Author: Elaine Freedgood Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691227810 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fiction Now praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds Enough, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction. Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, Freedgood demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. She analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. She concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature. By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, Worlds Enough suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.
Author: Roger Thurow Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com ISBN: 1458767337 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 558
Book Description
For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the ''Green Revolution'' succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year - most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse. In the west we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Thurow & Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European policies conspired to keep Africa hungry and unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to keep famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.
Author: Dan Simmons Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061809438 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
The award-winning author of the Hyperion series shifts between dark fantasy, space opera, hard sci fi & mainstream fiction in this five-novella collection. An extraordinary artist with few rivals in his chosen arena, Dan Simmons possesses a restless talent that continually presses boundaries while tantalizing the mind and touching the soul. Now he offers us a superb quintet of novellas—five dazzling masterworks of speculative fiction, including “Orphans of the Helix,” his award-winning return to the Hyperion Universe—that demonstrates the unique mastery, breathtaking invention, and flawless craftsmanship of one of contemporary fiction’s true greats. Human colonists seeking something other than godhood encounter their long-lost “cousins” . . . and an ancient scourge. A devastated man in suicide’s embrace is caught up in a bizarre cat-and-mouse game with a young woman possessing a world-ending power. The distant descendants of a once-oppressed people learn a chilling lesson about the persistence of the past. A terrifying ascent up the frigid, snow-swept slopes of K2 shatters preconceptions and reveals the true natures of four climbers, one of whom is not human. At the intersection of a grand past and a threadbare present, an aging American in Russia confronts his own mortality as he glimpses a wondrous future.
Author: Clea Simon Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd ISBN: 1780109091 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
A Boston music journalist-turned-corporate writer investigates the suspicious death of a friend from her punk past in this noir mystery. The Boston club scene may be home to a cast of outsiders and misfits, but it’s where Tara Winton belongs—the world she’s been part of for the past twenty years. Now, one of the old gang is dead, having fallen down the basement stairs at his home. With her journalist’s instincts, Tara senses there’s something not quite right about Frank’s supposedly accidental death. When she asks questions, she begins to uncover some disturbing truths about the club scene in its heyday. Beneath the heady, sexually charged atmosphere lurked something darker. Twenty years ago, there was another death. Could there be a connection? Is there a killer still at large…and could Tara herself be at risk? “[A] a fascinating reminiscence of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”—Kirkus Reviews “Simon writes with authority and affection about a lost world. Highly recommended”—Catriona McPherson, award-winning author of Strangers at the Gate “World Enough, is steeped in the 1980s Boston rock scene, with its sticky-floored clubs, radio stations dusted in coke, stars and hangers-on, seedy barbacks, and all the attendant sin and debauch that emerges after midnight when you can still hear the show ringing in your ears.”—Boston Globe “Simon's dark story shimmers with brilliance—and stands as her finest.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch
Author: Gary Westfahl Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 031307741X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
With our lives firmly controlled by the steady pace of time, humans have yearned for ways to escape its constraints, and authors have responded with narratives about traveling far into the past or future, reversing the flow of time, or creating alternate universes where Napoleon was triumphant at Waterloo or the South won the Civil War. Writers ranging from Dante and Lewis Carroll to Philip K. Dick and Martin Amis have probed into the workings of time, and an overwhelming desire to master time reverberates throughout popular culture. This book considers how imaginative works involving time and time travel reflect ongoing scientific concerns and examine the human condition. The scope of the volume is unusually wide, covering such topics as Dante, the major novels of the 19th century, and stories and films of the 1990s. The book concludes with a lengthy bibliography of short stories and novels, films and television programs, and nonfiction works that feature time travel or speculations about time. With a roster of contributors that includes several of the field's major scholars, this book offers many new insights into this fascinating subject.
Author: Maureen N. McLane Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 1466880805 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 144
Book Description
In World Enough, Maureen N. McLane maps a universe of feeling and thought via skyscapes, city strolls, lunar vistas, and passages through environments given and built. These poems explore how we come to know ourselves—sensually, intellectually, politically, biologically, historically, and anthropologically. Moving from the most delicate address to the broadest salutation, World Enough takes us from New England to New York to France to the moon. McLane fuses song and critique, giving us poetry as "musical thought," in Carlyle's phrase. Shuttling between idyll and disaster, between old forms and open experiment, these are restless, probing, exacting poems that aim to take the measure of—and to give a measure for—where we are. McLane moves through many forms and creates her own, invoking the French Revolution alongside convolutions of the heart and revolutions of the moon. Shifting effortlessly between the species and the self, between the sentient surround and the peculiar pulse within, World Enough attests to experience both singular and shared: "not that I was alive / but that we were."
Author: Joe Haldeman Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1497692393 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 407
Book Description
By the author of The Forever War: In the decades following the ultimate conflict, the last remnants of humanity face extinction on a doomed voyage to a new home in the stars, in the momentous conclusion to Joe Haldeman’s acclaimed Worlds saga The Earth is no more, an uninhabitable shell following the one-day war that obliterated the population. In the decades that followed, the surviving Worlds orbiting the dead planet have become the last refuge of humankind. With the discovery of a possibly habitable planet in a distant star system, ten thousand brave colonists are preparing to depart from New New York aboard the interstellar vessel Newhome. Among them is Marianne O’Hara, who will ultimately control the fate of what remains of the human race. The momentous voyage is plagued from the start by ignorance and sabotage, and by the dark tenets of a nihilistic religion dedicated to ultimate destruction. But despite the many trials and tragedies, the spacefarers—and particularly Marianne and her loved ones—will be forced to endure. There is no turning back once the journey begins . . . for soon there will be nowhere left to return to. With Worlds Enough and Time, Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Joe Haldeman completes his magnificent story of humankind’s destruction and rebirth, capping off his acclaimed trilogy with a truly transcendent tale of destiny, courage, selflessness, dedication, and the resilience of humankind. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joe Haldeman including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
Author: Rob Dietz Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0415820936 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
This powerful book sets out arguments and an agenda of policy proposals for achieving a sustainable and prosperous, but non-growing economy, also known as a steady-state economy. The authors describe a plan for solving the major social and environmental problems which face us today on a finite planet with a rapidly growing population.
Author: Nicholas Murray Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 0312242778 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
Andrew Marvell (1621-78) enjoys an unrivaled reputation based on the popularity of poems like To His Coy Mistress, yet his life has often seemed puzzling. In the first fully comprehensive biography since the 1960s, the poet emerges as an important figure in the political, as well as the poetic life of his time. Drawing on recent advances in knowledge, this biography shrewdly explores Marvell's complex and elusive personality.
Author: Elaine Freedgood
Author: James Kahn
Author: Roger Thurow
Author: Dan Simmons
Author: Clea Simon
Author: Gary Westfahl
Author: Maureen N. McLane
Author: Joe Haldeman
Author: Rob Dietz
Author: Nicholas Murray