The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science
Author: Neel Ahuja
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030482448

This handbook illustrates the evolution of literature and science, in collaboration and contestation, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essays it gathers question the charged rhetoric that pits science against the humanities while also demonstrating the ways in which the convergence of literary and scientific approaches strengthens cultural analyses of colonialism, race, sex, labor, state formation, and environmental destruction. The broad scope of this collection explores the shifting relations between literature and science that have shaped our own cultural moment, sometimes in ways that create a problematic hierarchy of knowledge and other times in ways that encourage fruitful interdisciplinary investigations, innovative modes of knowledge production, and politically charged calls for social justice. Across units focused on epistemologies, techniques and methods, ethics and politics, and forms and genres, the chapters address problems ranging across epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnology, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, physics, and computational and surveillance technologies. Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism
Author: Stefan Herbrechter
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 1233
Release: 2022-11-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031049586

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is a major reference work on the paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism, humanity, and the human posed by the erosion of the traditional demarcations between the human and nonhuman. This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities. With its focus on the posthuman as a figure, on posthumanism as a social discourse, and on posthumanisation as an on-going historical and ontological process, the volume highlights the relationship between the humanities and sciences. The essays engage with posthumanism in connection with subfields like the environmental humanities, health humanities, animal studies, and disability studies. The book also traces the historical representations and understanding of posthumanism across time. Additionally, the contributions address genre and forms such as autobiography, games, art, film, museums, and topics such as climate change, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and biopolitics to name a few. This handbook considers posthumanism’s impact across disciplines and areas of study.

Science Fiction in Translation

Science Fiction in Translation
Author: Ian Campbell
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2022-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3030842088

Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation focuses on the process of translation and its implications. The volume explores the translation of works of science fiction (SF) from one language to another and the translation of SF tropes, terms, and ideas of SF theory into cultures outside the West. Providing a comprehensive examination of the state of translation into English, the essays consider how representative the body of translated work of SF is from the source language/culture. It also considers the social, political, and economic choices in selecting a work to translate. The book illustrates the dramatic growth both in SF production outside the Anglosphere, the translation of works from other languages into English, and the practice of translating English-language SF into other languages. Altogether, the essays map the theory, practice, and business of SF translation around the world.

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek
Author: Leimar Garcia-Siino
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 673
Release: 2022-07-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000569969

The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek offers a synoptic overview of Star Trek, its history, its influence, and the scholarly response to the franchise, as well as possibilities for further study. This volume aims to bridge the fields of science fiction and (trans)media studies, bringing together the many ways in which Star Trek franchising, fandom, storytelling, politics, history, and society have been represented. Seeking to propel further scholarly engagement, this Handbook offers new critical insights into the vast range of Star Trek texts, narrative strategies, audience responses, and theoretical themes and issues. This compilation includes both established and emerging scholars to foster a spirit of communal, trans-generational growth in the field and to present diversity to a traditional realm of science fiction studies.

Literature, Science, and Public Policy

Literature, Science, and Public Policy
Author: Jay Clayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009263552

Literature, Science, and Public Policy shows how literature can influence public policy concerning scientific controversies in genetics and other areas. Literature brings unique insights to issues involving cloning, GMOs, gene editing, and more by dramatizing their full human complexity. Literature's value for public policy is demonstrated by striking examples that range from the literary response to evolution in the Victorian era through the modern synthesis of evolution and genetics in the mid-twentieth century to present-day genomics. Outlining practical steps for humanists who want to help shape public policy, this book offers vivid readings of novels by H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gary Shteyngart, and others that illustrate the important insights that literary studies can bring to debates about science and society. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science

The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science
Author: Howard Marchitello
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137463619

This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.

Literature and Institutions of Welfare

Literature and Institutions of Welfare
Author: Jess Cotton
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2024-12-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1843847310

Perspectives on the ways in which welfarist ideology has underpinned the teaching, reading and production of literature from the 1930s to the present. The welfare state in Britain established a new level of access to literature as a public good alongside other national resources that were grounded in a principle of democratic egalitarianism: the National Health Service, secondary education, promises of full employment and new housing structures. This volume charts the impact of the founding of the welfare state on the teaching, reading and production of literature, and the legacy of this social democratic vision of literature, from the 1930s to the present day; it is especially concerned with the representational possibilities, the social arrangements and political claims that welfare makes possible. Individual contributions consider the ways in which the history of literature is related to the history of welfare; and how it shaped the literary culture that emerged during these years; and how literature has communicated the value and character of the welfare state, moving, like the literature they examine, between a disenchantment with the institutions of welfare and an urgent need to articulate welfare's vision of social repair. Amongst the particular authors discussed are Raymond Williams, T.S. Eliot and Caryl Phillips, as well as an evaluation of the publisher Virago's contribution to the women's movement.

The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English

The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English
Author: Matthew Stratton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 661
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000872718

The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English provides an interdisciplinary overview of the vibrant connections between literature, politics, and the political. Featuring contributions from 44 scholars across a variety of disciplines, the collection is divided into five parts: Connecting Literature and Politics; Constituting the Polis; Periods and Histories; Media, Genre, and Techne; and Spaces. Organized around familiar concepts—such as humans, animals, workers, empires, nations, and states—rather than theoretical schools, it will help readers to understand the ways in which literature affects our understanding of who is capable of political action, who has been included in and excluded from politics, and how different spaces are imagined to be political. It also offers a series of engagements with key moments in literary and political history from 1066 to the present in order to assess and reassess the utility of conventional modes of periodization. The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of literary studies, which will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions within broader contexts.

No Other Planet

No Other Planet
Author: Mathias Thaler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2022-09-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009034553

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. This groundbreaking, timely book examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.