Science Fiction / Roger Luckhurst.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Luckhurst, Roger.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science fiction--History and criticism.

Science fiction.

Physical Description:

vii, 305 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Polity, 2005.

Summary:

In this new and timely cultural history of science fiction, Roger Luckhurst examines the genre from its origins in the late nineteenth century to its latest manifestations. The book introduces and explicates major works of science fiction literature by placing them in a series of contexts, using the history of science and technology, political and economic history and cultural theory to develop the means for understanding the unique qualities of the genre.

Luckhurst reads science fiction as a literature of modernity. The book examines how the genre provides a constantly modulating record of how human embodiment is transformed by scientific and technological change and how the very sense of self is imaginatively recomposed in popular fictions that range from utopian possibility to Gothic terror. This study charts the overlapping yet distinct histories of British and American science fiction, with commentary on the central authors, magazines, movements and texts from 1880 to the present day. It will be an invaluable guide and resource for all students taking courses on science fiction, technoculture and popular literature, but will equally be fascinating for anyone who has ever enjoyed a science fiction book.

Contents:

Part I Emergence, 1880-1945 13

1 Conditions of Emergence 15

2 Britain: The Scientific Romance and the Evolutionary Paradigm 30

3 America: Pulp Fictions and the Engineer Paradigm 50

Part II Elaboration, 1945-1959 77

4 1945: The Technocultural Conjuncture 79

5 From Atomjocks to Cultural Critique: American SF, 1939-1959 92

6 'All that Age, Horribly Dislocated': England After 1945 120

Part III Decade Studies 139

7 The 1960s 141

8 The 1970s 167

9 The 1980s 196

10 The 1990s 220.

ISBN:

0745628931

0745628923

OCLC:

58843750