Dr Paul March-Russell from the Department of Comparative Literature has just published a new book, Modernism and Science-Fiction (Palgrave, 2015).
The book ask to what extent can the future-oriented narratives of science fiction, emerging alongside modernism during the last years of the 19th century, be described as ‘modernist’? To what extent did modernism, responding to the scientific and technological breakthroughs of Darwin, Edison and Einstein, draw upon a grammar of ideas and images that we would call ‘science fiction’? It pursues these questions through a wide-ranging series of examples, drawn from literature, film and the visual arts in Britain, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Americas, from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) to J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973). Individual chapters examine key topics from within this period including scientific romance, utopia, pulp science-fiction, and the New Wave. A coda brings the story up to date with writers such as William Gibson, China Miéville and Kim Stanley Robinson. The book challenges how high and low culture has been mapped in the 20th century.
Paul’s title joins several others in the Modernism and… series to be written by staff from the School of European Culture and Language. These include Modernism and Nihilism (2011) by Professor Shane Weller, Modernism and Perversion (2011) by Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, and Modernism and Style (2011) by Professor Ben Hutchinson.
For more details on the book, please see the Palgrave Macmillan page here:
www.palgrave.com/page/detail/modernism-and-science-fiction-paul-marchrussell/?K=9780230273481