classical and contemporary literature and drama. Professor Fred Botting’s (co-author of Bataille and The Tarantinian Ethics) analysis of transgression from Bataille, to Baudrillard and Ballard compliments the collection’s concerns about the status of transgression. Aside from fourteen critical essays on topics such as early-modern drama, George Bataille, J. G. Ballard, the female necrophilic, “torture-porn” cinema, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Salvador Dali, there is also a new discussion of transgression between novelist Iain Banks and Professor Roderick Watson (Emeritus at the University of Stirling). With its focus on the paradoxical nature of the impulse to transgress, as well at its wide-ranging historical and artistic concerns, Transgression and Its Limits is a landmark book in a rapidly developing scholarly field.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527551938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
Book Description
Transgression and Its Limits is a long overdue collection that reads the complex relationship between artistic transgressions and the limits of law and the subject. In mid-twentieth century theoretical understandings of transgressive culture, it is the existence of the limit that guarantees the possibility and success of the transgression. While the limit calls for obedience, it also tempts with the possibility of violation. To breach the limits of the acceptable is to simultaneously define them. However, this classical understanding of transgression may no longer apply under the conditions of post-modernity, late-capitalism, and the simulated or empty transgressions that this period of the simulacra encourages. Context becomes paramount in reading the myriad forms of transgression that encompass politics, aesthetics and the ethics of the obscene; while a range of theoretical perspectives are employed in order to elucidate the economies at work underneath the seemingly transgressive act. The essays selected include explorations of transgression in cinema, photography, art, law, music, philosophy, technology, and both classical and contemporary literature and drama. Professor Fred Botting’s (co-author of Bataille and The Tarantinian Ethics) analysis of transgression from Bataille, to Baudrillard and Ballard compliments the collection’s concerns about the status of transgression. Aside from fourteen critical essays on topics such as early-modern drama, George Bataille, J. G. Ballard, the female necrophilic, “torture-porn” cinema, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Salvador Dali, there is also a new discussion of transgression between novelist Iain Banks and Professor Roderick Watson (Emeritus at the University of Stirling). With its focus on the paradoxical nature of the impulse to transgress, as well at its wide-ranging historical and artistic concerns, Transgression and Its Limits is a landmark book in a rapidly developing scholarly field.
The Culture of "the Culture"
Author: Joseph S. Norman
Publisher:
ISBN: 1789621747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
The Culture of 'The Culture' is the first critical monograph focussed solely on Iain M. Banks's 'Culture' series, exploring his political, philosophical and literary thought, and arguing that the Culture is both a harmonious, socialist alternative form of globalisation and a critique of our neo-liberal present.
Publisher:
ISBN: 1789621747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
The Culture of 'The Culture' is the first critical monograph focussed solely on Iain M. Banks's 'Culture' series, exploring his political, philosophical and literary thought, and arguing that the Culture is both a harmonious, socialist alternative form of globalisation and a critique of our neo-liberal present.
The Science Fiction Handbook
Author: Nick Hubble
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 147253896X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
As we move through the 21st century, the importance of science fiction to the study of English Literature is becoming increasingly apparent. The Science Fiction Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the genre and how to study it for students new to the field. In particular, it provides detailed entries on major writers in the SF field who might be encountered on university-level English Literature courses, ranging from H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick, to Doris Lessing and Geoff Ryman. Other features include an historical timeline, sections on key writers, critics and critical terms, and case studies of both literary and critical works. In the later sections of the book, the changing nature of the science fiction canon and its growing role in relation to the wider categories of English Literature are discussed in depth introducing the reader to the latest critical thinking on the field.
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 147253896X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
As we move through the 21st century, the importance of science fiction to the study of English Literature is becoming increasingly apparent. The Science Fiction Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the genre and how to study it for students new to the field. In particular, it provides detailed entries on major writers in the SF field who might be encountered on university-level English Literature courses, ranging from H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick, to Doris Lessing and Geoff Ryman. Other features include an historical timeline, sections on key writers, critics and critical terms, and case studies of both literary and critical works. In the later sections of the book, the changing nature of the science fiction canon and its growing role in relation to the wider categories of English Literature are discussed in depth introducing the reader to the latest critical thinking on the field.
Contemporary Scottish Gothic
Author: T. Baker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137457201
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
An innovative reading of a wide range of contemporary Scottish novels in relation to literary tradition and modern philosophy, Contemporary Scottish Gothic provides a new approach to Scottish fiction and Gothic literature, and offers a fuller picture of contemporary Scottish Gothic than any previous text.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137457201
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Book Description
An innovative reading of a wide range of contemporary Scottish novels in relation to literary tradition and modern philosophy, Contemporary Scottish Gothic provides a new approach to Scottish fiction and Gothic literature, and offers a fuller picture of contemporary Scottish Gothic than any previous text.
Representing and (De)Constructing Borderlands
Author: Weronika Łaszkiewicz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443888605
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
This volume stems from the assumption that broadly-understood borderlands, as well as peripheries, provinces or uttermost ends of different kinds, are abodes of significant culture-generating forces. From the academic point of view, their undeniable appeal lies in the fact that they constitute spaces of mutual interactions and enable new cultural phenomena to surface, grow or decline, and, as such, are worth thorough and constant scrutiny. However, they also provide the setting for radical clashes between ideologies, languages, religions, customs, and, as the media report every single day, armies or guerrilla units. Living within such areas of creative dynamics and destructive friction (or visiting them, even vicariously as the contributors to the volume do) is tantamount to exposing oneself to a difference. One’s response to this difference – either in the form of rejection or, more preferably, acceptance (or a mixture of both) – is not merely an index of one’s tolerance (a platitudinised term itself that all too often hides an attitude of comfortable indifference), but an affirmation of humaneness. Borderlands are paradoxical, if not aporetic, loci. They simultaneously connote territories on either side of a border, in a literal sense, and a vague, intermediate state or region, in a metaphorical sense. Encapsulating the idea of border, the term indicates both inescapable nearness and unavoidable (or perhaps unbridgeable) separateness. The studies included in the volume focus on various aspects of borderland art and literature, on analyses of selected works, and on the peculiarities of cultural and literary representations. Thus, the borderland landscape, both literal and metaphorical, comes to be seen as a factor contributing to the emergence of new, distinct and identifiable themes and motifs, as well as theoretical frameworks.
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443888605
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
This volume stems from the assumption that broadly-understood borderlands, as well as peripheries, provinces or uttermost ends of different kinds, are abodes of significant culture-generating forces. From the academic point of view, their undeniable appeal lies in the fact that they constitute spaces of mutual interactions and enable new cultural phenomena to surface, grow or decline, and, as such, are worth thorough and constant scrutiny. However, they also provide the setting for radical clashes between ideologies, languages, religions, customs, and, as the media report every single day, armies or guerrilla units. Living within such areas of creative dynamics and destructive friction (or visiting them, even vicariously as the contributors to the volume do) is tantamount to exposing oneself to a difference. One’s response to this difference – either in the form of rejection or, more preferably, acceptance (or a mixture of both) – is not merely an index of one’s tolerance (a platitudinised term itself that all too often hides an attitude of comfortable indifference), but an affirmation of humaneness. Borderlands are paradoxical, if not aporetic, loci. They simultaneously connote territories on either side of a border, in a literal sense, and a vague, intermediate state or region, in a metaphorical sense. Encapsulating the idea of border, the term indicates both inescapable nearness and unavoidable (or perhaps unbridgeable) separateness. The studies included in the volume focus on various aspects of borderland art and literature, on analyses of selected works, and on the peculiarities of cultural and literary representations. Thus, the borderland landscape, both literal and metaphorical, comes to be seen as a factor contributing to the emergence of new, distinct and identifiable themes and motifs, as well as theoretical frameworks.