Download or read book Genetics and the Literary Imagination written by Clare Hanson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. This is the first book to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed which had a major impact not only on biological science but on wider culture. As figures like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and (post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical implications of this holistic biological perspective. As advances in postgenomics, especially epigenetics, provoke increasing public interest and concern, this book offers a timely analysis of debates that have fundamentally altered our understanding of what it means to be human.

Download or read book Genetics and the Literary Imagination written by Clare Hanson and published by Oxford Textual Perspectives. This book was released on 2020-05-13 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed which had a major impact not only on biological science but on wider culture. As figures like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and (post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical implications of this holistic biological perspective.

Download or read book Genetics and the Novel written by Paul Hamann-Rose and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H G Wells written by Michael R. Page and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science,' beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining the interchange between emerging scientific ideas-specifically evolution and ecology-new technologies, and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, Page shows how British writers from Darwin to H.G. Wells confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world, of human species, and of the self. The wide range of authors covered in Page's ambitious study permits him to explore an impressive array of topics that include the role of the Romantic era in the molding of scientific and cultural perspectives; the engagement of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley with questions raised by contemporary science; Mary Shelley's conflicted views on the unfolding prospects of modernity; and how Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, and W.H. Hudson responded to the implications of evolutionary theory. Page concludes with the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, to demonstrate how evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the century.

Download or read book Biofictions written by Lejla Kucukalic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-22 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biofictions introduces three novel concepts: ‘biofiction,’ ‘bioimagination,’ and ‘biodiscourse’ to talk about intersections of literary and visual texts and biotechnology. The book proposes a new interdisciplinary area of research that correlates processes of genetics and literature, based on two critical approaches. One, drawing parallels between the genetic codes, human language, formal (binary) language, and posthuman communication and the role of meaning and imagination in these forms of communication. Two, by defining ‘biofictions’ as a critical scientific-artistic concept and as a corpus of texts that engage ideas and developments in molecular biology. Syncretic connection between biotechnology and literature is especially evident in an open science movement and the literary artistic genre of biopunk, discussed across chapters. The study includes well-known contemporary texts, such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, that are recontextualized as biofiction; it offers a rereading of important but neglected novels such as Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration (1967); and it analyzes new visual texts such as the TV series Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell films. Based on these wide-ranging examples and new critical concepts, the book argues that coming up with possible alterations for the genetic code or intended traits for the organism is a discursive practice that brings into being bionarratives that are both organic and literary. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Download or read book Double Helix History written by Jerome De Groot and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-29 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Double Helix History examines the interface between genetics and history in order to investigate the plausibility of ‘new’ knowledge derived from scientific methods and to reflect upon what it might mean for the practice of history. Since the mapping of the human genome in 2001, there has been an expansion in the use of genetic information for historical investigation. Geneticists are confident that this has changed the way we know the past. This book considers the practicalities and implications of this seemingly new way of understanding the human past using genetics. It provides the first sustained engagement with these so-called ‘genomic histories’. The book investigates the ways that genetic awareness and practice is seemingly changing historical practice and conceptualisation. Linking six concepts – ‘Public’, ‘Practice’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Politics’, ‘Self’, and ‘Imagination – Double Helix History outlines the ways that genetic information, being postgenomic, the public life of DNA, and the genetic historical imaginary work on the body, on collective memory, on the historical imagination, on the ethics of historical investigation, on the articulation of history, and on the collection and interpretation of data regarding the ‘past’. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in DNA, genetics, and historiography.

Download or read book Food and the Literary Imagination written by J. Archer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food and the Literary Imagination explores ways in which the food chain and anxieties about its corruption and disruption are represented in poetry, theatre and the novel. The book relates its findings to contemporary concerns about food security.

Download or read book Life Re Scaled written by Liliane Campos and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination. Comprised of thirteen chapters by an international group of academics, Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance engages with four main areas of biological study: ‘Invisible scales: cells, microbes and mycelium’, ‘Neuro-medical imaging and diagnosis’, ‘Pandemic imaginaries’, and ‘Ecological scales’. The authors examine these concepts in emerging forms such as plant theatre, climate change art, ecofiction and pandemic fiction, including the work of Jeff Vandermeer, Jon McGregor, Jeff Lemire, and Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade performances. This valuable resource moves beyond the biological paradigms that were central to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to outline the specificity of a contemporary imagination. Life, Re-Scaled is crucial reading for academics, scholars, and authors alike, as it proposes an unprecedented overview of the relationship between literature, performance and the life sciences in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism written by Rachel Carroll and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 703 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism brings unique literary, critical, and historical perspectives to the relationship between women’s writing and women’s rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present. Thematically organised around five central concepts—Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism—the Companion tracks vital questions and debates, offering fresh perspectives on changing priorities and enduring continuities in relation to women’s ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. This groundbreaking collection brings into focus the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the formation of British literary feminisms, including the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Empire. From the political novel of the 1790s to early twentieth-century suffrage theatre and contemporary ecofeminism, and from the mid-Victorian antislavery movement to anti-fascist activism in the 1930s and working-class women’s writing groups in the 1980s, this book testifies to the diverse and dynamic character of the relationship between literature and feminism. Featuring contributions from leading feminist scholars, the Companion offers new insights into the crucial role played by women’s literary production in the evolving history of women’s rights discourses, feminist activism, and movements for gender equality. It will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of women’s writing, British literature, cultural history, and gender and feminist studies.

Download or read book Goodness and the Literary Imagination written by Toni Morrison and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

Download or read book Literary Imagination written by George William Russell and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 4 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book On Parchment written by Bruce Holsinger and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia “Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history.”—Kirkus Reviews For centuries, premodern societies recorded and preserved much of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures. These remains make up a significant portion of the era’s surviving historical record. In a study spanning three millennia and twenty languages, Bruce Holsinger explores this animal archive as it shaped the inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world, from the leather rolls of ancient Egypt to the Acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Holsinger discusses the making of parchment past and present, the nature of the medium as a biomolecular record of faunal life and environmental history, the knotty question of “uterine vellum,” and the imaginative role of parchment in the works of St. Augustine, William Shakespeare, and a range of Jewish rabbinic writers of the medieval era. Closely informed by the handicraft of contemporary makers, painters, and sculptors, the book draws on a vast array of sources—codices and scrolls, documents and ephemera, works of craft and art—that speak to the vitality of parchment across epochs and continents. At the center of On Parchment is the vexed relationship of human beings to the myriad slaughtered beasts whose remains make up this vast record: a relationship of dominion and compassion, of brutality and empathy.

Download or read book Studies in the Literary Imagination written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Literature Culture and Education ICOLLITE 2022 written by Nuria Haristiani and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-14 with total page 685 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access book. The rapid advancement of technology has created new civilization in this digital era which affects almost all aspects of life including language, literature, culture, and education. The digital era brings opportunities as well as challenges that people have to deal with. Thus, some adjustments need to be done in order to keep up with those changes. Studies on language, literature, culture, and education need to be continuously conducted and developed to revitalize those aspects in facing the dynamic changes of the digital era. In relation to this, Faculty of Language and Literature Education, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (FPBS UPI) hosts this year’s International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture (ICOLLITE) with the theme “Revitalization of Language, Literature, Culture, and Education in the Digital Era” as a forum for experts and professionals to share their research, ideas, and experiences on this issue. Presenters and participants are welcome to discuss and disseminate current issues and offer solutions to the challenges of our time. Discussions on current trends in digital literacies are expected to pave way to learn from each other for betterment as one big society of humankinds, regardless of their social, economic, and cultural backgrounds.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory written by Irene Rima Makaryk and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years. Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and approaches to literature arose. The essays also discuss the uses and limitations of the various schools, and the key issues they address. Part II focuses on individual theorists. It provides a more detailed picture of the network of scholars not always easily pigeonholed into the categories of Part I. This second section analyses the individual achievements, as well as the influence, of specific scholars, and places them in a larger critical context. Part III deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, places them in context, and explains their origins and use. Accessibility is a key feature of the work. By avoiding jargon, providing mini-bibliographies, and cross-referencing throughout, Makaryk has provided an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians and for all scholars and students of contemporary criticism and culture.

Download or read book Fictional Realities written by J. J. A. Mooij and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the role of the imagination. It focuses on the imaginative use of language in literature (poetry and narrative prose); but it also touches on some more comprehensive issues, for the questions it discusses are questions regarding the relationship between mind, reality and unreality. The first two chapters survey the thinking about the imagination in the history of philosophy. The main trends and the main problems are discussed, particularly in respect of the (positive or negative) evaluation of imagination. The subsequent chapters investigate the role of the imagination from a closer point of view. How is it that imagination appears in literary art? Central topics of discussion are the nature of narrativity, of fictional discourse and fictional objects, of realistic fiction, of symbolism and metaphor. Moreover, the similarities (both real and imagined) between literature and the other arts are explored. In all chapters attention is paid to the problem of the value of art and literary imagination. The last chapter addresses this issue head-on. In particular, it attempts to define the value of literature in relation to science.

Download or read book The Ethics of Inheritable Genetic Modification written by John Rasko and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-26 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is inheritable genetic modification the new dividing line in gene therapy? The editors of this searching investigation, representing clinical medicine, public health and biomedical ethics, have established a distinguished team of scientists and scholars to address the issues from the perspectives of biological and social science, law and ethics, including an intriguing Foreword from Peter Singer. Their purpose is to consider how society might deal with the ethical concerns raised by inheritable genetic modification, and to re-examine prevailing views about whether these procedures will ever be ethically and socially justifiable. The book also provides background to define the field, and discusses the biological and technological potential for inheritable genetic modification, its limitations, and its connection with gene therapy, cloning, and other reproductive interventions. For scientists, bioethicists, clinicians, counsellors and public commentators, this is an essential contribution to one of the critical debates in current genetics.