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Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.
First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age. Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, the forgotten writings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are the precursors of such well-known masterpieces of the form as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984. The first secular story to break the imaginative barrier against tales of the future, Epigone marked the emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, The Year 2440, The Last Man, and The World As It Will Be. Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional Le roman de l'avenir, "the novel of the future." Both a narrative of the future and a poetics of the new genre, this book identified in the previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which the possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In the introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of the futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define the aesthetics of a major transformation in the relation between literature and time still stands as the basis for the poetics of futuristic fiction. Tracing the early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the key works of the earliest writers of the genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about the formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of the future could achieve their full power in the works of later novelists.
“Probably the greatest of all French-speaking science-fiction writers [after Jules Verne] . . . I was unprepared for the power and beauty.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post To the short list that includes Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as founding fathers of science fiction, the name of the Belgian writer J.-H. Rosny Aîné must be added. He was the first writer to conceive, and attempt to narrate, the workings of aliens and alternate life forms. His fascination with evolutionary scenarios, and long historical vistas, from first man to last man, are important precursors to the myriad cosmic epics of modern science fiction. Until now, his work has been virtually unknown and unavailable in the English-speaking world, but it is crucial for our understanding of the genre. Three wonderfully imaginative novellas are included in this volume. “The Xipehuz” is a prehistoric tale in which the human species battles strange geometric alien life forms. “Another World” is the story of a mysterious being who does not live in the same acoustic and temporal world as humans. “The Death of the Earth” is a scientifically uncompromising Last Man story. The book also includes an insightful critical introduction that places Rosny’s work within the context of evolutionary biology. “Rosny was a species pluralist, and believed that human beings are no more entitled than any other creature to reign supreme. He would have felt right at home among the Men In Black.” —Laura Miller, The New Yorker
The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction across national and genre boundaries, and trace its intellectual and creative roots in the philosophical and fantastic narratives of the ancient past. Science fiction as a literary genre is the central focus of the volume, but fundamental to its story is its non-literary cultural manifestations and influence. Coverage thus includes transmedia manifestations as an integral part of the genre's history, including not only short stories and novels, but also film, art, architecture, music, comics, and interactive media.
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.
A "Choice" Outstanding Academic Book, "Science Fiction Before 1900" is an accessible and fascinating overview of the evolution and early history of science fiction. Investigating works that marked significant turning points in the early evolution of the genre, including "Frankenstein," "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and "The Time Machine," Paul Alkon places these works in context. He also discusses science fiction and its complex relationship to other genres. This book will be a great addition to the emerging field of science fiction study. A chronology of significant events, works and figures from the genre's history, notes and references and an extensive bibliographic essay with recommended reading round out the volume.
The History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece up to the present day. The author is both an academic literary critic and acclaimed creative writer of the genre. Written in lively, accessible prose it is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and SF fandom.
Defoe and Fictional Time shows Defoe's relevance to issues now central to criticism of the novel; relationships between narrative time and clock time, the influence of time concepts shared by writers and their audience, and above all the questions of how fiction shapes the phenomenal time of reading. Paul K. Alkon offers first a study of time in Defoe's fiction, with glances at Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne; and second a theoretical discussion of time in fiction. Arguing that eighteenth-century views of history account for the strange chronologies in Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Alkon explores Defoe's innovative use of narrative sequences, frequency, spatial form, chronology, settings, tempo, and the reader's cumulative memories of a text. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year is the first portrayal of a public duration—passing time shared by an entire population during a crisis—ranking Defoe among the most creative writers who have explored the way in which fictional time may influence reading time.