In the early 1970s I was lucky enough to run across the writing of Alice Munro—it grabbed me from the opening line of the first story I ever read (“Material” [1973]: “I don’t keep up with Hugo’s writing”) and I haven’t waivered since. Just then I was about to begin graduate school and Munro’s “Material” led directly an M. A. thesis in her early stories and first book, to numerous critical essays and reviews, to a bibliography, to her archives at the University of Calgary, and eventually to Munro herself and to an extended biography based on interviews with her, with others in her orbit, and on ..read more

In this Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film we provide a concise introduction to how the interdisciplinary and intersectional endeavour of Age(ing) Studies has shaped and been shaped by literary and film studies in recent decades. We seek to explore how literary and filmic narratives have addressed, contributed to and shaped our understanding of and experiences of age and ageing in recent decades. In focusing on the contemporary period, we self-consciously recognize the challenges and opportunities of rapid demographic change and the tangle of cultural, political and economi ..read more

What is Fantastika? Fantastika is a word to describe fiction that deals in fantastical and speculative imaginings of all kinds. As an umbrella term used by critics and writers, Fantastika incorporates children’s and young adult literatures, as well as a range of genres and subgenres that cluster, like interconnected constellations, around the triple suns of ‘fantasy’, ‘science fiction’ and ‘horror’. The writer John Clute, who can be credited with coining the term ‘Fantastika’, calls it ‘planetary fiction’ because it first appeared in response to European Enlightenment ‘rationalism’ and the sci ..read more

Guest post by Andrew van der Vlies and Lucy Valerie Graham If assembling a collection purporting to be a readers’ companion to the work of any author is a difficult undertaking – will it be up to date on publication? for how long afterwards? how comprehensive can one reasonably suggest the contents will be? – initiating the reader into the idea of a Handbook to the work of J. M. Coetzee feels especially fraught. Indeed, it would be difficult to find another author whose writing warns the reader as repeatedly against searching for definitive interpretation or portrays so powerfully the fru ..read more

The premise of the present book is simple. Like the epic and the novel, science fiction is a literary form. By that we mean a historical narrative form, which is at the same time a narrative form of history—history understood, as in French or German, in the double meaning of story and history. The subject of the present book is an investigation of the specificities and possibilities of science fiction as a generic form, through comparison with the novel, the historical novel and the epic dimension of narrative. Our guide in this investigation will be the Hungarian philosopher and literary crit ..read more

SAFE ABORTION / PAIN-FREE / SAME-DAY / CALL NOW In contemporary South Africa, these words may be found plastered on any public objects ranging from lamp posts to litter bins. Promotional flyers by traditional healers make similar claims alongside promises to bring back lost lovers, enhance penis length and more. The supposedly painless abortion is often named first: most convincingly, perhaps, in a list of fictive achievements. Growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, I did not know what to make of the posters that appeared routinely in city centres and shopping malls. State school sex educa ..read more

This book originated out of my desire to reclaim climate change fiction (cli-fi) from the view that it is primarily concerned with future disasters and written in modes that go beyond realism to encompass the horrors of the looming apocalypse. Brilliant though novels of this kind can be, they seemed to me to run the risk of ignoring the present effects of the climate crisis and pushing the task of addressing it onto the back burner. The underlying narrative seemed to be ‘This is what lies in store, if we don’t change our ways before it’s too late’. Engagement with the here and now was in short ..read more

Chasing Freedom through Romantic Love in Popular and Literary Fiction In post-1990s India, romantic love is increasingly a fungible commodity. It is an emotion that is separable from the self and subject to a process of self-evaluation and rational judgment. It is evaluated because it must fulfill a function, that of confirming a revenue generating entrepreneurial alpha-masculinity. The extent of one’s successful self-transformation toward this kind of individual freedom is evaluated through one’s ability to acquire a romantic partner, and one’s emotion for that partner is therefore also a mea ..read more

Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture documents a profound shift in the meaning of individual freedom in India. This change has occurred largely since the 1990s, when the Indian economy was liberalized. The idea of individual freedom, once capacious enough to include notions of political sovereignty, individual agency, and social and economic liberty, has contracted to mean market freedoms tied to the spread of global capitalism and to the endless consumer choice it makes possible. I term the discourses of individual freedom tied to economic liberalization, ‘Fr ..read more

Guest post by Brett Ashley Kaplan Julie Mehretu’s multilayered, palimpsestic paintings insert memories of violence into politicized landscapes. There’s a work of unpacking that goes into experiencing these canvases as they swirl in and out of grids, colors competing with graffiti-esque spray paint, images conjured that fail to concretize. When confronted with her stunning canvases unexpected, buried histories, underground maps, legends to infinite pasts begin to bubble to the surface, percolating, and insisting on remembrance. Mehretu’s 2021 mid-career retrospective at The Whitney in New York ..read more