Dissertations / Theses: 'Speculative Literature'

1

Izadi, Dastgerdi Mehdi. "7 de Tristan Garcia: pour une poetique speculative." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1470296797.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

2

Bahng, Aimee Soogene. "Speculative acts the cultural labors of science, fiction, and empire /." Diss., [La Jolla] : University of California, San Diego, 2009. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3369154.

Full text

Abstract:

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009.
Title from first page of PDF file (viewed September 15, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-223).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

3

Barry, Michael, and n/a. "The long fall : Australian speculative fiction for adolescents as 'literature of anxiety'." University of Canberra. Creative Communication & Culture Studies, 2001. http://erl.canberra.edu.au./public/adt-AUC20060607.165243.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

4

Donner, Mathieu. "Contagion and the subject in contemporary American speculative fiction." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2017. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/40336/.

Full text

Abstract:

This thesis explores the relationship between the representation of contagion and those it affects offered by contemporary American speculative fiction and the ways in which this representative model has and continues to inform our understanding of real and actual pandemics. Over the past decade, the success of texts centred on such figures as the vampire, the werewolf and the zombie has triggered a return of contagion to the forefront of the American popular fictional imagination. Though this renewed fascination coincides with the emergence of new global biological threats, it also draws part of its power from a broader cultural anxiety regarding the structures of subjectivity, the relation between subject and State as well as the subject’s role within the collective deployed by our contemporary discourse of health. While critical studies on contagion have been predominantly concerned with real diseases and their narrativisation, this thesis focuses on five fictional representations—Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and its adaptations, the American series Being Human, Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark and Charles Burns’s Black Hole—in order to explore the ways in which these texts engage with the modern medical discourse and the wider conceptualisation of subjectivity promoted by Western philosophy. By emptying the referential dimension of the diseases they mobilise, these texts provide a unique opportunity to analyse the underlying mechanisms of contagion as a cultural construction and to expose the set of assumptions (moral, political, social, etc.) upon which its production itself relies. Exposing the ways in which our cultural perception of contagion has been shaped by the limitations inherent to the traditional epistemic model dominating Western society, this thesis not only reveal the violence inherent in the structures of subjectivity surrounding the individual, it also highlights, by deconstructing the dominant model, new possible lines of flight for the contagious subject outside the normative structures of our current public health, medical, social and political discourses.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

5

Girard, Geoffrey R. "CARAVAN PASSES: STORIES." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1366380928.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

6

Joo, Hee-Jung. "Speculative nations : racial utopia and dystopia in twentieth-century African American and Asian American literature /." view abstract or download file of text, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1404340651&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

Full text

Abstract:

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-214). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

7

Bradley, Darin Colbert Ross John Robert. "The little weird self and consciousness in contemporary, small-press, speculative fiction /." [Denton, Tex.] : University of North Texas, 2007. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-3703.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

8

Shimkus, James H. "Teaching Speculative Fiction in College: A Pedagogy for Making English Studies Relevant." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/95.

Full text

Abstract:

ABSTRACT Speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) has steadily gained popularity both in culture and as a subject for study in college. While many helpful resources on teaching a particular genre or teaching particular texts within a genre exist, college teachers who have not previously taught science fiction, fantasy, or horror will benefit from a broader pedagogical overview of speculative fiction, and that is what this resource provides. Teachers who have previously taught speculative fiction may also benefit from the selection of alternative texts presented here. This resource includes an argument for the consideration of more speculative fiction in college English classes, whether in composition, literature, or creative writing, as well as overviews of the main theoretical discussions and definitions of each genre. In addition, this work includes a short history of speculative fiction, bibliographies of suggested sample themes for each genre, sample course syllabi and assignment/activity suggestions, and strategies for obtaining and using hard-to-find texts for prospective teachers.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

9

Pawlak, Solange. "A Work of Speculative Fiction : Intertextuality in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale." Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Engelska, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-30479.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

10

Patrick, Mary Margaret Hughes. "Creator/Destroyer| The Function of the Heroine in Post-Apocalyptic Feminist Speculative Fiction." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10274963.

Full text

Abstract:

The heroine in feminist speculative fiction signifies and functions as the creator and destroyer of her community, particularly based on dystopian societies, the heroine uses the duality of creator and destroyer without the complexities of present society; however, the issues in these novels serve to highlight and emphasize problems with current gender identity and equality. Furthermore, the idea this heroine exists to destabilize narratives of patriarchy give voice to the powerless while continuing a narrative of the powerlessness, and counter narratives of gender normality. Each heroine confronts a patriarchal leader who symbolizes the faults in the existing societal regime, which allows her to undermine the hierarchy set up by men. With narrative centered on experiences of the heroine, the authors of these texts show how one voice can help exemplify the many. As heroines who incorporate characteristics of gender, they demonstrate that to lead, a person must be willing to identify not just as one sex, but as a person who understands where certain characteristics are not inherently male or female. Her role as creator/destroyer is to achieve communal, structural, and personal unity, completeness, or wholeness. The heroine looks to institute communities that depend on one another, that understand each person has strength to share, and that build trust on these shared strengths. The heroine seeks harmony with the people around her, but she also discovers harmony within herself. She must learn to accept the notion that as the creator of something new, she is also the destroyer. It is her acceptance of this wholeness that will help her lead a new kind of humanity.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

11

Donaldson, Eileen. "The Amazon goes nova considering the female hero in speculative fiction /." Diss., Pretoria : [s.n.], 2003. http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-11092004-144531/.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

12

Tobin, Stephen Christopher. "Visual Dystopias from Mexico’s Speculative Fiction: 1993-2008." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1437528785.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

13

Stone, Tracy. "Speculative Ontologies and Cautionary Horrors| The Literary Zombie's Answer to What We Are and Where We're Going." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3687707.

Full text

Abstract:

On a metaphoric level, the zombie is an extremely malleable and dynamic figure because it can act as a template for exploring the hazy definitions of humanity. The trope of the zombie I trace in this dissertation is the performance of an absence: the zombie as fragmented and incomplete human. I examine examples of the zombie in American literature across the last century that reify the absence of something crucial in the ontological makeup of a complete human, a component I term `the absent quale.' In the first two chapters, I establish the trope of the zombie as a figure that lacks a particular quale essential to humanity. Chapter One examines H. P. Lovecraft's zombies in "Herbert West: Reanimator" (1921–22) in the context of scientific materialism, which denies the existence of the soul. By 1959, when Robert Heinlein wrote his time travel classic "All You Zombies—," the figure of the zombie as an embodied absence was so established in popular culture that Heinlein's narrator uses the word "zombies" as a metaphor; Chapter Two reads the figurative zombie as a characterization of the fragmented along the temporal dimension. In Chapter Three, I consider Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg's "The Song the Zombie Sang" (1970) alongside Walter Benjamin's influential essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," using the latter's concept of the aura to denote a sort of material analogue to the human soul. I argue in Chapter Four that the bricolage of popular culture motifs that Robin Becker's zombie rehearses throughout Brains: A Zombie Memoir (2010) enacts the postmodern estrangement from an authentic dimension of being. Expanding on this theme, Chapter Five explores the ways in which popular culture dictates reality for the living and the undead members of the pre- and post-apocalyptic American society Colson Whitehead describes in Zone One (2011).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

14

Steenkamp, Elzette Lorna. "Identity, belonging and ecological crisis in South African speculative fiction." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002262.

Full text

Abstract:

This study examines a range of South African speculative novels which situate their narratives in futuristic or ‘alternative’ milieus, exploring how these narratives not only address identity formation in a deeply divided and rapidly changing society, but also the ways in which human beings place themselves in relation to Nature and form notions of ‘ecological’ belonging. It offers close readings of these speculative narratives in order to investigate the ways in which they evince concerns which are rooted in the natural, social and political landscapes which inform them. Specific attention is paid to the texts’ treatment of the intertwined issues of identity, belonging and ecological crisis. This dissertation draws on the fields of Ecocriticism, Postcolonial Studies and Science Fiction Studies, and assumes a culturally specific approach to primary texts while investigating possible cross-cultural commonalities between Afrikaans and English speculative narratives, as well as the cross-fertilisation of global SF/speculative features. It is suggested that South African speculative fiction presents a socio-historically situated, rhizomatic approach to ecology – one that is attuned to the tension between humanistic- and ecological concerns.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

15

Ogston, Linda C. "The clone as Gothic trope in contemporary speculative fiction." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/21487.

Full text

Abstract:

In February 1997, the concept of the clone, previously confined to the pages of fiction, became reality when Dolly the sheep was introduced to the world. The response to this was unprecedented, initiating a discourse on cloning that permeated a range of cultural forms, including literature, film and television. My thesis examines and evaluates this discourse through analysis of contemporary fiction, including Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), Stefan Brijs's The Angel Maker (2008), Duncan Jones's Moon (2009), and BBC America's current television series Orphan Black, which first aired in 2013. Such texts are placed in their cultural and historical setting, drawing comparisons between pre- and post-Dolly texts. The thesis traces the progression of the clone from an inhuman science fiction monster, to more of a tragic "human" creature. The clone has, however, retained its fictional portrayal as "other," be that double, copy or manufactured being, and the thesis argues that the clone is a Gothic trope for our times. The roots of the cloning discourse often lie in Gothic narratives, particularly Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which is analysed as a canonical cloning text. Each chapter focuses on a source of fascination and fear within the cloning discourse: the influence of Gothic paternity on the figure of scientist; the notion of the clone as manufactured product, victim and monster; and the ethical and social implications of cloning. There is a dearth of critical analysis on the contemporary literary clone, with the most comprehensive study to date neither acknowledging the alignment of cloning and the Gothic nor demonstrating the impact of Dolly on fictional portrayals. My thesis addresses this, interweaving fiction, science and culture to present a monster which simultaneously embodies difference and sameness: a new monster for the twenty-first century.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

16

Jones, Esther L. "Traveling discourses subjectivity, space and spirituality in black women's speculative fictions in the Americas /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1155665383.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

17

McAlister, Meagan L. "The Stories." The Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1587573445982909.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

18

Fetchko, Amy Victoria. "Speculative Fictions as a Mirror: Gender and Sexuality Across Three Works." Kent State University Honors College / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1399244087.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

19

Morse, Andrew. ""A new discipline of vision" : the synthesis of poetic and scientific epistemologies in contemporary speculative verse /." view abstract or download file of text, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3102180.

Full text

Abstract:

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 232-241). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

20

Bradley, Darin Colbert. "The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2007. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/.

Full text

Abstract:

This dissertation explores how contemporary, small-press, speculative fiction deviates from other genres in depicting the processes of consciousness in narrative. I study how the confluence of contemporary cognitive theory and experimental, small-press, speculative fiction has produced a new narrative mode, one wherein literature portrays not the product of consciousness but its process instead. Unlike authors who worked previously in the stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue modes, writers in this new narrative mode (which this dissertation refers to as "the little weird") use the techniques of recursion, narratological anachrony, and Ulric Neisser's "ecological self" to avoid the constraints of textual linearity that have historically prevented other literary modes from accurately portraying the operations of "self." Extrapolating from Mieke Bal's seminal theory of narratology; Tzvetan Todorov's theory of the fantastic; Daniel C. Dennett's theories of consciousness; and the works of Darko Suvin, Robert Scholes, Jean Baudrillard, and others, I create a new mode not for classifying categories of speculative fiction, but for re-envisioning those already in use. This study, which concentrates on the work of progressive, small-press, speculative writers such as Kelly Link, Forrest Aguirre, George Saunders, Jeffrey Ford, China Miéville, and many others, explores new ideas about narrative "coherence" from the points of view of self as they are presented today by cognitive, narratological, psychological, sociological, and semiotic theories.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

21

Boulter, Amanda. "Speculative feminisms : the significance of feminist theory in the science fiction of Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr, and Octavia Butler." Thesis, University of Southampton, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.296179.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

22

Dauncey, Sarah. "The uses of silence : a twentieth-century preoccupation in the light of fictional examples, 1900-1950." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2003. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4054/.

Full text

Abstract:

A striking feature of twentieth-century Western cultural history was a preoccupation with silence. This thesis is a survey of the phenomenon across a broad range of literary and theoretical discourses actively engaged in the period in exploring and exploiting silence's expressive and philosophical potential. Its focus, and unifying principle, is the dynamic resourcefulness of the motif-the diversity of its uses and significations. The meaning of silence shifts according to its context and the discourse deploying it. By analysing an array of novels and theoretical formulations-by writers as diverse as James, Chopin, Conrad, H. D., Forster, Lawrence, Faulkner, and Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Blanchot, Hassan, Macherey, Irigaray, Spivak, Derrida-the mobility of silence as a construct is exposed. Silence is identified in the fiction of the period 1900-1950, and its implications are assessed in the light of the various ways in which its uses were understood and interpreted by twentieth-century theorists. Theory provides a heuristic device for the comprehension of the fiction selected for scrutiny whilst further highlighting the extent of the past century's dedication to the motif. Fiction and theory are regarded as two different manifestations of a fascination with silence: fiction dramatizes a commitment to the motif which comes to be formally registered in theoretical discourse as the century progresses. After an introductory chapter outlining the expanse of the phenomenon to be studied, the thesis is divided into two parts illustrating the discrete implications attaching to the motif: 'Social Silences' and 'Ontological Silences'. The project questions whether the multiplicity of silence's usage may work to depotentiate its signifying power; in particular, whether its role in abstract 'ontological' formulations diminishes its force for emancipatory 'social' discourses. In conclusion, by means of the synchronic organization of the thesis, silence's import is shown to lie in its resourcefulness rather than in any intrinsic characteristic it might be thought to possess.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

23

Lacy, Dianna C. "Expanding the Definition of Liminality: Speculative Fiction as an Exploration of New Boundaries." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2019. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2698.

Full text

Abstract:

Speculative fiction allows an expanded view of literature and so allows scholars to explore new boundaries in the way words and ideas work. In the titular character of The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, the reader sees an expansion of self through liminality while A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick explores its collapse. In order to portray each of these the character examined must move though one seems to move upward and the other downward. This idea of movement is only part of what expands the idea of liminality past the traditional idea of a doorway to create a hallway that the character might traverse on the way from place to place. This is not a redefinition of the term but a revision, a change in the way that we look at the concept as we accept and explore newer genres.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

24

Hildebrand, Laura A. ""Speculated Communities": The Contemporary Canadian Speculative Fictions of Margaret Atwood, Nalo Hopkinson, and Larissa Lai." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20503.

Full text

Abstract:

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

25

Spriggs, Bianca L. "Women of the Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists." UKnowledge, 2017. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/56.

Full text

Abstract:

“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of supportive wives. The mode of speculative fiction is well suited to crafting counter-narratives to Exodus mythology because of its ability to place marginalized voices in the center from the stance of ‘What next?’ My project is a hybrid in that I combine critical theory with original poems. The prose section of each chapter contextualizes a novel and its author with regard to Exodus mythology. However, because novels can only reveal so much about character development, I identify spaces to engage and elaborate upon the conversation incited by these authors’ feminist protagonists. In the tradition of Black American poets such as, Ai, Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, and Tyehimba Jess, in my own personal creative work, I regularly engage historical figures through recovering the narratives of underrepresented voices. To write in persona or limited omniscient, spotlighting an event where the reader possesses incomplete information surrounding a character’s experience, the result becomes a kind of call-and-response interaction with these novels.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

26

Abbott, Sarah J. "The Future Perfect." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/30.

Full text

Abstract:

In the prison society of Circadia, the Jury doesn’t need chains or locks to keep citizens tame, only routine—but Valerie and Brennan break the routine. Valerie allows a hospital patient who hurt her in the past to die from cardiac arrest. Her twelve-year term will be reset if anyone finds out she didn’t try to save him; she’ll start over in the dangerous Twelfth Circle. With 455 days left in Circadia, she must lie not only to the authorities but also to her family. And she’s a terrible liar. Most conversations halt near Brennan, the Warden’s son, but even he catches the whispers after a police officer attempts to escape from Circadia. When Brennan learns that his mother and a Juror are rigging the officer’s public trial, they give him a choice: side with the Circadians and lose his safety, or side with the Jury and lose his self-respect. Structured in chapters that alternate between Valerie and Brennan, this novel—influenced by George Orwell, Suzanne Collins, and Michel Foucault—suggests that the best prison makes you comfortable. It makes you want to stay.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

27

Glover, Jayne Ashleigh. ""A complex and delicate web" : a comparative study of selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy /." [S.l. : s.n.], 2007. http://eprints.ru.ac.za/1001/.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

28

McGinnis, Kayla. ""Ecofiction: Realizing the Full Potential of the Genre Through Speculative and Ecofeminist Theory" and "Tricolored Waters: A Novel -- Part I"." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1619128128287878.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

29

Dauphin, Matthew J. "No Good Utopia: Desiring Ambiguity in The Dispossessed." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1300740583.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

30

DiFrancesco, Alessandro. "The Living and the Dead." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1591353224820624.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

31

Reynolds, Hannah C. "The Electric Era: Science Fiction Literature in China." Wittenberg University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wuhonors1617805441166436.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

32

Crowe, Elizabeth A. "The Wit and Wisdom in the Novels of Diana Wynne Jones." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2005. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd846.pdf.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

33

Persson, Örtman Lisa. "The Costs of Modernity : How a historical steampunk fantasy such as The Kingston Cycle can successfully portray the intersectional origins of the Capitalocene." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-107023.

Full text

Abstract:

There is a growing recognition of the interconnectedness of the crises of food, water, democracy and climate change as stemming from the capitalist hunt for modernity and progress. As climate change is thus not only so complex, but urgent, the question of a successful portrayal of it for an enhanced understanding and subsequent action becomes vital. The name of the Capitalocene functions to highlight the intersectional origins of climate change - as the Global North has done violence upon nature in the quest for monetary value, so has it also done violence upon people in the process. The Kingston Cycle is part of a fast-rising wave of speculative fiction with the potential to successfully communicate not only an encompassing picture of the acknowledgedly incomprehensive totality of the current crisis, but also the solution in the form of an egalitarian society founded on the value of community instead of capital. As writers are thus beginning to discover the suitability of speculative fiction to depict the Capitalocene, especially spatiotemporal combinations of genres such as historical steampunk fantasy, it is necessary for scholars to follow in order to breach the hitherto persisting view of speculative fiction as simply an escape from reality, and to investigate how it can be used to create not only an understanding of the current crisis, but an incentive to action.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

34

Glover, Jayne Ashleigh. ""A complex and delicate web" : a comparative study of selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002241.

Full text

Abstract:

This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

35

Lemon, Kiersty. "The Infectious Monster: Borders and Contagion in Yeti and Lágrimas en la lluvia." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2015. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5734.

Full text

Abstract:

Monsters are disruptive characters, who cross boundaries and blend categories. They come in various kinds: Non-human monsters, such as Dracula, created-by-human monsters like Frankenstein, human monsters like Hitler, and more-than-human monsters such as the X-men. These monsters can either be dangerous or helpful to humanity. Dangerous monsters appear as infectious, viral forces, while helpful monsters are inoculative forces for positive change. In either case, they penetrate the borders set up between normatively separate categories. Critics and authors have long realized the connection between heroes and monsters, often portraying them as necessary to one another, as two sides of a single coin. However, this analogy is lacking, because it does not allow for the possibility that a single character can display varying degrees of both heroism and monstrosity. Mario Yerro and Bruna Husky present such characteristics in Yeti and Lágrimas en la lluvia, as evidenced by their physical appearance, their relations to scapegoats, the porosity of species and other boundaries, and the decisions they make in regards to the Other.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

36

Chen, Jou-An. "An exploration of nature and human development in young adult historical fantasy." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/282878.

Full text

Abstract:

Traditional historical writing focuses on the cause and effect of human action, assuming that it is the historian's responsibility to recount the ebbs and flows of human progress. In the process of laying hold of the past as a narrative of human action, historical writing has developed the tendency to marginalise nature and undermine its power to influence the historical narrative. My investigation explores the fantastic in historical fantasy as a means of resisting historical writing's anthropocentrism. Historical fantasy uses fantastical elements to create counterfactual and alternative historical realities that have the potential to resist and undermine history's anthropocentric norm. My thesis examines four contemporary young adult historical fantasy trilogies that reimagine key turning points in history such as industrialisation, the American frontier, European imperialism, and World War I. They share the theme of retrieving and subverting anthropocentric discourses in the history of human development and thereby creating space for nature's presence and agency. My study finds that the fantastic is an effective means of subverting historical writing's anthropocentrism. But it also uncovers ambiguities and contradictions in historical fantasy's ecological revisionism, pointing to the idea that despite the fantastic's capacity for subversion, historical representations of nature cannot be separated from considerations of human identity and survival.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

37

Viada, Jessica. "La Bestia and Other Stories." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2011. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/344.

Full text

Abstract:

The following collection of short stories explores the notion of being caught between two worlds, of straddling physical, emotional, linguistic and metaphorical borders. I have chosen these characters in order to give voice to those who are often voiceless. The collection has been divided in two parts in order to challenge ideas of what is "real." I argue that the emotional truth of a story is paramount, and this reality can sometimes be best achieved through unconventional means.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

38

Lane, Emily. "Hell On Earth: A Modern Day Inferno in Cormac McCarthy's The Road." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2010. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1127.

Full text

Abstract:

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Dante's the Inferno contain textual and thematic comparisons. While the Inferno creates a world that exhibits the worst fears of the medieval Catholic subconscious of Dante's time, The Road paints a world of the darkest fears of the current American subconscious. Both texts reflect a critical dystopia that speculates on human spirituality and offers a critique of society through a tour of sin and suffering in a desolate setting.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

39

Blackford, Elizabeth Coulter. "Glamour (Collected Stories)." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1555609829233799.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

40

Spallino, Jamie. "“It’s Queer that Daylight’s not Enough”: Interdependence Counters Othering in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness." Wittenberg University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wuhonors1624014925027157.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

41

Marlatt, Jarred J. "The Montagnards." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2017. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2338.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

42

Calbert, Tonisha Marie. "(Re)Writing Apocalypse: Race, Gender, and Radical Change in Black Apocalyptic Fiction." The Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593596843453299.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

43

Wiley, Antoinette Marchelle. "The Familiar Stranged." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1513009183178476.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

44

Christie, Thomas A. "Notional identities : ideology, genre and national identity in popular Scottish fiction, 1975-2006." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/7149.

Full text

Abstract:

One of the most striking features of contemporary Scottish fiction has been its shift from the predominantly realist novels of the 1960s and 1970s to an engagement with very different modes of writing, from the mixture of realism and visionary future satire in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) to the Rabelaisian absurdity and excess of Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998). This development has received considerable critical attention, energising debates concerning how such writing relates to or challenges familiar tropes of identity and national culture. At the same time, however, there has been a very striking and commercially successful rise in the production of popular genre literature in Scotland, in categories which have included speculative fiction and crime fiction. Although Scottish literary fiction of recent decades has been studied in great depth, Scottish popular genre literature has received considerably less critical scrutiny in comparison. Therefore, the aim of my research is to examine popular Scottish writing 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 fiction, and to consider the characteristics of such a connection between these different modes of writing. To achieve this objective, the dissertation will investigate whether the features of any such shared literary concerns are inclined to vary between the mainstream of literary fiction in Scotland and two different, distinct forms of popular genre writing. My research will take up the challenge of engaging with the popular genres of speculative fiction and crime fiction during the years 1975 to 2006. I intend to discuss the extent to which the national political and cultural climate of the period under discussion informed the narrative form and social commentary of such works, and to investigate 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 this period. This will be done by discussing and comparing eight novels in total; four for each chosen popular genre. From the field of speculative fiction, I will examine texts by the authors Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Margaret Elphinstone and Matthew Fitt. The discussion will then turn to crime fiction, with an analysis of novels by Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, Denise Mina and Louise Welsh. As well as evaluating the work of each author and its relevance to other texts in the field, consideration will be given to the significance of each novel under discussion to wider considerations of ideology, genre and national identity which were ongoing both at the time of their publication and in subsequent years. The dissertation’s conclusion will then consider the nature of the relationship between the popular genres which have been examined and the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction within the period indicated above.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

45

Siperstein, Stephen. "Climate Change in Literature and Culture: Conversion, Speculation, Education." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20450.

Full text

Abstract:

This dissertation examines an emergent archive of contemporary literary and cultural texts that engage with the wicked problem of anthropogenic climate change. Following cultural geographer Michael Hulme, this project works from the assumption that climate change is as much a constellation of ideas as it is a set of material realities. I draw from a diverse media landscape so as to better understand how writers, artists, and activists in the global north are exploring these ideas and particularly what it means to be human in a time of climate change. How do individuals learn to live with climate change, that is, with a daily commitment to navigating these chaotic and unprecedented times? Whether a memoir or a novel, an alternate-reality storytelling game or a collection of agitprop posters, each of these texts call on us to imagine different kinds of selves, different kinds of communities, or different kinds of futures. Just as the modes of inquiry practiced in the Environmental Humanities ask us to question the political, economic, and cultural status quo that has led to climate chaos, these texts also call on their audiences to engage in modes of transformative learning incited by this ongoing disorienting dilemma. The project thus also offers a set of ideas and practices for teaching climate change in literary and cultural studies. I argue that climate change poses both challenges and opportunities for educators in the Humanities, particularly in the context of its psychological impacts and emotional contours, and I suggest that transformative learning is a productive framework through which to understand such education. Ultimately, transformative climate change learning requires that students question their own assumptions and identities as well as exercise their cultural agency as a way of generating hope and working together to imagine and enact more just and sustainable futures.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

46

Welstead, Adam. "Dystopia and the divided kingdom : twenty-first century British dystopian fiction and the politics of dissensus." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17104.

Full text

Abstract:

This doctoral thesis examines the ways in which contemporary writers have adopted the critical dystopian mode in order to radically deconstruct the socio-political conditions that preclude equality, inclusion and collective political appearance in twenty-first century Britain. The thesis performs theoretically-informed close readings of contemporary novels from authors J.G. Ballard, Maggie Gee, Sarah Hall and Rupert Thomson in its analysis, and argues that the speculative visions of Kingdom Come (2006), The Flood (2004), The Carhullan Army (2007) and Divided Kingdom (2005) are engaged with a wave of contemporary dystopian writing in which the destructive and divisive forms of consensus that are to be found within Britain's contemporary socio-political moment are identified and challenged. The thesis proposes that, in their politically-engaged extrapolations, contemporary British writers are engaged with specifically dystopian expressions of dissensus. Reflecting key theoretical and political nuances found in Jacques Rancière's concept of 'dissensus', I argue that the novels illustrate dissensual interventions within the imagined political space of British societies in which inequalities, oppressions and exclusions are endemic - often proceeding to present modest, 'minor' utopian arguments for more equal, heterogeneous and democratic possibilities in the process. Contributing new, theoretically-inflected analysis of key speculative fictions from twenty-first century British writers, and locating their critiques within the literary, socio-political and theoretical contexts they are meaningfully engaged with, the thesis ultimately argues that in interrogating and reimagining the socio-political spaces of twenty-first century Britain, contemporary writers of dystopian fiction demonstrate literature working in its most dissensual, political and transformative mode.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

47

Homsher, Robert S. "Mythological apocalypses eschatological mythopoeic speculation of the combat myth in biblical apocalyptic literature /." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 2005. http://www.tren.com/search.cfm?p050-0135.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

48

McLoone, Jr Robert Bruce. "The enchanted plantation: literature, speculation, and the credit economy in Virginia, 1688-1754”." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6800.

Full text

Abstract:

"The Enchanted Plantation: Literature, Speculation, and the Credit Economy in Virginia, 1688-1754" examines the beginnings of a regionally-based literary culture in colonial Virginia and focuses specifically on texts that either originate from, or have close ties to, the colony's political and administrative capital at Williamsburg. The dissertation argues that literary practices and literary production in Virginia at this time were crucial to the imagination and material construction of Virginia's unevenly-developed plantation landscape, specifically as this plantation landscape arose within the new speculative and financial markets of the early eighteenth century. Individual chapters demonstrate how reading, writing, and publishing--practices that enabled, and were enabled by, a transatlantic empire built upon speculation and credit--were increasingly tied to land speculation and a managerial ethos of plantation administration. While surveying and bringing to light the many genres and writers associated with Virginia and its capital during this period (including financial literature by government officials, public oratory and ballads in Williamsburg, quitrent poetry, the periodical culture of the Virginia Gazette, and William Byrd II's historical narratives), the dissertation analyzes how Virginia's early literary culture assisted in both creating and managing the Virginia plantation as a slave society, a colonial contact zone, and a scene of financial investment.

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

49

Wallace, Nathaniel R. "H.P. Lovecraft's Literary "Supernatural Horror" in Visual Culture." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1417615151.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

50

Doyle, Emma B. B. "The Sound & the Surplus: Speculation as a Radical Mode." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1559139514065567.

Full text

APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles

Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Speculative Literature'

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles