Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Origins of Futuristic Fictionby Paul K. Alkon
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Alkon's book charts the rise of the genre of futuristic fiction, which eventually becomes subsumed into the larger genre of science fiction, once that emerges in the 1890s-1920s. He doesn't care much about why the genre emerges, but how it works, exploring its generic forms. Basically, the utopian story stops being spatially distant and starts becoming temporally distant, though he claims that early futuristic work's like Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440: Rêve s'il en fut jamais [The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One] (1771) aren't really interested in extrapolation in the way that later works will be; their future histories aren't really connected to actual history, they're just distancing techniques. The background was really nice, of course, but as someone whose focus is 1818+, I really appreciated his exploration of the evolution of futuristic fiction in that period, as he charts what's new, and what's departing the genre, like the emphasis on where these narratives come from. An angel gives the narration of Loudon's 1827 novel The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century a vision of the future, for example, but this technique is fading away by the time of H. G. Wells, though even as Wells makes the future more realistic, other authors are starting to use it just as a background for daring adventures. no reviews | add a review
Awards
For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age. Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, the forgotten writings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are the precursors of such well-known masterpieces of the form as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984. The first secular story to break the imaginative barrier against tales of the future, Epigone marked the emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, The Year 2440, The Last Man, and The World As It Will Be. Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional Le roman de l'avenir, "the novel of the future." Both a narrative of the future and a poetics of the new genre, this book identified in the previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which the possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In the introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of the futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define the aesthetics of a major transformation in the relation between literature and time still stands as the basis for the poetics of futuristic fiction. Tracing the early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the key works of the earliest writers of the genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about the formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of the future could achieve their full power in the works of later novelists. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)809.3Literature By Topic History, description and criticism of more than two literatures FictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |