Author: David RUSSENPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Book Description
Iter Lunare: or, a Voyage to the Moon. Containing some considerations on the nature of that planet: the possibility of getting thither. With other ... conceits about the inhabitants, etc
Author: David RUSSENIter Lunare
Author: David RussenPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
Origins of Futuristic Fiction
Author: Paul K. AlkonPublisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337722
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age. Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, the forgotten writings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are the precursors of such well-known masterpieces of the form as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984. The first secular story to break the imaginative barrier against tales of the future, Epigone marked the emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, The Year 2440, The Last Man, and The World As It Will Be. Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional Le roman de l'avenir, "the novel of the future." Both a narrative of the future and a poetics of the new genre, this book identified in the previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which the possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In the introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of the futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define the aesthetics of a major transformation in the relation between literature and time still stands as the basis for the poetics of futuristic fiction. Tracing the early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the key works of the earliest writers of the genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about the formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of the future could achieve their full power in the works of later novelists.
Iter Lunare: Or, A Voyage to the Moon
Author: David RussenPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Interplanetary voyages
Languages : en
Pages : 139
Book Description
Iter lunare or a voyage to the moon
Author: David RussenIter Lunare: Or, A Voyage to the Moon
Author: David RussenPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Interplanetary voyages
Languages : en
Pages : 147
Book Description
Wonder and Science
Author: Mary Baine CampbellPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501705067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383
Book Description
During the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by the proliferation of new worlds—geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by natural philosophy, or science. The response to incredible overseas encounters and to the profound technological, religious, economic, and intellectual changes occurring in Europe was one of nearly overwhelming wonder, expressed in a rich variety of texts. In the need to manage this wonder, to harness this imaginative overabundance, Mary Baine Campbell finds both the sensational beauty of early scientific works and the beginnings of the divergence of the sciences—particularly geography, astronomy, and anthropology—from the writing of fiction. Campbell's learned and brilliantly perceptive new book analyzes a cross section of texts in which worlds were made and unmade; these texts include cosmographies, colonial reports, works of natural philosophy and natural history, fantastic voyages, exotic fictions, and confessions. Among the authors she discusses are André Thevet, Thomas Hariot, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. Campbell's emphasis is on developments in England and France, but she considers works in languages other than English or French which were well known in the polyglot book culture of the time. With over thirty well-chosen illustrations, Wonder and Science enhances our understanding of the culture of early modern Europe, the history of science, and the development of literary forms, including the novel and ethnography.
The Last Frontier
Author: Karl S. GuthkePublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501745875
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 419
Book Description
The existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life has been a subject of debate since the dawn of recorded history. The Last Frontier, originally published in German in 1983 and now available in Helen Atkins's sensitive English translation, traces the development of the idea that Earth is not the only planet inhabited by intelligent beings, but that there might be a plurality or even an infinity of "worlds" with human or humanoid life. Focusing on the seventeenth to the twentieth century and taking into account theological, philosophical, scientific, popular, and literary writings from American, British, French, and German sources, Karl S. Guthke demonstrates the continuing importance of this question to the process of human self-definition.
Empirical Wonder
Author: Riccardo CapoferroPublisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783034303262
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
"Empirical Wonder" focuses on the emergence of the fantastic in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture. To do so, it preliminarily formulates an inclusive theory of the fantastic centering on nineteenth- and twentieth-century genres. The origins of such genres, this study argues, reside in the epistemological shift that attended the rise of empiricism, and their formal and historical identity becomes fully visible against the backdrop of pre-modern culture. While in pre-modern world-views no clear-cut distinction between the natural and the super- or the non-natural existed, the new epistemology entailed the emergence of boundaries between the empirical and the non-empirical, which determined, on the level of literary production, the opposition between the realistic and the non-realistic. Along with these boundaries, however, emerged the need to overcome them. In the seventeenth century, the religious supernatural and the existence of monsters were increasingly being questioned by modern science, and a variety of attempts were made to enact a mediation between what was perceived as unmistakably real and the problematic phenomena that were threatened by the empirical outlook: apparition narratives were used, for instance, to persuade skeptics of the presence of otherworldly beings, and travelogues often presented monsters as if they were empirical entities. Most of these attempts became soon incompatible with scientific culture, more and more normative, so the task of mediation was assumed by literature. Apparition narratives, originally conceived as factual texts, were progressively aestheticized; analogously, imaginary voyages grew different from fictionalized travelogues -- the success of Gulliver's Travels resetting the genre's main conventions and establishing a distinctly fictional model. Both apparition narratives and imaginary voyages emerged as self-consciously literary, that is, aesthetic, genres, bridging the gap between the empirical and the non-empirical. The origins of the fantastic ended when its mediatory task gave way to other concerns. Although on a residual level the mediation between the empirical and the non-empirical persisted, the fantastic's main preoccupations changed: in imaginary voyages its distinctive devices were used to dramatize or validate colonial practices, and Gothic fiction disconnected itself from the moral framework typical of apparition narratives.
Alternate Worlds
Author: James GunnPublisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476673535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
Alternate Worlds was first published in 1975 and became an instant classic, winning a Hugo award. This third edition brings the history of science fiction up to date, covering developments over the past forty years--a period that has seen the advent of technologies only imagined in the genre's Golden Age. As a literature of change, science fiction has become ever more meaningful, presaging dangers to humanity and, as Alvin Toffler wrote, guarding against "the premature arrival of the future." The world has begun to recognize science fiction in many different ways, incorporating its elements in products, visual media and huge conventions.