Download Free The Wellsian Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Wellsian and write the review.

In 'The Wellsian: Selected Essays on H.G. Wells', John S. Partington brings together a selection of the finest articles published in The Wellsian, the journal of the H.G. Wells Society, from 1981 to the present. The volume covers a wide breadth of Wells's work and thought, with essays from Lyman Tower Sargent on utopianism, Patrick Parrinder on The Time Machine, David Lake's textual analysis of the scientific romances, Michael Sherborne on Wells and Plato, and many others. With The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds, The Sea Lady, The Food of the Gods and The Door in the Wall all receiving detailed attention, this volume promises to be a worthy memorial to the first twenty-five years of The Wellsian. As well as celebrating Wells's greatest literary achievements, it explores the philosophical basis of his thought and, through several comparative studies, takes an interdisciplinary approach to his aesthetic concerns.
Acclaimed as a work of genius when first published in 1895, The Time Machine represents a revolution in storytelling. H. G. Wells's first--and greatest--novel has been recognized worldwide as a founding text of the science fiction genre and one of the most seminal narratives of the last hundred years. This collection of essays offers a series of original, penetrating, and wide-ranging perspectives on Wells's masterpiece by an international group of major Wells and science fiction scholars. The authors explore such textual topics as the narrative techniques and mythological undertones of the novel as well as its contribution to modern ideas of time and evolution and its focusing of the intellectual cross-currents of the late nineteenth century. This insightful volume captures the innovative imagination, richness, and fascinating ambiguity that resulted in a classic literary work and demonstrates that Wells's novel is both a visionary story and an unstoppable idea.
H. G. Wells (1866_1946) was a literary lion throughout his career, publishing more than one hundred books, including classics such as War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine. Though best remembered for his science fiction, Wells was also a prolific sketcher who frequently enlivened his correspondence and marginalia with cartoons. Those drawings made for his companion Amy Catherine Robbins, which he called "picshuas," allowed him a vehicle for his nuanced self-expression and satire. Gene K. Rinkel and Margaret E. Rinkel's The Picshuas of H. G. Wells interprets these highly original cartoons through an analysis of their peculiar content and style based on Wells's life and writings. The picshuas are perhaps the best demonstration of Wells's piquant sense of humor. They provide intriguing snapshots of Wells's robust private life and convey his opinions about other writers and public figures as well as himself, whose rotund cartoon figure he sometimes lampooned as "the Great Author." Using a narrative style of creative nonfiction, The Picshuas of H. G. Wells weaves facts from Wells's life with incidents reflected in the cartoons, episodes drawn from his novels, and scenes from other writings to provide glimpses into his moments of his personal and professional conflict and triumph. There emerges a fascinating and funny portrait of a complex literary personality and his complicated relationship with a devoted collaborator, his wife. Some forty picshuas were published in Wells's Experiment in Autobiography, but the wide range of the pichsuas throughout his correspondence and private papers has never been surveyed and published until now. As an ensemble, they provide close look at the Great Author in his most joyous and uninhibited moments, laughing at himself and the world.
The aim of this interdisciplinary study is to reconstruct the evolution of our changing conceptions of time in the light of scientific discoveries. It will adopt a new perspective and organize the material around three central themes, which run through our history of time reckoning: cosmology and regularity; stasis and flux; symmetry and asymmetry. It is the physical criteria that humans choose – relativistic effects and time-symmetric equations or dynamic-kinematic effects and asymmetric conditions – that establish our views on the nature of time. This book will defend a dynamic rather than a static view of time.
The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles is concerned with Gothic representations of London in the late 19th century. Establishing that a modern Gothic literary mode relocates the traditional rural Gothic to the late 19th century metropolis, this volume explores the cultural history of London in the 19th century. The subsequent discussion of the Gothic fictions of Stevenson, Wilde and Wells offers new perspectives from which to assess the impact of contemporary perceptions of London as a Gothicized space on the works of these novelists.
"Well's uncanny ability to highlight the problems which are now most acute and supply tentative solutions that allow a maximum of individual freedom merits serious consideration. Recommended reading for students and teachers dealing with government, science, and the contemporary dilemma of a world facing war, famine, and racial unrest."--Choice A Modern Utopia is one of the first important blueprints for the modern welfare state and an early major statement of Wells's idea of the World State, an idea that is perhaps his greatest contribution to the intellectual history of this century. In this "quintessential utopia," as Lewis Mumford calls it, Wells "sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings them into contact with the world of the present." The Bison Books edition, with an introduction by Mark R. Hillegas, associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University, brings back into print a work that has stimulated three generations of thinkers. "This is not flight into fancy no voyage into whimsy. It is a sober attempt to imagine what kind of society men would create if they really used their heads and worked at it. The result is one of the most plausible utopias ever written."--Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare "It is a beautiful Utopia beautifully seen and beautifully thought: and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one finds in News from Nowhere."--Van Wyck Brooks, The World of H.G. Wells
In this volume, John Farrell shows that political utopias—societies with laws and customs designed to short-circuit the foibles of human nature for the benefit of our collective existence—have a perennial opponent, the honor-based culture of aristocracy that dominated most of the world from ancient times into early modernity and whose status-based competitive psychology persists to the present day. While utopias aim at equality, the heroic imperative defends the need for personal and collective dignity. It asks the utopian, Do we really want to live in a world without struggle, without heroes, and without the stories they create? Because the utopian dilemma pits essential values against each other—equity versus freedom, dignity versus justice—few who confront it can simply take sides. Rather, the dilemma itself has been a generative stimulus for classic authors from Plato and Thomas More to George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Farrell follows their struggles with the utopian dilemma and with each other, providing a deepened understanding of the moral and emotional dynamics of the western political imagination.
Animal Subjects identifies a new understanding of animals in modernist literature and science. Drawing on Darwin's evolutionary theory, British writers and scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to think of animals as subjects dwelling in their own animal worlds. Both science and literature aimed to capture the complexity of animal life, and their shared attention to animals pulled the two disciplines closer together. It led scientists to borrow the literary techniques of fiction and poetry, and writers to borrow the observational methods of zoology. Animal Subjects tracks the coevolution of literature and zoology in works by H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and modern scientists including Julian Huxley, Charles Elton, and J. B. S. Haldane. Examining the rise of ecology, ethology, and animal psychology, this book shows how new, subject-centered approaches to the study of animals transformed literature and science in the modernist period.
Since its generic inception in 1516, utopia has produced visions of alterity which renegotiate, subvert, and transcend existing places. Early in the twentieth century, H. G. Wells linked utopia to the World State, whose post-national, post-Westphalian emergence he predicated on English national discourse. This critical study examines how the discursive representations of England’s geography, continuity, and character become foundational to the Wellsian utopia and elicit competing response from Wells’s contemporaries, particularly Robert Hugh Benson and Aldous Huxley, with further ramifications throughout the twentieth century. Contextualized alongside modern theories of nationalism and utopia, as well as read jointly with contemporary projections of England as place, reactions to Wells demonstrate a shift from disavowal to retrieval of England, on the one hand, and from endorsement to rejection of the World State, on the other. Attempts to salvage the residual traces of English culture from their degradation in the World State have taken increasing precedence over the imagination of a post-national order. This trend continues in the work of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, J. G. Ballard, and Julian Barnes, whose future scenarios warn against a world without England. The Nationality of Utopia investigates utopia’s capacity to deconstruct and redeploy national discourse in ways that surpass fear and nostalgia.