Assembling Alternatives brings together five English-speaking communities -- the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland and Australia -- to discuss how national differences have inflected poetic experimentation. The 24 essays provide historic overviews, close readings, personal views and polemics on poetics as they have developed in situ. These "oppositional poetries" and poetics are highly diverse and can only be unified -- as they are here -- as an imagined collective alternative to a mainstream and institutionalized practice of poetry. By tracing the varied histories and trajectories of innovative poetry in these countries, and by engaging in readings of specific texts from within these traditions, Assembling Alternatives suggests subtle but provocative differences in strategies of resistance, constructions of self, use of voice and use of technology.

In Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel Andrew Gibson sets out to demonstrate that postmodern theory has actually made possible an ethical discourse around fiction. Each chapter elaborates and discusses a particular aspect of Levinas' thought and raises questions for that thought and its bearing on the novel. It also contains detailed analyses of particular texts. Part of the book's originality is its concentration on a range of modernist and postmodern novels which have seldom if ever served as the basis for a larger ethical theory of fiction. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel discusses among others the writings of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie.

Product Description: Is comedy postmodern?Kirby Olson posits that no one has been more marginalized than the comic writer, whose irreverent truths have always made others uncomfortable. In a literary age that purports to champion diversity, comic writers remain an underclass huddling at the fringes of the canon...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The love story is an integral part of many novels. What is its narrative status? How does it function, and why? In this original study of Socratic 'love stories,' from Plato through Fielding and Faulkner to the Postmodernists, Jennie Wang proposes a new narrative theory in the study of the novel, which deconstructs the mimesis of 'love stories' and reconstructs their historicity. Wang claims that in the Platonic tradition, the construction of 'love stories' is often a dramatization of the author's historical vision, philosophical speculations, cultural criticism, or political ideology. Novelistic love functions as a literary medium, a power of free speech, that enables the novelist to speak unspeakable truths and include excluded subjects. Wang's work will be of interest to both philosophers and scholars of American literature and postmodernism. (view table of contents)

Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre.Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive `encyclopaedia'. He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers.Reading by Starlight includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney.

Product Description: Exploring the connections between autobiography and postmodernism, this book addresses self-representation in a variety of literatures - Native American, British, Chicana, immigrant, and lesbian, among others - in genres as diverse as poetry, naming, confession, photography, and the manifesto...read more

Product Description: "This is an extremely intelligent, interesting, and well written book." —Murder Is Academic"... compelling analysis of the comedy thriller... " —Theatre Studies"... almost as much fun to read as is seeing the actual plays discussed...read more

This fascinating study is the first to examine the history of gender and science fiction and the first to discuss science fiction pulp magazines' images of women, as well as postmodernism and feminist science fiction. Robin Roberts begins with Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a female alien appears, and continues through H. G. Wells, the 1950s pulp science fiction magazines, Doris Lessing and feminist utopias, and the new generation of science fiction writers, including Joan Vinge, Sheila Finch, Vonda McIntyre, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler. Roberts explores the legacy of male SF writers, utopia as a feminist response to patriarchy, and science fiction and postmodernism, showing how current writers use deconstructive theory to challenge patriarchal assumptions more forcefully than ever. A New Species includes an entire chapter of Doris Lessing's science fiction in the context of science fiction by women.

Product Description: In her survey, the author examines the main areas of developme nt in the novel since the great innovative writers of the early part of this century. She investigates the historical impulses that have driven postmodernism in fiction, with particular reference to the influence of James Joyce; to the main philosophical shifts in 20th century thinking; to the pressure of events experienced by a number of those writers who had abandoned traditional "realist" modes of writing...read more

Product Description: In her survey, the author examines the main areas of developme nt in the novel since the great innovative writers of the early part of this century. She investigates the historical impulses that have driven postmodernism in fiction, with particular reference to the influence of James Joyce; to the main philosophical shifts in 20th century thinking; to the pressure of events experienced by a number of those writers who had abandoned traditional "realist" modes of writing...read more