|
Showing 1 - 10 of
10 matches in All Departments
'Island Genres, Genre Islands' moves the debate about literature
and place onto new ground by exploring the island settings of
bestsellers. Through a focus on four key genres-crime fiction,
thrillers, popular romance fiction, and fantasy fiction-Crane and
Fletcher show that genre is fundamental to both the textual
representation of real and imagined islands and to actual
knowledges and experiences of islands. The book offers broad,
comparative readings of the significance of islandness in each of
the four genres as well as detailed case studies of major authors
and texts. These include chapters on Agatha's Christie's islands,
the role of the island in 'Bondspace,' the romantic islophilia of
Nora Roberts's Three Sisters Island series, and the archipelagic
geography of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea. Crane and Fletcher's book
will appeal to specialists in literary studies and cultural
geography, as well as in island studies.
This volume moves the debate about literature and geography in a
new direction by showing the significance of spatial settings in
the enormous and complex field of popular fiction. Approaching
popular genres as complicated systems of meaning, the collected
essays model key theoretical and critical approaches for
interrogating the meaning of space and place across diverse genres,
including crime, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, and romance.
Including topics such as classic English ghost stories, blockbuster
Antarctic thrillers, prize-winning Montreal crime fiction, J. R. R.
Tolkien's Middle-earth, and China Mieville's Bas-Lag, among others,
this book brings together analyses of the real-and-imagined
settings of some of the most widely read authors and texts of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how they have an
immeasurable impact on our spatial awareness and imagination.
'Island Genres, Genre Islands' moves the debate about literature
and place onto new ground by exploring the island settings of
bestsellers. Through a focus on four key genres-crime fiction,
thrillers, popular romance fiction, and fantasy fiction-Crane and
Fletcher show that genre is fundamental to both the textual
representation of real and imagined islands and to actual
knowledges and experiences of islands. The book offers broad,
comparative readings of the significance of islandness in each of
the four genres as well as detailed case studies of major authors
and texts. These include chapters on Agatha's Christie's islands,
the role of the island in 'Bondspace,' the romantic islophilia of
Nora Roberts's Three Sisters Island series, and the archipelagic
geography of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea. Crane and Fletcher's book
will appeal to specialists in literary studies and cultural
geography, as well as in island studies.
This volume moves the debate about literature and geography in a
new direction by showing the significance of spatial settings in
the enormous and complex field of popular fiction. Approaching
popular genres as complicated systems of meaning, the collected
essays model key theoretical and critical approaches for
interrogating the meaning of space and place across diverse genres,
including crime, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, and romance.
Including topics such as classic English ghost stories, blockbuster
Antarctic thrillers, prize-winning Montreal crime fiction, J. R. R.
Tolkien's Middle-earth, and China Mieville's Bas-Lag, among others,
this book brings together analyses of the real-and-imagined
settings of some of the most widely read authors and texts of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how they have an
immeasurable impact on our spatial awareness and imagination.
The first book-length study of romance novels to focus on issues of
sexuality rather than gender, Historical Romance Fiction moves the
ongoing debate about the value and appeal of heterosexual romance
onto new ground, testing the claims of cutting-edge critical
theorists on everything from popular classics by Georgette Heyer,
to recent 'bodice rippers,' to historical fiction by John Fowles
and A.S. Byatt. Beginning with her nomination of 'I love you' as
the romance novel's defining speech act, Lisa Fletcher engages
closely with speech-act theory and recent studies of
performativity. The range of texts serves to illustrate Fletcher's
definition of historical romance as a fictional mode dependent on
the force and familiarity of the speech act, 'I love you', and
permits Fletcher to provide a detailed account of the genre's
history and development in both its popular and 'literary'
manifestations. Written from a feminist and anti-homophobic
perspective, Fletcher's subtle arguments about the romantic speech
act serve to demonstrate the genre's dependence on repetition
('Romance can only quote') and the shaky ground on which the
romance's heterosexual premise rests. Her exploration of the
subgenre of cross-dressing novels is especially revealing in this
regard. With its deft mix of theoretical arguments and suggestive
close readings, Fletcher's book will appeal to specialists in
genre, speech act and performativity theory, and gender studies.
|
|