Browse Books

There has been plenty of scholarship on science fiction over the decades, but it has left one crucial aspect of the genre all but unanalysed: the visual. Ambitious and original, Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary corrects that oversight, making a powerful argument for science fiction as a visual cultural discourse. Taking influential historical works of visual art as starting points, along with illustrations, movie matte paintings, documentaries, artist’s impressions and digital environments, John Timberlake focuses on the notion of science fiction as an “imaginary topos,” one that draws principally on the intersection between landscape and historical/prehistorical time. Richly illustrated, this book will appeal to scholars, students and fans of science fiction and the remarkable visual culture that surrounds it.

The book reveals how everyday people survived political persecution and oppression, and champions human resilience in the face of unrelenting political terror.

In Life in War, the reader accompanies Shannon Woodcock, the author and historian, through intimate interviews with six Albanian men and women. We hear how everyday people survived shocking living conditions, political persecution and oppression dependent on ethnicity, political status, gender and sexuality.

This is a thorough and vivid history of lived communism in Albania, charting political and ideological shifts through the experiences of those who survived. Life is War stands as remarkable and profound testimony to the resilience of humanity in the face of unrelenting political terror.

An accurate and precise historical work, engagingly rendered from life narratives, it plunges the reader into the difficult emotional truths that are at the core of remembering Albania’s communist past.

Life is War is a valuable contribution to studies of everyday life under communism and dictatorship. Eloquently written and expertly researched, it will appeal to readers interested in life histories, war, communism, European history and trauma studies.

Lure of the Big Screen explores film exhibition and consumption in rural parts of the UK and Australia, where film theatres are often highly valued as spaces around which isolated communities can gather and interact. Going beyond national borders, this book examines how theatres in areas of social and economic decline are sustained by resourceful individuals and sub-commercial operating structures. Systematic analysis of cinemas in non-metropolitan locations has yielded an original five-tiered clustering model through which Karina Aveyard recognizes a range of types between large commercial multiplexes in stable regional centres and their smallest improvised counterparts in remote settlements.

 

The authors explore a range of different approaches to the languages of theatre, including translation and interpretation of the art form, along with languages, performance work, body language and gesture. Considered alongside the related social issues of race, class and dialect, the following questions emerge:<BR xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/><BR/>• What is the role of language in theatre today?<BR/>• Whose language is English; what other languages do women making theatre use?<BR/>• What does it mean to write about, photograph and video live performance?<BR/>• What is the future for women's theatre in an international context increasingly united by new technologies but divided by new issues of cultural diversity?<BR/><BR/>Goodman and de Gay analysis covers issues that are central to current courses in Theatre and Performance and Women's Studies. They assess the forms which women as theatre-makers have chosen to explore in the age of new technology, and look at some of the different definitions of 'theory' offered by theatre-makers and critics including Caryl Churchill, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigiray and Julia Kristeva.

Linguistics is a huge discipline with many sub-fields, many of which drift towards, and often overlap with, the primary concerns of cultural studies. In general, however, linguistics is concerned with the deconstruction of language itself, with the nuts and bolts (phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexis, etc.) and how these are systematically acquired (psycholinguistics) and how they interact with the socio-cultural context in which they are used (sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics). Both of these approaches to language and culture are represented in this collection. The eclecticism of the papers should be seen as a strength, reflecting the wide range of ways in which we are all influenced by, and to an extent constructed by, language. 

The interaction between the disciplines of law, computer science and artificial intelligence are attracting increasing attention within the academic and commercial communities, especially in the areas of "intelligent" computer fraud, copyright of software, data protection, representing law on the computer, and legal liability of producers of intelligent and nonintelligent software. The chapters in this volume are representative of the debate and of the central issues. They include material concerning the way that the discipline of law will affect computer science and AI and also how computer science and AI will affect law. The chapters lend support to the hypothesis that in years to come law will have a severe impact on computer science (via data protection and copyright); that computers will have an effect on law (via legal databases and electronic presentation of evidence); that law will impact on AI (via liability of intelligent software writers and codes of conduct); and that AI will have an impact on law (via models of legal reasoning and implementations of various statutes). By grouping the chapters into theory, implications, and applications sections, the authors make an initial attempt to identify separate, but interrelated methodological stances.