The Future of the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Boxall ◽  
Bryan Cheyette
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Push And Pull ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses the future of the novel. It also reflects on the possibility and nature of historical change. The push and pull between the novel as an expressive symptom of an ailing culture, and the novel as the engine for the production of new cultural possibilities, runs through the long history of novelists’ reflections on the future of the novel. From our perspective in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the perception of a watershed triggered by 1973, and a new understanding of the relationship between style, fiction, and knowledge, seems remarkably prescient. Moreover, the new generation of novelists that have emerged since the turn of the century have collectively registered the re-emergence of a kind of historical vitality in the culture.

scholarly journals The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

This book offers an account on the last eight decades of British and Irish prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel, and the reader. The chapters look at the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender, and different periods of women’s writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class, and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children’s novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.

scholarly journals Interpretations of Emanuel Swedenborg’s image of the afterlife in the novel Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Tomas Mansikka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the relationship between Western esotericism and literature. As an example of a secular author who uses and benefits from esoteric texts, ideas and thoughts as resources in creating a literary artwork, the article analyses Laura Lindstedt’s novel Oneiron. A Fantasy About the Seconds After Death (2015). It contextualises the novel within the frames of Western esotericism and literature, focusing on Emanuel Swedenborg’s impact on discourses of the afterlife in literature. Laura Lindstedt’s postmodern novel indicates various ways that esoteric ideas, themes, and texts can work as resources for authors of fiction in twenty-first century Finland. Since the late eighteenth century Swedenborg’s influence has been evident in literature and among artists, especially in providing resources for other-worldly imagery. Oneiron proves that the ideas of Swedenborg are still part of the memory of Western culture and literature.

Dewey and Confucian Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 552-574
Author(s):  
Roger T. Ames
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Moral Imagination ◽  
First Century ◽  
Technical Term ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Confucian Philosophy ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Role Ethics

Perhaps the most important international relationship in the twenty-first century is that between America and China. Given the often delicate and sometimes underproductive history of the relationship between America and China broadly, this chapter argues that American pragmatism might serve as a vocabulary to promote a positive dialogue between these cultures at a moment in history when such a conversation is imperative. These commonalities provide a language introducing Confucian philosophy to the Western academy and also an external perspective from which to examine the presuppositions of our own worldview and common sense. The chapter compares the central Confucian notion of relationally constituted persons (ren 仁)— or human “becomings”—with Dewey’s technical term, “individuality.” It explores the centrality of moral imagination in Confucian role ethics and in Deweyan ethics and also concludes that these two traditions share the idea of a human-centered religiousness.

Loving Shakespeare

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rivlin
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Positive Feelings ◽  
The Relationship

This article focuses on Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (2016), a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew published in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, to explore how the novel and the series seek to create affective ‘middlebrow’ communities that purport to keep Shakespeare alive through love. Counter-intuitively, Tyler chose to adapt a play whose gender politics are unlovable to many twenty-first-century American readers, including the author. But although Tyler has said that she ‘hates’ Shakespeare, her solution is surprisingly to inspire mild, positive feelings in her readers. In mediating Shakespeare in this way, Tyler effectively strengthens bonds of empathy and affection between herself and her readers. Extending its claim, the article argues that the Hogarth Shakespeare Project is a ‘middlebrow’ publishing enterprise, in the sense that it uses Shakespeare to cultivate communities built on the relationship between the adapting author and her readers.

The Future Stops Here

Old Futures ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 88-96
Author(s):  
Alexis Lothian
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
First Century ◽  
First Child ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

The first wormhole chapter uses a speculative engagement with Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men to link disparate times and spaces in the book: the history of no future shown by feminist, eugenic, imperial narratives in part 1 and the affirmative prospects for queer of color futures in part 2. The major studio film, filmed in London by the Mexican director, highlights the presence in twenty-first-century transnational popular culture of tropes from the fictional futures examined in the previous pages. Cuarón’s adaptation of the 1992 novel by P. D. James underlines the ways in which hopeful futurity is unevenly distributed along the same lines of race, gender, sexuality, capital, and globalization that determine who gets to be seen as fully human. The contradictions surrounding the character of Kee—a black woman pregnant with the first child to be born in decades whose representation in the film leaves much to be desired—become a point of possibility opening on to different worlds and futures.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
Agnes Arnold-Forster
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
Terminal Illness ◽  
First Century ◽  
Community Values ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
History Of Cancer

This chapter concludes that cancer’s incurability was not just an obstacle to overthrow, but a galvanizing and intellectually provocative idea that shifted medicine, health care, and professional identity in profound and lasting ways. It enabled the construction of professional credentials and community values; turned hospitals into places for treating ‘terminal’ illness; made possible the invention of new forms and rationales of intervention; and brought into being certain modes of investigating the disease such as mapping, the microscope, and discourses of progress and decline. I also suggest that it is almost impossible to research and write a history of cancer without reflecting on its contemporary life. This chapter explores the relationship between cancer then and now and reappraises the twenty-first-century disease.

scholarly journals Studying development in the 21st Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-356
Author(s):  
Michael S. C. Thomas ◽  
Gert Westermann ◽  
Denis Mareschal ◽  
Mark H. Johnson ◽  
Sylvain Sirois ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Future Study ◽  
First Century ◽  
Target Article ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this response, we consider four main issues arising from the commentaries to the target article. These include further details of the theory of interactive specialization, the relationship between neuroconstructivism and selectionism, the implications of neuroconstructivism for the notion of representation, and the role of genetics in theories of development. We conclude by stressing the importance of multidisciplinary approaches in the future study of cognitive development and by identifying the directions in which neuroconstructivism can expand in the Twenty-first Century.

THE PURSUIT OF REALITY: RECENT RESEARCH INTO THE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 1069-1088 ◽  
Author(s):  
MALCOLM GASKILL
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Area ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Psychological Phenomenon ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
State Of The Field

ABSTRACTIn recent years the outpouring of historical work on witchcraft has been prodigious. Twenty-first-century studies encompass every conceivable chronological and geographical area, from antiquity to the present, Massachusetts to Muscovy. Approaches have been varied, with witchcraft explored as an intellectual, legal, political, social, cultural, and psychological phenomenon. Of particular interest – and difficulty – is the ‘reality’ of witchcraft: how historians might recover contemporary meanings, beyond the meanings imposed by rationalists, romantics, and social scientists. This article examines nine books from the last five years to assess the state of the field, and to offer some suggestions for research in the future.

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