As we move through the 21st century, the importance of science fiction to the study of English Literature is becoming increasingly apparent. The Science Fiction Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the genre and how to study it for students new to the field. In particular, it provides detailed entries on major writers in the SF field who might be encountered on university-level English Literature courses, ranging from H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick, to Doris Lessing and Geoff Ryman. Other features include an historical timeline, sections on key writers, critics and critical terms, and case studies of both literary and critical works. In the later sections of the book, the changing nature of the science fiction canon and its growing role in relation to the wider categories of English Literature are discussed in depth introducing the reader to the latest critical thinking on the field.

This collection of essays examines the relationship between the media and cosmopolitanism in an increasingly fragmented and globalizing world. This relationship is presented from multiple perspectives and the essays cover, amongst other themes, cosmopolitanization in everyday life, the mediation of suffering, trauma studies, and researching cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective. Some of the essays explore existing research and theory about cosmopolitanism and apply it to specific case studies; others attempt to extend this theoretical framework and engage in a dialogue with the broader disciplines of media and cultural studies. Overall, this variety of approaches generates valuable insights into the central issue of the book: the role played by the media, in its various forms, in either encouraging or discouraging cosmopolitanist identifications among its audiences.

This interdisciplinary volume focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse, reflecting on its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. It offers a dynamic combination of theoretical speculation, textual analysis and historicisation, exploring four crucial areas of investigation: theory, space, time, and language. Authors examine how apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world's globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief. The apocalypse is generally understood as a complex and often paradoxical paradigm of contemporary culture. This book offers a new, post-millennial perspective that perceives 'the end' as immanent rather than imminent, and develops existing theoretical tendencies that approach apocalyptic fictions as fantastic displacements of contemporary social, cultural and political anxieties. It points to the many ways in which the apocalypse is spatialised and mapped across urban, virtual, and global spaces.This collection explores the widespread appeal of the apocalypse as one of the most pervasive preoccupations in the history of Western culture, and one that has served as a template to construct different sets of cultural anxieties throughout history.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural production. Examining the ways in which apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world's globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief, fifteen original essays by a group of internationally established and emerging critics reflect on the apocalypse, its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. The collection seeks to offer a new reading of the apocalypse, understood as a complex - and, frequently, paradoxical - paradigm of (contemporary) Western culture. The majority of published collections on the subject have been published prior to the year 2000 and, in their majority of cases, locate the apocalypse in the future and envision it as something imminent. This collection offers a post-millennial perspective that perceives "the end" as immanent and, simultaneously, rooted in the past tradition.

As we move through the 21st century, the importance of science fiction to the study of English Literature is becoming increasingly apparent. The Science Fiction Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the genre and how to study it for students new to the field. In particular, it provides detailed entries on major writers in the SF field who might be encountered on university-level English Literature courses, ranging from H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick, to Doris Lessing and Geoff Ryman. Other features include an historical timeline, sections on key writers, critics and critical terms, and case studies of both literary and critical works. In the later sections of the book, the changing nature of the science fiction canon and its growing role in relation to the wider categories of English Literature are discussed in depth introducing the reader to the latest critical thinking on the field.

"Cybercultures: Mediations of Community, Culture, Politics," is a collection of essays that critically examine the role that digital media and online cultures play in the rearticulation of contemporary societies, cultures and polities. This volume interrogates the nature and effects of the existence of cybercultures in the world of Web 2.0, new media and media convergence, and mobile digital networks. It does so by examining the effect of cybercultures upon the contemporary articulation of phenomena as diverse as bodily experience, memory, the imagination, history, political participation, the nature of community, artistic creativity, and the instability of rhetoric, language and meaning.