At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

A major new survey of literature in England during the first half of the twentieth century, Chris Baldick places modernist with non-modernist writings, high art with low entertainment. The Modern Movement ranges broadly covering psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, children's books, and other literary forms evolving in response to the new anxieties and exhilarations of twentieth-century life.

A look inside one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

Dissatisfied with her relationship with her boyfriend, Constance Wechselburger, a graduate film student, embarks on a disheartening, confusing quest in search of her vision of the ideal intellectual mate.

Criticism on utopian subjects has generally neglected the literary or fictional dimension of utopia. The reason for such neglect may be that earlier utopian fictions tended to be written by what one would nowadays call social scientists, e.g., Plato or Sir Thomas More. That is also why earlier discussions of utopian fiction were usually written by critics trained in the social sciences rather than by critics trained in literature. To an appreciable degree this still tends to be the case today. Now, however, there is an additional difficulty, for the social scientists are critiquing utopias written by people who are primarily literary, for example, Krishan Kumar on Wells or Bernard Crick on Orwell. Inevitably much of importance--of literary importance--is simply disregarded, and so our understanding of modern utopia is correspondingly diminished. This book aims to put the fiction back into utopian fictions. While tracing the development of fiction in the writing of modern utopias, especially in Britain, it seeks to demonstrate in specific ways how those utopias have become increasingly literary--possibly as a reaction not only against the "social scientification" of modern utopias but also in reaction against the modern attempt to institute "utopia" in reality, notably in the former Soviet Union but also in consumerist, late-twentieth-century America. After an introductory discussion of how we understand--and how we should understand--modern utopian fictions, the book provides several examples of how those understandings affect our appreciation of utopian fiction. There are chapters on H. G. Wells's Time Machine; Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four; William Golding's Lord of the Flies; and Iris Murdoch's The Bell. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Peter Edgerly Firchow, internationally recognized scholar and author of numerous works including Reluctant Modernists, W. H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," and The End of Utopia, is professor of English at the University of Minnesota. "Firchow includes much that is praiseworthy in this short book on utopian fiction. . . . Firchow's work displays his very well informed explication and his ability, in most instances, to make literary texts come alive. His treatment of Wells's The Time Machine is simply outstanding. . . . I find his enthusiasm for his texts refreshing and his work on the end of history meticulous. Other scholars of utopian fiction will as well." -- H-Net Reviews "Utopian fiction has often been mangled in interpretation on the occasions when it has been read without a sense of irony, for the sake of political analysis, disregarding its artistic nature. To counterpoise such approaches, Firchow offers us a close reading of each of the chosen works, while also placing them in literary context," -- Janice Rossen, Partial Answers

Discusses theories of E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham and Joyce Cary.

This book is about the fiercely contrasting visions of two of the nineteenth century’s greatest utopian writers. A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study, it emphasizes that space is a key factor in utopian fiction, often a barometer of mankind’s successful relationship with nature, or an indicator of danger. Emerging and critically acclaimed scholars consider the legacy of two great utopian writers, exploring their use of space and time in the creation of sites in which contemporary social concerns are investigated and reordered. A variety of locations is featured, including Morris’s quasi-fourteenth century London, the lush and corrupted island, a routed and massacred English countryside, the high-rises of the future and the vertiginous landscape of another Earth beyond the stars.

The Time Machine is one of the most important works of science fiction. It greatly influenced the genre and continues to be widely read at all levels. This reference guide overviews the novel for students and general readers. Written by a leading scholar on H.G. Wells, the volume covers all aspects of the work, including its plot, textual history, historical and intellectual contexts, themes, style, and reception. Written more than 100 years ago, H.G. Wells' first novel forever shaped the course of science fiction. Of all his vast writings, The Time Machine seems most likely to ensure his permanent place in literary history. But more than a literary work, it is now widely recognized as a key text in the history of ideas, for the notion of time travel has profoundly influenced human thought. So too, with its bleak view of the future, The Time Machine has made a seminal contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the future course of evolution. Though The Time Machine is widely read and studied, there is relatively little written about it. Prepared by a leading authority on H.G. Wells, this reference is a convenient introductory guide to the novel. It examines all aspects of the work, including its textual history, historical and intellectual contexts, themes, literary style, and critical reception. The volume also includes a detailed plot summary and an extensive bibliographic essay.

H. G. Wells wrote almost a hundred books, yet he is generally remembered for only a handful of them. He is known above all as a writer who heralded the future, yet throughout his life he clung to fixed attitudes from the Victorian past. He began his career as a draper's apprentice; by the age of forty-five he had secured an international reputation as the author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Kipps and Tono Bungay; he went on to establish himself as an influential educator, polemicist and sage. In this book John Batchelor offers a readable introduction to Wells's huge and varied output as a writer and thinker. He guides the reader through the whole oeuvre, and argues persuasively that at his best Wells was a great artist: a man with a remarkable, restless imagination (not limited, as many critics have implied, merely to his early romances) and with a coherent and responsible theory of fiction.