Genius in the Raw

2018 ◽  
pp. 42-72
Author(s):  
Catherine Keyser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Rational Control ◽  
Raw Foods ◽  
Twentieth Century Fiction ◽  
George Schuyler

In his popular science fiction serial Black Empire, published pseudonymously in the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938, the satirist George Schuyler associates the light-skinned love interest with hydroponic produce and science kitchens. The tragic mulatta, an icon of nineteenth-century fiction, becomes in twentieth-century fiction a racial representative pointing the way to a hybrid future. However, the raw foods diet also generates a paradox: the modern mulatta is both pure and primitive, abnegating and appetitive; Schuyler’s fiction and his mixed-race daughter Philippa’s childhood celebrity both reveal a discomfort with women’s bodies and desires that might exceed the bounds of rational control.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Gavin Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
Reflexive Function ◽  
And Function ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.

An Anthropologist Orders a Beer

2020 ◽  
pp. 16-35
Author(s):  
K. Mitchell Snow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mexican Nationalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Indigenous Heritage

The extended turmoil associated with the decade-long armed portion of the Mexican Revolution provoked widespread concern about how the country would remake itself once the violence ended. Establishing a national esthetic as a means of unification played a significant role in this discussion, which began before hostilities ended. Some of the early manifestations of what might be regarded as Mexican nationalism arose from an appreciation of the land’s indigenous heritage while it was still under Spanish control. Although the willingness to fully embrace the indigenous components of its culture was largely a twentieth century phenomenon, by the late nineteenth century Mexican intellectuals did understand the nation to be essentially mestizo, or mixed race. It was from these premises that the discussion departed.

scholarly journals Deceived by orchids: sex, science, fiction and Darwin

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM ENDERSBY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Many

AbstractBetween 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

Body Parts: Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Short Stories by Women

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Donawerth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cosmetic Surgery ◽  
South American ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Domestic Technology ◽  
Modern Business ◽  
American Author ◽  
Century Science

This essay is a feminist, historical exploration of body parts in short science fiction stories by women. In early-twentieth-century stories about prostheses, blood transfusion, and radioactive experiments, Clare Winger Harris, Kathleen Ludwick, and Judith Merril use body parts to explore fears of damage to masculine identity by war, of alienation of men from women, and of racial pollution. In stories from the last quarter of the twentieth century, the South American author Angélica Gorodischer depicts a housewife's escape from oppressive domestic technology through time travel in which she murders male leaders, while Eileen Gunn offers a critique of bioengineering and sociobiology, satirizing fears of women in modern business and of erasure of identity in global corporate structures. An end-of-the-century fiction by the African American Akua Lezli Hope imagines a black woman altered through cosmetic surgery to become a tenor sax and critiques technologies that transform women's bodies into cultural signifiers of social function and class.

Ice, Fire and Flood: A Short Pre-history of Climate Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner ◽  
J.R. Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Climate Fiction ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Global Heating

This chapter argues that catastrophic climate change fictions have been organised around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world. Of these, only the last has a deep history in the Western mythos, dating back to stories of a Great Flood in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. When modern science fiction (SF) began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, it inherited a preoccupation with the Flood from its parent cultures, for example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Richard Jefferies’s After London and Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous. This flood motif continued to be important in American pulp SF. Cooling and warming are more recent preoccupations, dating from the widespread acceptance of ice age theory and greenhouse theory in the late nineteenth century. For most of the twentieth century both science and SF were more interested in cooling. But in the closing quarter of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, widespread scientific concern that anthropogenic warming might more than offset longer-term cooling led to the development of contemporary ‘cli-fi’, concerned primarily with the effects of global heating.

Teaching nature study on the blackboard in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin Donahue Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nature Study ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Object Lessons ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Young Students

England's Education Acts in the late nineteenth century made school free and mandatory for all children, filling schools with more and younger students. Visual teaching methods such as blackboard drawing were used to catch young students’ eyes and engage their interest. At the same time, there was high public engagement with natural history and popular science lectures, which built the perception of science as accessible, interesting and useful for people of all social classes. This “science for all” trend along with the new universal education paved the way for nature study, a new school subject based on experiential learning through observation of plants and animals, similar to the popular nineteenth-century pedagogy of object lessons. The many manuals about nature study that were published for teachers in England in the early twentieth century reveal the content, pedagogy, and portrayal of science communicated to young students. Analysis of one manual, Nature teaching on the blackboard (1910), sheds light on typical nature study lessons, including suggested images for teachers to draw on the blackboard. Visual methods of teaching science were not limited to schoolchildren: university lecturers as well as popularizers of science used object lessons and blackboard drawing to educate and entertain their adult audiences. Comparing blackboard teaching of nature study with other educational images and audiences for science explores how multisensory learning and the blackboard brought information about the natural world and engagement with science to the public.

Bells and the Problem of Realism in Ravel’s Early Piano Music

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kieffer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Piano Music ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Maurice Ravel ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Musical Listening

Early in his career Maurice Ravel composed two pieces that take bells as their subject: “Entre Cloches” from Sites auriculaires, composed in 1897, and “La vallée des cloches,” the final movement of the 1905 work Miroirs. Although these pieces can be contextualized within a nineteenth-century lineage of French piano pieces that depict bell peals, they also set themselves apart by virtue of their heightened attention to the particularities of bell sonorities. Relying heavily on repetitive ostinato patterns, quartal harmonies, and intense dissonances, these pieces play in the nebulous space between transcription and composition. Ravel’s experimentation with bell sonorities in his piano music can be understood in relation to a broader discourse surrounding the sound of bells in nineteenth-century France. A complex sonic object, bell resonance lent itself to different modes of listening: the harmoniousness of bell peals was a common refrain among romantic poets, Catholic clergy, and campanarian historians, but toward the end of the century it became increasingly common for physicists and popular-science publications to complain that bells were inherently discordant. In this context Ravel’s depictions of bells in “Entre cloches” and “La vallée des cloches” suggest a shift in the place of musical listening in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultures of aurality. Ravel’s musical listening entailed heightened attentiveness to the empirical qualities of non-musical sound; his pieces negotiate in new ways the boundary between musical composition and the protean sonic world outside of music. This reorientation of musical listening participates in a broader questioning by early twentieth-century modernists of the nature of music and its sonic material.

Gardening in the Apocalypse

2020 ◽  
pp. 389-517
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Robert Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
To Come

The “White City” of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago struck many Americans as a hopeful glimmer of the happy cities to come, but soon, visions of even happier utopian suburbs reclaimed dominance, asserting the need for “A Cityless and Countryless World.” When Bellamy produced his sequel to Looking Backward, it promised a future of commuting by motorcar and personal aircraft to and from cottages in garden suburbs. In different ways, influential reformers and architects such as Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright fed their readings of utopian literature into influential designs for destroying old cities and achieving suburban bliss. The last great nineteenth-century utopian visionary was also the greatest science-fiction author of the early twentieth century: H. G. Wells. He, perhaps more than any other writer, carried forward the Victorian call to abandon Babylon to new heights and fresh audiences, prophesying dreadful apocalypse, and luminously modern gardens to follow.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Glyn Morgan ◽  
C. Palmer-Patel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
History Texts ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth century French novels to early-twentieth century essays and more recent examples of science fiction short stories, novels, television and films. It provides definitions and distinctions for key terminology such as ‘nexus point’, ‘counterfactualism’, ‘secret history’ and ‘alternate future’, as well as an overview of important existing research, and explores the relationship between alternate history texts and their source historical narratives. After setting out the aims and aspirations of this collection of essays, the introduction concludes with a precis of the essays in the rest of the collection, underlining connections between them.

The Battle Over Racial Identity in Popular and Legal Cultures, 1810–1860

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Middleton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Black Blood ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trial Courts ◽  
White Culture ◽  
The One ◽  
Circuit Courts

This chapter challenges the view of legal historians that the “one-drop rule” did not exist before the early twentieth century. It argues that the one-drop rule was enforced in white culture and entered the opinions of local judges during the early nineteenth century. Middleton shows that trial courts and circuit courts, while they are not the final authority on the law, frequently used one-drop language in racial identity cases. He also provides evidence illustrating that these judges frequently told juries that if a mixed race person had any black blood whatsoever, they should be looked upon as black.

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