Science Fiction Literary Criticism

This is a historical journey like no other - unlike every other book on the subject, Goddess with a Thousand Faces transcends geographical boundaries and breaks down cultural barriers. From Rangda in Bali, to Freyja in Iceland and more recognisable faces such as the Greek goddess Artemis, it is a work of true inclusion - listeners are invited to consider these dazzling goddesses as part of a cultural cannon of human femininity; regardless of race, sex, or gender. Goddess with a Thousand Faces asks us to interrogate our past through a fresh new lens.

At the age of 48, film critic David Denby returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, to re-experience the core humanities courses he had taken as a freshman 30 years before. Facing the question of what he really knows, Denby re-examines the besieged Western classics, ranging from Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles to Dante, Nietzsche, and Woolf. What relevance do the writers and thinkers of the past have to our current life? The answer surprised Denby and will surprise and enlighten his listeners.

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture.

Joan Didion es una de las cronistas fundamentales de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. En una edición a cargo de Claudio López de Lamadrid, Los que sueñan el sueño dorado reúne por primera vez en castellano una selección de artículos y ensayos de sus libros.

Le Guin’s sharp and witty voice is on full display in this collection of twenty-four essays, revised by the author a decade after its initial publication in 1979. The collection covers a wide range of topics and Le Guin’s origins as a writer, her advocacy for science fiction and fantasy as mediums for true literary exploration, the writing of her own major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, and her role as a public intellectual and educator.

As any fan of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic rereader of books. In 2008, then-new science fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her rereading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor. Now this volume presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.

福沢諭吉の説くあるべき日本男子は「メシ」「フロ」「ネル」ではありえない。『一国の社会を維持して繁栄幸福を求めんとするには、その社会の公衆に公徳なかるべからず。その公徳をして堅固ならしめんとするには、根本を私徳の発育に取らざるべからず。』この視点に依って説かれる「男子論」なのである。襟を正して聞くべし。

Rüdiger Safranski beschreibt die Epoche der Romantik und ihre Zeitgenossen, die für die Entfesselung des Genies stehen, für den Aufbruch und die Lust am Experiment...

As Viv Groskop knows from personal experience, everything that has ever happened to a person has already happened in the Russian classics: from not being sure what to do with your life (Anna Karenina) to being hopelessly in love with someone who doesn't love you back (Turgenev's A Month in the Country). In this sort of literary self-help memoir, Groskop mines these and other works, as well as the lives of their celebrated creators and her own experiences as a student of Russian, to answer the question, "How should you live your life?"

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

Sweet, supportive, dependable, selfless. Long before she had children of her own, journalist Carrie Mullins knew how mothers should behave. But how? Where did these expectations come from—and, more importantly, are they serving the mothers whose lives they shape? Carrie's suspicion, later crystallized while raising two small children, was that our culture’s idealization of motherhood was not only painfully limiting but harmful, leaving women to cope with impossible standards—standards rarely created by mothers themselves.

The Definitive Guide to Understanding Karens Patriarchy and Other Modalities of Oppression, is a groundbreaking book that is absolutely one of its kind. For the first time, "Karen", who symbolizes a White female who publicly polices and oppresses Black people and other people of color, is viewed through the lens of not an individual misbehaving, but an actual model of oppression towards People of Color, and writ large People of the Global Majority (PGM), a collective term to identify people racialized as "ethnic minorities".

David Sterling Brown offers nothing less here than a wholesale deconstruction of whiteness in Shakespeare's plays, arguing that the 'white other' was a racialized category already in formation during the Elizabethan era—and also one to which Shakespeare was himself a crucial contributor.

Recuperando el título de un pequeño cuento con el que la puertorriqueña Rosario Ferré analizó la misoginia literaria en los años noventa, "El coloquio de las perras" pretende ser un homenaje a las escritoras hispanohablantes que sortearon todo tipo de obstáculos para hacer su literatura. Desde populares figuras como Elena Garro, Gabriela Mistral o Alejandra Pizarnik hasta otras más desconocidas como Alcira Soust Scaffo, Agustina González López o María Emilia Cornejo, la periodista y poeta Luna Miguel entabla una conversación llena de ladridos con una docena de mujeres...

In 1950, publisher Fawcett Books founded its Gold Medal imprint, inaugurating the reign of lesbian pulp fiction. These were the books that small-town lesbians and prurient men bought by the millions - cheap, easy to find in drugstores, and immediately recognizable by their lurid covers: often a hard-looking brunette standing over a scantily clad blonde, or a man gazing in tormented lust at a lovely, unobtainable lesbian. For women leading straight lives, here was confirmation that they were not alone.

In the Company of Radical Women Writers rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers who as young women turned to communism around the Great Depression and, over decades of national crisis, spoke to issues of labor, land, and love in ways that provide thought-provoking guidance for today. Rosemary Hennessy spotlights the courageous lives of women who confronted similar challenges to those we still face: exhausting and unfair labor practices, unrelenting racial injustice, and environmental devastation.

Although humankind today can peer far deeper into the universe than ever before, we still find ourselves surrounded by the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. All great science fiction has used the human imagination to explore that realm beyond the known, just as theistic religions have done since long before the genre existed. As Hugo Award-winning author Robert Charles Wilson argues, the genre’s freewheeling speculation and systematic world-building make it a unique lens for understanding, examining, and assessing the truth claims of religions in general and Christianity in particular.

Questions of what happens after death were vital in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living.

What does Shaheen Bagh have in common with Tahrir Square in Egypt and Gezi Park in Istanbul? A lot! In episode 12 of The Book Club, Amit Varma discusses 'Twitter and Tear Gas' by Zeynep Tufekci, which looks at the similarity in citizen protests across the world over the last decade.

Sie ist die Frau, der man nachsagt, dass sie kein Glück in der Liebe hat. Diejenige, die ihr Leben allein regelt: Die Frau ohne Begleitung. Als die Autorin feststellt, dass auch sie so eine geworden ist - ein weiblicher Langzeit-Single - ist die Erkenntnis ein Schock. Dann eine Befreiung. Und ein Ansporn, nicht nur für eine schonungslose Selbsterkundung, sondern auch für eine überfällige Spurensuche.