Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film

Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film
Author: Kirk Combe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2020-12-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000289834

Download Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Since 1980, when neoliberal and neoconservative forces began their hostile takeover of western culture, a new type of political satire has emerged that works to unmask and deter those toxic doctrines. Literary and cultural critic Kirk Combe calls this new form of satire the Rant. The Rant is grim, highly imaginative, and complex in its blending of genres. It mixes facets of satire, science fiction, and monster tale to produce widely consumed spectacles—major studio movies, popular television/streaming series, bestselling novels—designed to disturb and to provoke. The Rant targets what Combe calls the Regime. Simply put, the Regime is the sum of the dangerous social, economic, and political orthodoxies spurred on by neoliberal and neoconservative polity. Such practices include free-market capitalism, corporatism, militarism, religiosity, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and so on. In the Rant, then, we have a unique and wholly contemporary genre of political expression and protest: speculative satire.

Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction

Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction
Author: Anna Neill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-06-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000392724

Download Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Victorian anthropology made two apparently contradictory claims: it distinguished "civilized man" from animals and "primitive" humans and it linked them though descent. Paradoxically, it was by placing human history in a deep past shaped by minute, incremental changes (rather than at the apex of Providential order) that evolutionary anthropology could assert a new form of human exceptionalism and define civilized humanity against both human and nonhuman savagery. This book shows how fantastic Victorian and early Edwardian fictions—utopias, dystopias, nonsense literature, gothic horror, and children’s fables—untether human and nonhuman animal agency from this increasingly orthodox account of the deep past. As they imagine worlds that lift the evolutionary constraints on development and as they collapse evolution into lived time, these stories reveal (and even occupy) dynamic landscapes of cognitive descent that contest prevailing anthropological ideas about race, culture, and species difference.

Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody

Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody
Author: Kerstin-Anja Münderlein
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000487776

Download Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book brings together an analysis of the theoretical connection of genre, reception, and frame theory and a practical demonstration thereof, using a set of parodies of the first wave of the Gothic novel, ranging from well-known titles such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, to little known and researched titles such as Mary Charlton’s Rosella. Münderlein traces the development of socio-political debates conducted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on female roles, behaviour, and subversion from the subtly subversive Gothic novel to the Gothic parody. Combining two major areas of research, literary criticism and Gothic studies, the book provides both a new take on an ongoing debate in literary criticism as well as an in-depth study of a virtually neglected aspect of Gothic studies, the Gothic parody.

The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction

The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction
Author: Emily Cox-Palmer-White
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2021-01-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000329704

Download The Biopolitics of Gender in Science Fiction Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Questioning essentialist forms of feminist discourse, this work develops an innovative approach to gender and feminist theory by drawing together the work of key feminist and gender theorists, such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. By analysing representations of the female cyborg figure, the gynoid, in science fiction literature, television, film and videogames, the work acknowledges its normative and subversive properties while also calling for a new feminist politics of selfhood and autonomy implied by the posthuman qualities of the female machine.

Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J.G. Ballard

Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J.G. Ballard
Author: Carolyn Lau
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2023-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100091237X

Download Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J.G. Ballard Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book proposes that Ballard’s novels extrapolate the formation of a posthuman subjectivity that is centred around an affirmative understanding of what a human body can do. This new subjectivity transforms constraints and prescribed desires into creative openings in a hyper-mediated control society that conditions docile bodies through technology and consumerism. Set in surrealist predicaments in postwar affluent Western societies, Ballard’s novels remind us of the fragile veneer of order in the familiar every day. In these moments of crisis, complacent characters are compelled to undergo a process of defamiliarisation and transformation of their understanding of the self and the body. The ability to form new relationships with the unfamiliar is imperative to survival in a hostile environment. Ballard delineates both the possibilities and obstacles of forming these relationships. In particular, the author attributes the failure to do so to the irreconcilable contradictions of late capitalism.

Motherless Creations

Motherless Creations
Author: Wendy C. Nielsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2022-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000582418

Download Motherless Creations Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers’ sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.

Lovecraft in the 21st Century

Lovecraft in the 21st Century
Author: Antonio Alcala Gonzalez
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000531651

Download Lovecraft in the 21st Century Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Lovecraft in the 21st Century assembles reflections from a wide range of perspectives on the significance of Lovecraft’s influence in contemporary times. Building on a focus centered on the Anthropocene, adaptation, and visual media, the chapters in this collection focus on the following topics: Adaptation of Lovecraft’s legacy in theater, television, film, graphic narratives, video games and game artwork The connection between the writer’s legacy and his life Reading Lovecraft in light of contemporary criticism about capitalism, the posthuman, and the Anthropocene How contemporary authors have worked through the implicit racial and sexual politics in Lovecraft’s fiction Reading Lovecraft’s fiction in light of contemporary approaches to gender and sexuality

The Specter and the Speculative

The Specter and the Speculative
Author: Mae G. Henderson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 197883408X

Download The Specter and the Speculative Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction
Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2022-05-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3030961923

Download Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction explores how much technology has reshaped feminist conversations in the decades since Donna Haraway’s influential “Cyborg Manifesto” was published. With sections exploring reproductive technologies, new ways of imagining femininity and motherhood via artificial means, queer readings of gender as a social technology, and posthuman visions of a world beyond gender, this book demonstrates how feminist speculative fiction offers an urgently needed response to the intersections of women’s bodies and technology. This collection brings together authors from Europe, Japan, the US and the UK to consider speculative films and texts, reproductive technologies and food futures, and opportunities to rethink family, aging, gender and sexuality, and community through feminist speculative fiction, a social technology for building better futures.

Shades of Violence: Multidisciplinary Reflections on Violence in Literature, Culture and Arts

Shades of Violence: Multidisciplinary Reflections on Violence in Literature, Culture and Arts
Author: Sümeyra Buran
Publisher: Transnational Press London
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2023-12-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180135149X

Download Shades of Violence: Multidisciplinary Reflections on Violence in Literature, Culture and Arts Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

"Shades of Violence: Multidisciplinary Reflections on Violence in Literature, Culture, and Arts" explores the tapestry of violence across diverse forms of artistic expression, expertly edited by Sümeyra Buran, Mahinur Akşehir, Neslihan Köroğlu, and Barış Ağır. From the gripping introduction to the thought-provoking chapters contributed by an array of scholars, this collection navigates the multifaceted dimensions of violence. Muhsin Yanar's exploration of Don DeLillo's work calls for a posthumanist stance against violence, while Begüm Tuğlu Atamer questions the justification of violence in Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus." The anthology expands its reach, examining slow violence in John Burnside's "Glister" (Derya Biderci Dinç), portraying environmental violence in Bilge Karasu's "Hurt Me Not" (Özlem Akyol), and unraveling psychological violence in Kate Chopin's stories (Senem Üstün Kaya). Contributors delve into theatre violence (Gamze Şentürk Tatar), indigenous struggles against violence in Cheran, Mexico (Kristy L. Masten), and the complex interplay of power in Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange" (Şebnem Düzgün). The anthology also explores the contested space of the Black queer body (Taylor Ajowele Duckett), Nietzschean aggression (Yunus Tuncel), and various forms of violence in Giovanni Verga's short stories (Simone Pettine). "Shades of Violence" emerges as an indispensable exploration of violence's nuanced manifestations, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding through its diverse and insightful perspectives.