by Amy J. Elias (2001)
"In Sublime Desire, Amy J. Elias examines our changing relationship to history and how fiction written since 1960 reflects that change. She contends that postmodernism is a post-traumatic imagination that is pulled between two desires: the political desire to acknowledge the physical violence of twentieth-century history and the yearning for an escape from that history into a ravishing realm of historical certainty. Torn between these desires, both historical fiction and historiography after 1960 redefine history as the "sublime," a territory beyond lived experience that is both unknowable and seductive. In the face of a failure of Enlightenment ideals about knowledge and the West's own history of violence, post-World War II history becomes a desire for the "secular sacred" sublime - for awe, certainty, and belief."--BOOK JACKET.
Harry Turtledove
As World War II escalates, North America is faced with violence on all sides--Confederate attacks on northern cities, Canadian insurgents, and a Japanese assault on the Hawaiian islands--as, in the South, ex-slaves are forced to build their own concentration camps, and Vice President La Follette takes over from the dead president while Franklin Roosevelt builds his own power base.
Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride
"The Oxford group of writers known as the Inklings met and thrived during the 1930s and 1940s. Three of the members, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, became known as authors and cultural figures, recognized for interweaving Christian themes into fantasy fiction. Other members of the group doubtlessly influenced these works through their comments and discussion, and the published ideas of Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien were probably first discussed within this circle. Every member of the Inklings was male, the group consciously excluded women, and it was formed to promote male companionship. This book examines the attitude of the Inklings toward women and thus, sheds new light on the lives and works of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams. The book examines the male culture of the Inklings and the relation of the literary group to the larger Oxford community. It also looks at women in the lives of Williams, Tolkien, and Lewis. While Williams and Tolkien apparently thought of women as mythic icons, Lewis began to question some of the group's assumptions after his marriage. When considering the representation of women in fiction by the Inklings, the volume gives special attention to issues of gender and theology." -- Publisher's description.
Dennis Walder
"This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread yet often misunderstood condition -- nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries. Often seen as merely escapist, nostalgia also offers solace and self-understanding for those displaced by the larger movements of our time. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of 'Bushman' song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.</P>"--
Ian Gordon
Contending that comic strips contributed to the expansion of a mass consumer culture driven by visual images, Ian Gordon shows how, in addition to embellishing a wide array of goods with personalities, the comics themselves increasingly promoted consumerist values and upward mobility. He details how "Gasoline Alley" advocated the enjoyment of cars and how 1920s working girl Winnie Winkle became an avid seeker of a middle-class lifestyle. Documenting the invention of the comic book in the 1940s, Gordon also describes the emergence of a super-licensed Superman, whose girlfriend Lois Lane even went on a shopping spree during a period of wartime rationing. Emerging just as Americans were beginning to define themselves less by what they made and believed and more by what they bought, comic strips were from the outset commodities sold by syndicates to newspapers nationwide. Ian Gordon demonstrates that the strips' most enduring role has been not only to mirror a burgeoning consumer culture but also to actively promote it.