Download or read book Sputnik Caledonia written by Andrew Crumey and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robbie dreams of going to space. In 1970s Scotland this marks him out almost as much as his eccentric family does. Educated in the ways of the Left, Robbie can't entertain the idea of going into orbit with the capitalist Americans. So he gets a 'teach yourself' Russian book & settles down with Einstein's 'Meaning of relativity' by his side.
Download or read book Shapes of Time in British Twenty First Century Quantum Fiction written by Sonia Front and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the notion of time and temporality and its various conceptualizations in the theories of the new physics, utilized as a thematic and formal framework in the British novel of the twenty-first century. As the Newtonian conception of reality does not provide a reliable framework within which to situate human experience and generate meaning, fiction writers have recognized quantum mechanics as a potent source from which to draw in search of new metaphors. The quantum has become a part of the understanding of reality, and its concepts and assumptions have been absorbed into the textual structure and content of literary fiction. Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction examines human temporality as mediated by the timeshapes imagined within the context of the new physics, and explores the philosophical implications for human temporality and identity of situating an individual within the realm of physical time. Its chapters deal with various concepts of the new physics connected with temporality, and their appropriation in a selected novel: parallel universes in Andrew Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (2008), eternal recurrence and Poincaré’s theorem in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), chaos theory in Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness (2009), and the end of time in Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2006). Each of them corresponds to a different conceptual shape of time: tree, concertina, spiral and snapshot, respectively, which is enacted on the formal level. Analyzing the new time constructs in a narrative, this book thus uncovers passages between scientific and humanistic standpoints, and reveals quantum fiction to be an effective tool for visualizing the subjective non-homogenous experience of private time.
Download or read book Bridges between Cultures written by Tomasz Kalaga and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centred on the metaphor of bridges and knots, this volume investigates the dialogic and dialectical relationships between socially dissimilar and topographically distant cultures. The contributions here explore various methodological frameworks for discourses and theories that purport to conceptualize cultural spaces, which – as opposed to objective, geographical areas – are characterized by the propensity to bind topographical distances by means of symbolic ties and perimeters. The chapters address possible juxtapositions and intersections of spatial and temporal dimensions of cultural practice, religious and ethical “ties and knots” between lands and cultures, disconnections between historical, literary and cultural epochs, discourses of cultural entanglement and cultural ensnarement on individual and social levels, and the possibilities of raising aesthetic bridges between various cultures in music, poetry and visual arts, among other topics.
Download or read book Hours like bright sweets in a jar written by Sonia Front and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers gathered in the present collection investigate time and temporality from a number of interdisciplinary perspectives: literary or film studies, postcolonial theory, physics, philosophy, psychology, urban studies, history and gender studies. This wide spectrum of scholarly approaches encompasses chapters dealing with the convergences of time and the human psyche; time and the body; time and memory; time and trauma; time and change; time and cultural reproduction; time and language; time and the city; and time and identity. It transpires that the imaginary refigurations of time more often than not constitute resistance against the linearity of chronometric time, represented by institutions, capitalism, government and power, and attempts to colonize the human psyche. In attempting to assault this hegemony of linear time, literary, cinematographic and cultural practice enacts exploding temporalities to reflect the multifacetedness and multidirectionality of the human experience of time.
Download or read book Scotland as Science Fiction written by Caroline McCracken-Flesher and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of the mainstream but ahead of the tide, that is Scottish Science Fiction. Science Fiction emphasizes "progress" through technology, advanced mental states, or future times. How does Scotland, often considered a land of the past, lead in Science Fiction? "Left behind" by international politics, Scots have cultivated alternate places and different times as sites of identity so that Scotland can seem a futuristic fiction itself. This book explores the tensions between science and a particular society that produce an innovative science fiction. Essays consider Scottish thermodynamics, Celtic myth, the rigors of religious "conversion," Scotland's fractured politics yet civil society, its languages of alterity (Scots, Gaelic, allegory, poetry), and the lure of the future. From Peter Pan and Dr. Jekyll to the poetry of Edwin Morgan and the worlds of Muriel Spark, Ken Macleod, or Iain M. Banks, Scotland's creative complex yields a literature that models the future for Science Fiction.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction 1945 2010 written by David James and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 provides insight into the critical traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain.
Download or read book Notional Identities written by Thomas Christie and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notional Identities takes up the challenge of engaging with the popular genres of speculative fiction and crime fiction by Scottish authors from the mid-1970s until the beginning of the twenty-first century, examining a variety of significant novels from across the decades in the light of wider considerations of ideology, genre and national identity. The book investigates the extent to which the national political and cultural climate of this tumultuous era informed the narrative form and social commentary of such works, and considers the manner in which—and the extent to which—a specific and identifiably Scottish response to these ideological matters can be identified in popular prose fiction during the period under discussion. Although Scottish literary fiction of recent decades has been studied in considerable depth, Scottish popular genre literature has received markedly less critical scrutiny in comparison. Notional Identities aims to help in redressing this balance, examining popular Scottish texts of the stated period in order to reflect upon whether a significant relationship can be discerned between genre fiction and the mainstream of Scottish literary writing, and to consider the characteristics of the literary connections which exist between these different modes of writing.
Download or read book Facing the Bear written by Trevor Royle and published by Birlinn. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Culloden explores Scotland’s history during the Cold War. Between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of Communism, confrontation with the Soviet Union was an everyday reality. As part of NATO’s response, Scotland played a key role in the alliance’s forward maritime defense strategy, aimed at containing the Soviet threat from naval and air forces. During this period, 10 percent of the UK’s naval and air forces were based in Scotland, and there was a substantial U.S. presence, as well as top secret satellite and command stations. In Facing the Bear, Trevor Royle paints a fascinating portrait of this extraordinary period, examining not just the wider military and political contexts, but also showing how the defense industry brought huge economic benefits, how CND maintained a high-profile presence, and how anti-nuclear sentiments underpinned much of the left’s thinking in Scotland and contributed to the hegemony enjoyed by the Labour Party in Scotland during the Cold War. Praise for Facing the Bear “Engrossing . . . . Like a military commander at the top of his game, Royle marshals his material to maximum effect to show how Scotland has been shaped by, and also helped shape, the Cold War . . . . He ranges far and wide and has that rare talent to marry the local with the geopolitical . . . . But this is not simply a story of military hardware and confrontation. Royle is very interesting on how the Cold War influenced our cultural life from the novel to poetry and the protest song.” —Barclay McBain, The Herald (UK)
Download or read book The Great Chain of Unbeing written by Andrew Crumey and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Crumey’s novels are renowned for their unique blend of science, history, philosophy and humour. Now he brings the same insight and originality to this story cycle whose title offers an ironic twist on the ancient doctrine of connectedness, the great chain of being. Here we find a blind man contemplating the light of an atom bomb, a musician disturbed by a conspiracy of radio waves, a visitor to Moscow caught up in a comic case of mistaken identity, a woman on a Greek island trying to become a different person. We range across time, from the Renaissance to a globally-warmed future, across light-years in search of hallucinogenic space-plankton, and into magical worlds of talking insects and bottled fire. Fans of Crumey’s acclaimed novels will occasionally spot hints of themes and figures that have recurred throughout his fiction; readers new to his work will delight in finding subtle links within the pieces. Are they all part of some larger untold story? We have nothing to lose but the chains of our imagination: what lies beyond is a great change of being. ‘The Great Chain of Unbeing is unboring, unusual and quite brilliant.’ Adam Roberts in The Literary Review 'It is a delightful introduction to his singularly riddling work - and in Crumeyesque style it is an intermezzo that doubles as an overture.' Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman The Great Chain of Unbeing, a book bursting with fertile fusions of ideas by this Scottish Borges .' The Sunday Herald
Download or read book A Companion to Scottish Literature written by Gerard Carruthers and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-12-08 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Scottish Literature offers fresh readings of major authors and periods of Scottish literary production from the first millennium to the present. Bringing together contributions by many of the world’s leading experts in the field, this comprehensive resource provides the historical background of Scottish literature, highlights new critical approaches, and explores wider cultural and institutional contexts. Dealing with texts in the languages of Scots, English, and Gaelic, the Companion offers modern perspectives on the historical milieux, thematic contexts and canonical writers of Scottish literature. Original essays apply the most up-to-date critical and scholarly analyses to a uniquely wide range of topics, such as Gaelic literature, national and diasporic writing, children’s literature, Scottish drama and theatre, gender and sexuality, and women’s writing. Critical readings examine William Dunbar, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark and Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others. With full references and guidance for further reading, as well as numerous links to online resources, A Companion to Scottish Literature is essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Scottish literature, as well as academic and non-academic readers with an interest in the subject.
Download or read book Albion s Secret History written by Guy Mankowski and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-26 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Albion's Secret History compiles snapshots of English pop culture’s rebels and outsiders, from Evelyn Waugh to PJ Harvey via The Long Blondes and The Libertines. By focusing on cultural figures who served to define England, Guy Mankowski looks at those who have really shaped Albion’s secret history, not just its oft-quoted official cultural history. He departs from the narrative that dutifully follows the Beatles, The Sex Pistols and Oasis, and, by instead penetrating the surface of England’s pop history (including the venues it was shaped in), throws new light on ideas of Englishness. As well as music, Mankowski draws from art, film, architecture and politics, showing the moments at which artists like Tricky and Goldfrapp altered our sense of a sometimes green but sometimes unpleasant land. 'The most illuminating odyssey through lost, hidden or forgotten English pop culture since Michael Bracewell's England Is Mine.' Rhian E. Jones, author of Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender
Download or read book How I Left The National Grid written by Guy Mankowski and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s Robert Wardner, eccentric frontman of post-punk band ‘The National Grid’ became famous overnight after committing an act on Top Of The Pops that shocked a nation. But a year later he had vanished, leaving a 'masterpiece' record abandoned in his wake. More darkly, rumours grew that his disappearance was due to him having brutally murdered an obsessed young fan. Twenty-five years later word has spread that the singer is alive and scheming to re-emerge. Sam, a journalist who helped first bring his band to the public eye, is commissioned to track Wardner down so he will at last tell his story for a book. Finding Wardner is the only way for Sam to save his collapsed career and relationship. But it gradually becomes apparent that by cornering his quarry Sam may in fact be planning his own murder.
Download or read book The Nation in British Literature and Culture written by Andrew Murphy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nation and British Literature and Culture charts the emergence of Britain as a political, social and cultural construct, examining the manner in which its constituent elements were brought together through a process of amalgamation and conquest. The fashioning of the nation through literature and culture is examined, as well as counter narratives that have sought to call national orthodoxies into question. Specific topics explored include the emergence of a distinctively national literature in the early modern period; the impact of French Revolution on conceptions of Britishness; portrayals of empire in popular and literary fiction; popular music and national imagining; the marginalisation and oppression of particular communities within the nation. The volume concludes by asking what implications an extended set of contemporary crises have for the ongoing survival both of the United Kingdom, both as a political unit and as a literary and cultural point of identity.
Download or read book Brexlit written by Kristian Shaw and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain's vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society – from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives – that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.
Download or read book The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti Tales written by Kendra Reynolds and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph aims to counter the assumption that the anti-tale is a ‘subversive twin’ or dark side of the fairy tale coin, instead it argues that the anti-tale is a genre rich in complexity and radical potential that fundamentally challenges the damaging ideologies and socializing influence of fairy tales. The Feminist Architecture of Postmodern Anti-Tales: Space, Time and Bodies highlights how anti-tales take up timely debates about revising old structures, opening our minds up to a broader spectrum of experience or ways of viewing the world and its inhabitants. They show us alternative architectures for the future by deconstructing established spatio-temporal laws and structures, as well as limited ideas surrounding the body, and ultimately liberate us from the shackles of a single-minded and simplistic masculine reality currently upheld by dominant social forces and patriarchal fairy tales themselves. It is only when these masculine fairy tales and social architectures are deconstructed that new, more inclusive feminine realities and futures can be brought into being.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature written by Allen Stroud and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-12 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.
Download or read book Lightship Anthology written by Stephen Beechinor and published by Alma Books. This book was released on 2012-11-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lightship Anthology 2 is the second collection of short stories, poems, flash fiction and a first chapter from the 2012 Lightship International Literary Prize winners. Lightship Publishing aims to discover and mentor the best new literary voices writing in English, and this is an exciting international collection from Indian, American, Australian, Swedish, French, Irish and British authors.
