Anna McFarlane

Gavin Miller

Donna McCormack

The medical humanities are becoming increasingly important as their first wave is interrogated by a critical approach that aims to uncover the wider possibilities of the field. In conversation with this debate, this volume explores the ways in which science fiction studies can contribute to such discussions. Science fiction challenges techno-optimism and offers a non-realist avenue for the expression of illness experience. Science fiction also estranges its readers from their societies and the medical possibilities inherent in those societies, inviting consideration of how medicine may be complicit with, or opposed to, other structures of power. By engaging these concerns, this Companion volume offers a unique viewpoint on the power of the future to shape the present.

Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities

Eleanor Bell

Scotland in Theory offers new ways of reading Scottish texts and culture within the context of an altered political framework and a changing sense of national identity. With the re-establishment of a Parliament in Edinburgh, issues of nationality and nationalism can be looked at afresh. It is timely now to revisit representations of Scottish culture in cinematography and literature, and also to examine aspects of gender, sexuality and ideology that have shaped how Scots have come to understand themselves. Established and younger critics use a variety of theoretical approaches here to catch an authentic sense of a post-modern Scotland in the process of change. Literature and the arts provide radical ways of knowing what Scotland, in theory, could become. The collection will be of interest to teachers and students of Scottish and English literature, literary theory, cultural and media analysis, and the history of ideas. Contributors include Eleanor Bell, Kasia Boddy, Cairns Craig, Thomas Docherty, Christopher Harvie, Ellen Raïssa-Jackson, Willy Maley, Gavin Miller, Tom Nairn, Sarah Neely, Laurence Nicoll, Berthold Schoene, Anne McManus Scriven, A.J.P. Thomson, Ronald Turnbull, Christopher Whyte.

Reflections on Culture & Literature

Scotland in Theory

Alasdair Gray's writing, and in particular his great novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), is often read as a paradigm of postmodern practice. This study challenges that view by presenting an analysis that is at once more conventional and more strongly radical. By reading Gray in his cultural and intellectual context, and by placing him within the tradition of a Scottish history of ideas that has been largely neglected in contemporary critical writing, Gavin Miller re-opens contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists who helped shape his literary vision of personal and national identity. Scottish social anthropology and psychiatry (including the work of W. Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer and R.D. Laing) can be seen as formative influences on Gray's anti-essentialist vision of Scotland as a mosaic of communities, and of our social need for recognition, acknowledgement and the common life.

The Fiction of Communion

Alasdair Gray

The psychologist may appear in science fiction as the herald of utopia or dystopia; literary studies have used psychoanalytic theories to interpret science fiction; and psychology has employed science fiction as an educational medium. Science Fiction and Psychology goes beyond such incidental observations and engagements to offer an in-depth exploration of science fiction literature's varied use of psychological discourses, beginning at the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century and concluding with the ascendance of neuroscience in the late twentieth century. Rather than dwelling on psychoanalytic readings, this literary investigation combines with history of psychology to offer attentive textual readings that explore five key psychological schools: evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, behaviourism, existential-humanism, and cognitivism. The varied functions of psychological discourses in science fiction are explored, whether to popularise and prophesy, to imagine utopia or dystopia, to estrange our everyday reality, to comment on science fiction itself, or to abet (or resist) the spread of psychological wisdom. Science Fiction and Psychology also considers how psychology itself has made use of science fiction in order to teach, to secure legitimacy as a discipline, and to comment on the present.

Gavin Miller

Books

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