This book examines how contemporary women novelists have successfully transformed and rewritten the conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction. Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been an outpouring of writing that depicts the end of the world as we know it, and women writers are no exception to this trend. However, the book argues that their fiction is distinctive. Contemporary women's work in this genre avoids conservatism, a nostalgic mourning for the past, and the focus on restoring what has been lost, aspects key to much male authored apocalyptic fiction. Instead, contemporary women writers show readers the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision, and offer qualified hope for a new beginning for society, culture and literature after an imagined apocalyptic event. Exploring science, nature and matter, the posthuman body, the maternal imaginary, time, narrative and history, literature and the word, and the post-secular, the book covers a wide variety of writers and addresses issues of nationality, race and ethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality.

Riven by world wars and cold wars, atrocities and genocides, the twentieth-century was also one of sexual, cultural and ideological revolutions, each inscribed across the fictions it produced. This fascinating new volume re-examines the twentieth-century novel as a form shaped by its problematic, often scandalous relation to the public sphere. Discussing ten groundbreaking texts against the challenges of their milieux, it considers twentieth century fiction as a tradition of transgression, perennially caught between license and licentiousness, erudition and sedition.

This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women's writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range and intensity of women writers' engagement with post-war transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across 'literary', 'middlebrow' and 'popular' genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children's literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism. They examine issues including realism and experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of 'second-wave' feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment of women's writing at a time of radical social change and rapid cultural expansion.

This is an edited collection offering up-to-date critical coverage of a wide range of Lessing's work. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and 'space fiction', and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to "The Fifth Child" and "The Grass is Singing", eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.

Since the turn of the century, New Left Review has published a score of editorials on contemporary world politics, each departing from conventional positions. This collection brings together a selection of NLR's interventions in these years of US unipolarity and late-capitalist boom and bust, the War on Terror and the rise of China, the asymmetrical recovery from the financial crisis and the fraught politics of the energy transition. Bookended by surveys reviewing the broader political-intellectual conjuncture in which the journal is publishing, they examine both the ideas and the on-the-ground operations of liberal-internationalist rule, from the Middle East peace process to the new cold war, analysing the character of the EU and the record of Obama, the meaning of Donald Trump and the explanation for Brexit - as well as tracking counter-movements from street to ballot box, the Arab Spring to Corbyn, Sanders and Podemos.

"Functional Clothing Design" is a book about how and why clothing works. This interdisciplinary text introduces new ways to look at the human body, the environment and clothing and to explore the relationships between them by looking at the ways clothing achieves goals such as protecting the body, increasing health and safety, improving a worker's efficiency on the job or increasing body function. Watkins and Dunne present technical material using clear, simple language that can be readily understood by beginning design students with no science or engineering background. Building on the groundbreaking text by Watkins, "Clothing: The Portable Environment," this text covers a full range of factors involved in designing functional clothing: protection from thermal, impact and other environmental hazards; enhancing movement and visibility and increasing body function with smart clothing; designing clothing for people with handicaps and designing protective clothing for groups such as the military, who face multiple hazards. "Functional Clothing Design" focuses on the full range of activities needed to develop functional clothing--from analysis of user needs to choosing appropriate materials to design and design evaluation. The text includes case studies throughout as well as new content on smart textiles and all the latest developments in wearable technology. Designers and others seeking clothing solutions to problems in many fields will find a common language linking a number of disciplines through which they can explore both problems and solutions.

Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and "space fiction," and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to The Fifth Child and The Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.