Kirjahaku

An invaluable contribution to the serious study of science fiction as well as a highly entertaining collection, Science Fiction contains 27 chronologically-arranged stories and excerpts, ranging from such early classic works as Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Shelley's Frankenstein to recent stories such as Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and Ursula K. Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow." Including brief general essays and a separate introduction to each individual story or excerpt, Rabkin's anthology greatly illuminates the evolution of the genre.

What is Mars? From the ancients to the present, we have imagined Mars repeatedly and studied it longingly. As scientific knowledge of Mars has changed, so has the cultural imagination of this celestial neighbors. The earth-centered beginnings of astronomy connected the blood-red planet with the God of War. The Copernican Revolution and a later, simple mistranslation from Italian supported fantastic visions of distant Mars as the abode of life variously bizarre, ideal, or malignant. In the work of H. G. Wells and Orson Welles, in books, films, radio, and television, Mars reflected not only eternal hopes and fears but then-current political realities. In recent years, NASA-fication has brought Mars home, imagining the Red Planet almost as an eighth continent of Earth, a candidate for exploration and exploitation both in fiction and in fact. Rabkin weaves a chronological tale of many threads, including mythology, astrology, astronomy, literary criticism, and cultural studies.

"When Slim Turned Sideways . . ."—this is narrative suspense, and if well done propels the reader on into and through a novel, or folktale, or printed play, or epic poem. How does it work? Is it a matter of plot only? Why do some works rivet our attention from the first page, while others obviously do not? These are among the deceptively simple questions taken up in Eric Rabkin's seminal study of narrative suspense. Using the insights afforded by structuralism, linguistics, and modern criticism—and basing his discussion on close readings of many well-known works—Rabkin provides at once an original work in literary theory and a remarkably practical account of how successful narrative establishes and sustains interest on several levels. Suspense, Rabkin shows, is involved not only in the plot of a narrative, but in its thematic development, character development, and style as well. This broad understanding enables the author to develop a coherent theoretical description of suspense, using the terminology of rhetoric. The most startling result of this approach is a schematic representation for literary genres that, though arrived at theoretically, corresponds almost exactly to our intuitive categorization of literary works. Narrative Suspense can be read with ample profit by interested layman and professional critic alike. With wit and intelligence, the book clarifies an oft-perceived phenomenon—the fundamental importance of suspense, broadly defined, in all great works of literature.

What exactly is the fantastic? In the twentieth-century world, our notions of what is impossible are assaulted every day. To define the nature of fantasy and the fantastic, Eric S. Rabkin considers its role in fairy tales, science fiction, detective stories, and religious allegory, as well as in traditional literature. The examples he studies range from Grimm's fairy tales to Agatha Christie, from Childhood's End to the novels of Henry James, from Voltaire to Robbe-Grillet to A Canticle for Leiboivitz. By analyzing different works of literature, the author shows that the fantastic depends on a reversal of the ground rules of a narrative world. This reversal signals most commonly a psychological escape, often from boredom, to an unknown world secretly yearned for, whose order, although reversed, bears a precise relation to reality. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What exactly is the fantastic? In the twentieth-century world, our notions of what is impossible are assaulted every day. To define the nature of fantasy and the fantastic, Eric S. Rabkin considers its role in fairy tales, science fiction, detective stories, and religious allegory, as well as in traditional literature. The examples he studies range from Grimm's fairy tales to Agatha Christie, from Childhood's End to the novels of Henry James, from Voltaire to Robbe-Grillet to A Canticle for Leiboivitz. By analyzing different works of literature, the author shows that the fantastic depends on a reversal of the ground rules of a narrative world. This reversal signals most commonly a psychological escape, often from boredom, to an unknown world secretly yearned for, whose order, although reversed, bears a precise relation to reality. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.