Robots in Popular Culture: Androids and Cyborgs in the American Imagination seeks to provide one go-to reference for the study of the most popular and iconic robots in American popular culture. In the last 10 years, technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have become not only a daily but a minute-by-minute part of American life-more integrated into our lives than anyone would have believed even a generation before. Americans have long known the adorable and helpful R2-D2 and the terrible possibilities of Skynet and its army of Terminators. Throughout, we have seen machines as valuable allies and horrifying enemies. Today, Americans cling to their mobile phones with the same affection that Luke Skywalker felt for the squat R2-D2. Meanwhile, our phones, personal computers, and cars have attained the ability to know and learn everything about us. This volume opens with essays about robots in popular culture, followed by 100 A-Z entries on the most famous AIs in film, comics, and more. Sidebars highlight ancillary points of interest, such as authors, creators, and tropes that illuminate the motives of various robots. The volume closes with a glossary of key terms and a bibliography providing students with resources to continue their study of what robots tell us about ourselves. Provides readers with detailed information on popular examples of robots/AI in American popular culture Provides readers with considerable Further Reading suggestions, including scholarly, pop culture, and scientific readings on each topic Places popular examples of robots/AI in pop culture in proper historical perspective Provides scholarly material that gives readers additional important historical context in five essays Gives equal coverage to a diverse array of robots, from the well-known to the obscure

Building on the formula of York Notes, this Advanced series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. The notes enable students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop their own critical thinking. Key features include: study methods; an introduction to the text; summaries with critical notes; themes and techniques; textual analysis of key passages; author biography; historical and literary background; modern and historical critical approaches; chronology; and glossary of literary terms.

Including more than 30 essential works of science fiction criticism in a single volume, this is a comprehensive introduction to the study of this enduringly popular genre. Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings covers such topics as: *Definitions and boundaries of the genre *The many forms of science fiction, from time travel to 'inner space' *Ideology and identity: from utopian fantasy to feminist, queer and environmental readings *The non-human: androids, aliens, cyborgs and animals *Race and the legacy of colonialism The volume also features annotated guides to further reading on these topics. Includes writings by: Marc Angenot, J.G. Ballard, Damien Broderick, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Grace Dillon, Kodwo Eshun, Carl Freedman, Allison de Fren, Hugo Gernsback, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Robert A. Heinlein, Nalo Hopkinson, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Gwyneth Jones, Rob Latham, Roger Luckhurst, Judith Merril, John B. Michel, Wendy Pearson, John Rieder, Lysa Rivera, Joanna Russ, Mary Shelley, Stephen Hong Sohn, Susan Sontag, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Vernor Vinge, Sherryl Vint, H.G. Wells, David Wittenberg and Lisa Yaszek

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

Thinking in Literature sets out to examine how the Modernist novel might be understood to be a machine for thinking, and further how it might offer means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis of the concept of thinking in literature using Gilles Deleuze as a point of departure and returning directly to the work of the two philosophers who were most important to Deleuze's understanding of thinking in literature: Spinoza and Leibniz. Three elements are identified as crucial to aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Yet in order to build a fuller understanding of these processes it is necessary to move from theory to specific readings of artistic practice. Uhlmann examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and the young Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature.

Since the controversy and acclaim that surrounded the publication of Disgrace (1999), the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature and the publication of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (both in 2003), J. M. Coetzee's status has begun to steadily rise to the point where he has now outgrown the specialized domain of South African literature. Today he is recognized more simply as one of the most important writers in the English language from the late 20th and early 21st century. Coetzee's productivity and invention has not slowed with old age. The Childhood of Jesus, published in 2013, like Elizabeth Costello, was met with a puzzled reception, as critics struggled to come to terms with its odd setting and structure, its seemingly flat tone, and the strange affectless interactions of its characters. Most puzzling was the central character, David, linked by the title to an idea of Jesus. J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things is at the forefront of an exciting process of critical engagement with this novel, which has begun to uncover its rich dialogue with philosophy, theology, mathematics, politics, and questions of meaning.

The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British experimental writers of the swinging 1960s. A decade of research, including as-yet unopened archives and interviews with the writers' colleagues, is brought together to produce a comprehensive history of this ill-starred group of renegade writers. Whether the bolshie B.S. Johnson, the globetrotting Ann Quin, the cerebral Christine Brooke-Rose, or the omnipresent Anthony Burgess, these writers each brought their own unique contributions to literature at a time uniquely open to their iconoclastic message. The journey connects historical moments from Bletchley Park, to Paris May '68, to terrorist groups of the 1970s. A tale of love, loss, friendship and a shared vision, this book is a fascinating insight into a bold, provocative and influential group of writers whose collective story has gone untold, until now.

Mendele Mocher Sefarim's seven novels constitute the most important and influential body of work in modern Jewish prose fiction written prior to the First World War. These novels-five of which he wrote twice, once in Yiddish and once in Hebrew-are devastating satiric portraits of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Russia. They are permeated by Mendele's passion for social change, and an often equally passionate contempt for his own people for failing to achieve it. David Aberbach, exploring these passions in terms of the psychology of prejudice and self-hate, provides the first full-length analysis of the tension between realism and caricature in Mendele's descriptions of his fellow-Jew. At the same time, his analysis conveys Mendele's fascinating social and psychological insights into the forces which led to the mass emigration of Jews from Russia before the First World War, to the rise of Zionism, and to Jewish involvement in the socialist and revolutionary movements in Russia at the turn of the century. The picture is broadened through references to contemporary Russian literature so as to portray these forces in the context of Russian society at the time. Aberbach's skilful presentation allows the reader to gain access to Mendele's works through many tantalizing excerpts, with some of the key passages provided in Hebrew and Yiddish as well as in Aberbach's lively translation. He also makes available the considerable body of Mendele scholarship that has been published in Hebrew in recent years. From this fascinating and lucid work, scholars and general readers alike will gain a new understanding not only of the social realities of Jewish life in tsarist Russia but also of how the self-image of an ethnic minority may be affected and even determined by the character and social problems of the majority culture.

H. G. Wells, the inventor of the concept of the time machine and the phrase 'the Shape of Things to Come' described his life's work as one of 'critical anticipation'. Shadows of the Future identifies this attempt to imagine possible futures as the unifying principle behind Wells' diverse and sometimes wayward literary career. Described by John Middleton Murry as 'the last prophet of bourgeois Europe', he was also its first futurologist.

In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison's seven later novels. Love comes in a new and surprising shape in each of the later novels; for example, Love presents it as the deep friendship between little girls; in Home it acts as a disruptive force producing deep changes in subjectivity; and in Jazz it becomes something one innovates and recreates each moment-like jazz itself. Each novel's unconventional idea of love requires a new experimental narrative form. Wyatt analyzes the stylistic and structural innovations of each novel, showing how disturbances in narrative chronology, surprise endings, and gaps mirror the dislocated temporality and distorted emotional responses of the novels' troubled characters and demand that the reader situate the present-day problems ofthe characters in relation to a traumatic African American past. The narrative surprises and gaps require the reader to become an active participant in making meaning. And the texts' complex narrative strategies draw out the reader's convictions about love, about gender, about race-and then prompt the reader to reexamine them, so that reading becomes an active ethical dialogue between text and reader. Wyatt uses psychoanalytic concepts to analyze Morrison's narrative structures and how they work on readers. Love and Narrative Form devotes a chapter to each of Morrison's later novels: Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child.

This volume highlights humour's crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour's politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also risks recycling the past's invidious ideologies under the politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers - including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic, the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful - producing a richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of 'canonical' neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at - the Victorians, as we like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge? This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof. Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia

A Sherlock Holmes Escape Book: The Adventure of the Tower of London is a unique form of puzzle book, in which the reader must solve the riddles to escape the pages. The fourth title in this ingenious series of Sherlock Holmes Escape Books, The Adventure of the Tower of London is an exhilarating combination of escape room, puzzle book and adventure story. Inspired by the urban craze for escape rooms, where players tackle puzzles while trapped in a locked room, it is an escape room in the form of a locked book, filled with codes, ciphers, riddles and red herrings, and a clever Code Wheel set into the cover. In the latest adventure in the series, readers will take on the role of the world's foremost consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes's nemesis Moriarty has locked Sherlock's friend, the musician Odon von Mihalovic, with the CrownJewels in a cage in Tower Bridge the night before a special ceremony is due to be held for the Queen. Holmes and Watson are themselves trapped in the nearby Tower of London by Moriarty, and they must work through the night and against the clock to find and free Odon from the cage to prevent him being disgraced in the ceremony the following morning. Combines riddles, logic puzzles, timed challenges, mathematical brain-teasers, maps and mazes.

Although female communication networks abound in many contexts and have received a good measure of critical scrutiny, no study has addressed their unique significance within narrative culture writ large. Filling this conspicuous gap, Ned Schantz presents a lively exploration of the phenomenon, resituating novelistic culture as central even as he ranges across media and the myriad technologies that attend them.
Charting the emergence of female networks via the most prominent modes of communication--gossip, letters, and phones--Schantz brings his study to life with unconventional interpretations of classic British novels and popular Hollywood films spanning multiple genres and time periods. With incisive readings of Clarissa, Emma, and Evelina, Schantz shows how gossip both draws sympathy and is repressed by dominant male culture in a recurrent pattern of avowal and disavowal. The epistolary novel added a rhythm to communication that was generative of fantasy, which in turn informed "telephonic film," a development depicted in analyses of movies such as Sorry, Wrong Number; Vertigo; Terminator; and You've Got Mail. Schantz highlights the way the telephone works as a structuring device, not merely a prop, one that shapes the plot and suggests provocative formal implications.
While this study traverses an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the importance of female communication at its most basic level. Illuminating and accessible--Gossip, Letters, Phones reveals female networks as one of narrative's most supple and persistent elements in literature andcinema.

Exam board: AQA A, Cambridge Assessment International Education Level & Subject: AS and A Level English Literature First teaching: September 2015 First examination: June 2017, 2021 This edition of Persuasion provides depth and context for A Level students, with the complete novel in an easy to read format, and a detailed introduction and bespoke glossary written by an experienced A Level teacher with academic expertise in the area. * Affordable high quality complete text of Persuasion, ideal for AS and A Level Literature * Perfectly pitched introductions provide the depth and demand required by AS and A Level * Explore the contemporary context, Jane Austen's writing, the novel's critical reception and subsequent interpretations for a deeper reading of the text * Expand your further reading with a list of key articles and critical and theoretical texts * Improve your understanding of the novel with unfamiliar concepts and culturally-specific terms defined in the glossary

Barely noticed upon publication in 1941, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans's unique chronicle of Alabama sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would enjoy a remarkable revival during the 1960s. Remembering it as a "bible of sorts" for civil rights activists like himself, psychiatrist Robert Coles called it "an eloquent testimony that others had cared, had gone forth to look and hear, and had come back to stand up and address their friends and neighbors and those beyond personal knowing." The book has remained in print ever since, profoundly affecting subsequent generations of readers. In this collection, seventeen gifted essayists offer provocative new perspectives on the Agee-Evans classic, ranging from personal appreciations to computational analysis, with forays into literary, film, historical, social, and cultural criticism, among other approaches. David Moltke-Hansen examines the political context in which the book was produced, comparing it in particular to the works of Erskine Caldwell and others with more explicit agendas than Agee, while Sarah E. Gardner explores Agee's position as a southerner in the literary culture of 1930s Manhattan. Contrasting Agee's text to the uncaptioned Evans photographs that open the book, Jeffrey Couchman discusses how the writer applied a "cinematic eye" to his descriptions of the sharecroppers' homes and their possessions. In their essays, Hugh Davis, Brent Walker Cline, and David Madden link Agee with earlier writers such as Wordsworth, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, and Melville, while Michael Jacobs considers Agee as a forefather of the "New Journalism" championed by Tom Wolfe. Other contributors explore such disparate topics as Agee's conception of irony, the conflict of art and nature in the book, and the author's portrayal of space. Taken together, these artful elucidations of a notoriously difficult but brilliant work provide the most comprehensive and wide-ranging view of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to date.

Although best known the world over for his masterpiece novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the antics of the would-be knight-errant and his simple squire only represent a fraction of the trials and tribulations, both in the literary world and in society at large, of this complex man. Poet, playwright, soldier, slave, satirist, novelist, political commentator, and literary outsider, Cervantes achieved a minor miracle by becoming one of the rarest of things in the Early-Modern world of letters: an international best-seller during his lifetime, with his great novel being translated into multiple languages before his death in 1616. The principal objective of The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes is to create a resource in English that provides a fully comprehensive overview of the life, works, and influences of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). This volume contains seven sections, exploring in depth Cervantes's life and how the trials, tribulations, and hardships endured influenced his writing. Cervantistas from numerous countries, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and France offer their expertise with the most up-to-date research and interpretations to complete this wide-ranging, but detailed, compendium of a writer not known for much other than his famous novel outside of the Spanish-speaking world. Here we explore his famous novelDon Quixote de la Mancha, his other prose works, his theatrical output, his poetry, his sources, influences, and contemporaries, and finally reception of his works over the last four hundred years.

Some of the most memorable movies of Hollywood's Golden Age were based on novels that never received the acclaim they deserved. No-one who saw Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker could forget the actor's wrenching performance but does anyone remember the author of the book on which the film was based? The same can be said of Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Greta Garbo in Susan Lenox, and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This book retrieves these novels and re-evaluates the careers of the eight neglected novelists whose works inspired eight different directors - among them Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, John Huston and Sidney Pollack. Each chapter offers detailed analysis on both the original text and the resulting movie. Taken together, the double examination of novel and film raises some important questions about the nature and problems of cinematic adaptation.

Locating Conrad's work in the context of the writer's life and cultural milieu, Professor Watts's study examines the main phase in Conrad's literary development. Drawing out the distinctive thematic preoccupations and technical devices in Conrad's writing, Watts explores Conrad's importance and influence as a moral, social and political commentator. He focuses in particular on Almayer's Folly, The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo and Chance. The critical discussions address recent controversial developments in the evaluation of this magisterial, vivid, yet complex and problematic author.

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few - it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

In Postcolonial Past & Present twelve outstanding scholars of literature, history and visual arts look to those spaces Epeli Hau'ofa has insisted are full not empty, asking what it might mean to Indigenise culture. A new cultural politics demands new forms of making and interpretation that rethink and reroute existing cultural categories and geographies. These 'makers' include Mukunda Das, Janet Frame, Xavier Herbert, Tomson Highway, Claude McKay, Marie Munkara, Elsje van Keppel, Albert Wendt, Jane Whiteley and Alexis Wright. Case studies from Canada to the Caribbean, India to the Pacific, and Africa, analyse the productive ways that artists and intellectuals have made sense of turbulent local and global forces. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, Debnarayan Bandyopadhyay, Anne Brewster, Diana Brydon, Meeta Chatterjee-Padmanabhan, Anne Collett, Dorothy Jones, Kay Lawrence, Russell McDougall, Tekura Moeka'a, Tony Simoes da Silva, Teresia Teaiwa, Albert Wendt, Lydia Wevers, Diana Wood Conroy

Cicero has long been seen to embody the values of the Roman republic. This provocative study of Cicero's use of history reveals that rather than promoting his own values, Cicero uses historical representation to explore the difficulties of finding any ideological coherence in Rome's political or cultural traditions. Matthew Fox looks to the scepticism of Cicero's philosophical education for an understanding of his perspective on Rome's history, and argues that neglect of the sceptical tradition has transformed the doubting, ambiguous Cicero into the confident proponent of Roman values. Through close reading of a range of his theoretical works, Fox uncovers an ironic attitude towards Roman history, and connects that to the use of irony in mainstream Latin historians. He concludes with a study of a little-known treatise on Cicero from the early eighteenth century which sheds considerable light on the history of Cicero's reception.

This is the first published collection of critical essays on the work of Kate Grenville, one of Australia's most important contemporary writers. Grenville has been acclaimed for her novels, winning numerous national and international prizes including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her novels are marked by sharp observations of outsider figures who are often under pressure to conform to society's norms. More recently, she has written novels set in Australia's past, revisiting and re-imagining colonial encounters between settlers and Indigenous Australians. This collection of essays includes a scholarly introduction and three new essays that reflect on Grenville's work in relation to her approach to feminism, her role as public intellectual and her books on writing. The other nine essays provide analyses of each of her novels published to date, from the early success of "Lilian's Story "and "Dreamhouse "to the most recently published novel, "The Lieutenant." Her work has been the subject of some debate and this is reflected in a number of the essays published here, most particularly with regard to her most successful novel to date, "The Secret River." This intellectual engagement with important contemporary issues is a mark of Grenville's fiction, testament to her own analysis of the vital role of writers in uncertain times. She has suggested that "writers have ways of going into the darkest places, taking readers with them and coming out safely." This volume attests to Grenville's own significance as a writer in a time of change and to the value of her novels as indices of that change and in "lighting dark places."

In this ground-breaking study, Sabine Binder analyses the complex ways in which female crime fictional victims, detectives and perpetrators in South African crime fiction resonate with widespread and persistent real crimes against women in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of crime novels written over the last decade, Binder emphasises the genre's feminist potential and critically maps its political work at the intersection of gender and race. Her study challenges the perception of crime fiction as a trivial genre and shows how, in South Africa at least, it provides a vibrant platform for social, cultural and ethical debates, exposing violence, misogyny and racism and shedding light on the problematics of law and justice for women faced with crime.

Middlemarch is the prime example of George Eliot's dictum that "interpretations are illimitable," and in this collection of new essays Middlemarch is re-examined as an open text responsive to gaps and fissures, and as resistant to authority as it is to other fixed notions of identity, idealism, and gender. What does the novel omit, and how do the omissions shape what is there? How shall we understand the materiality of the text? What problems does it pose to adaptation? The novel's plasticity becomes a basis for investigation into the multiple forms of expressiveness, and a consideration of how we might plot the patterns linguistically, ideologically, even cinematically. New spaces emerge within character, place, and narrative; what seemed absent or inaccessible assumes shape and definition; Middlemarch remains "Victorian" but it is a Victorianism understood through the dual perspectives of the 19th and 21st centuries. Scholars of George Eliot and students of Victorianism will be engaged by the wide-ranging scope of these essays, which nonetheless build on each other to form a coherent narrative of critical reflections. If there is something for everyone in Middlemarch, there is also something compelling about each of the essays in this collection.