Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor

Peter Marks

Fátima Vieira

The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures celebrates a literary genre already over 500 years old. Specially commissioned essays from established and emerging international scholars reflect the vibrancy of utopian vision, and its resiliency as idea, genre, and critical mode. Covering politics, environment, geography, body and mind, and social organization, the volume surveys current research and maps new areas of study. The chapters include investigations of anarchism, biopolitics, and postcolonialism and study film, art, and literature. Each essay considers central questions and key primary works, evaluates the most recent research, and outlines contemporary debates. Literatures of Africa, Australia, China, Latin America, and the Middle East are discussed in this global, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive volume.

The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures

This study examines feminist speculative fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and finds within it a new vision for the future. Rejecting notions of postmodern utopia as exclusionary, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor advances one defined in terms of hospitality, casting what she calls 'imaginative sympathy' as the foundation of utopian desire. Tracing these themes through the works of Atwood, Butler, Lessing and Winterson, as well as those of well-known Muslim feminists such as El Saadawi, Parsipur and Mernissi, Wagner-Lawlor balances literary analysis with innovative extensions of feminist philosophy to show how inclusionary utopian thinking can inform and promote political agency. Examining these contemporary fictions reveals the rewards of attending to a community that acknowledges difference, diversity and the imaginative potential of every human being.

Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions

Covering a range of texts from prominent feminist writers, this book examines notions of utopia in twenty-first-century speculative literature.

Barbara Ching

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) spoke of the promiscuity of art and literature?the willingness of great artists and writers to scandalize their spectators through critical frankness, complexity, and beauty. Sontag's life and thought were no less promiscuous. She wrote deeply and engagingly about a range of subjects?theater, sex, politics, novels, torture, and illness?and courted celebrity and controversy both publicly and privately. Throughout her career, she not only earned adulation but also provoked scorn. Her living was the embodiment of scandal. In this collection, Terry Castle, Nancy K. Miller, Wayne Koestenbaum, E. Ann Kaplan, and other leading scholars revisit Sontag's groundbreaking life and work. Against Interpretation, "Notes on Camp," Letter from Hanoi, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, I, Etcetera, and The Volcano Lover?these works form the center of essays no less passionate and imaginative than Sontag herself. Debating questions raised by the thinker's own images and identities, including her sexuality, these works question Sontag's status as a female intellectual and her parallel interest in ambitious and prophetic fictional women; her ambivalence toward popular culture; and her personal and professional "scandals." Paired with rare photographs and illustrations, this timely anthology expands our understanding of Sontag's images and power.

Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor

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