A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction offers an authoritative overview of contemporary British fiction in its social, political, and economic contexts.
Focuses on the fiction that has emerged since the late 1970s, roughly since the start of the Thatcher era.
Comprises original essays from major scholars.
Topics range from the rise and fall of the postcolonial novel to controversies over the celebrity author.
A Companion to Science Fiction assembles essays by an international range of scholars which discuss the contexts, themes and methods used by science fiction writers.
This Companion conveys the scale and variety of science fiction.
Shows how science fiction has been used as a means of debating cultural issues.
Essays by an international range of scholars discuss the contexts, themes and methods used by science fiction writers...
Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad examines the representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism in Conrad's fiction. Drawing on the work of Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Robert Hodges, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christopher Lane, and others who have already begun unearthing and analyzing this subject, the author traces Conrad's representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism, beginning with the Malay works and ending with The Shadow Line. In Conrad's lifetime, homosexuals came under increasing scrutiny, definition, and censure; same-sex desire was an increasingly contested issue within popular, legal, and medical discourses. Conrad's fiction traces this interest, though most often in subterranean ways.
Martin Gardner begins Riddles with questions about splitting up polygons into prescribed shapes and he ends this book with an offer of a prize of $100 for the first person to send him a 3 x# magic square consisting of consecutive primes. Only Gardner could fit so many diverse and tantalizing problems into one book. This material was drawn from Gardner's column in Issac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. His riddles presented here incorporate the responses of his initial readers, along with additions suggested by the editors of this series.
Science Fact and Science Fiction examines in one volume how science has propelled science-fiction and, to a lesser extent, how science fiction has influenced the sciences. Although coverage will discuss the science behind the fiction from the Classical Age to the present, focus is naturally on the 19th century to the present, when the Industrial Revolution and spectacular progress in science and technology triggered an influx of science-fiction works speculating on the future. As scientific developments alter expectations for the future, the literature absorbs, uses, and adapts such contextual visions.
