Genetics And The Literary Imagination

Author : Clare Hanson
Publisher : Oxford Textual Perspectives
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2020-05-13
Category : English fiction
ISBN : 9780198813286

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Genetics and the Literary Imagination by Clare Hanson Pdf

This is the first book to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed which had a major impact not only on biological science but on wider culture. As figures like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and (post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical implications of this holistic biological perspective.

Author : Paul Hamann-Rose
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2024-06-30
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783031531002

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Genetics and the Novel by Paul Hamann-Rose Pdf

Author : Lejla Kucukalic
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2021-09-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000441574

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Biofictions by Lejla Kucukalic Pdf

Biofictions introduces three novel concepts: ‘biofiction,’ ‘bioimagination,’ and ‘biodiscourse’ to talk about intersections of literary and visual texts and biotechnology. The book proposes a new interdisciplinary area of research that correlates processes of genetics and literature, based on two critical approaches. One, drawing parallels between the genetic codes, human language, formal (binary) language, and posthuman communication and the role of meaning and imagination in these forms of communication. Two, by defining ‘biofictions’ as a critical scientific-artistic concept and as a corpus of texts that engage ideas and developments in molecular biology. Syncretic connection between biotechnology and literature is especially evident in an open science movement and the literary artistic genre of biopunk, discussed across chapters. The study includes well-known contemporary texts, such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, that are recontextualized as biofiction; it offers a rereading of important but neglected novels such as Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration (1967); and it analyzes new visual texts such as the TV series Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell films. Based on these wide-ranging examples and new critical concepts, the book argues that coming up with possible alterations for the genetic code or intended traits for the organism is a discursive practice that brings into being bionarratives that are both organic and literary. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Author : Jerome De Groot
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2022-08-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000643039

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Double Helix History by Jerome De Groot Pdf

Double Helix History examines the interface between genetics and history in order to investigate the plausibility of ‘new’ knowledge derived from scientific methods and to reflect upon what it might mean for the practice of history. Since the mapping of the human genome in 2001, there has been an expansion in the use of genetic information for historical investigation. Geneticists are confident that this has changed the way we know the past. This book considers the practicalities and implications of this seemingly new way of understanding the human past using genetics. It provides the first sustained engagement with these so-called ‘genomic histories’. The book investigates the ways that genetic awareness and practice is seemingly changing historical practice and conceptualisation. Linking six concepts – ‘Public’, ‘Practice’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Politics’, ‘Self’, and ‘Imagination – Double Helix History outlines the ways that genetic information, being postgenomic, the public life of DNA, and the genetic historical imaginary work on the body, on collective memory, on the historical imagination, on the ethics of historical investigation, on the articulation of history, and on the collection and interpretation of data regarding the ‘past’. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in DNA, genetics, and historiography.

Author : Rachel Carroll,Fiona Tolan
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 703 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2023-12-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000991451

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The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism by Rachel Carroll,Fiona Tolan Pdf

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism brings unique literary, critical, and historical perspectives to the relationship between women’s writing and women’s rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present. Thematically organised around five central concepts—Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism—the Companion tracks vital questions and debates, offering fresh perspectives on changing priorities and enduring continuities in relation to women’s ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. This groundbreaking collection brings into focus the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the formation of British literary feminisms, including the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Empire. From the political novel of the 1790s to early twentieth-century suffrage theatre and contemporary ecofeminism, and from the mid-Victorian antislavery movement to anti-fascist activism in the 1930s and working-class women’s writing groups in the 1980s, this book testifies to the diverse and dynamic character of the relationship between literature and feminism. Featuring contributions from leading feminist scholars, the Companion offers new insights into the crucial role played by women’s literary production in the evolving history of women’s rights discourses, feminist activism, and movements for gender equality. It will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of women’s writing, British literature, cultural history, and gender and feminist studies.

Author : Liliane Campos,Pierre-Louis Patoine
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2022-10-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781800647527

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Life, Re-Scaled by Liliane Campos,Pierre-Louis Patoine Pdf

This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination. Comprised of thirteen chapters by an international group of academics, Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance engages with four main areas of biological study: ‘Invisible scales: cells, microbes and mycelium’, ‘Neuro-medical imaging and diagnosis’, ‘Pandemic imaginaries’, and ‘Ecological scales’. The authors examine these concepts in emerging forms such as plant theatre, climate change art, ecofiction and pandemic fiction, including the work of Jeff Vandermeer, Jon McGregor, Jeff Lemire, and Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade performances. This valuable resource moves beyond the biological paradigms that were central to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to outline the specificity of a contemporary imagination. Life, Re-Scaled is crucial reading for academics, scholars, and authors alike, as it proposes an unprecedented overview of the relationship between literature, performance and the life sciences in the twenty-first century.

Author : J. J. A. Mooij
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789027222183

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Fictional Realities by J. J. A. Mooij Pdf

This book is a study of the role of the imagination. It focuses on the imaginative use of language in literature (poetry and narrative prose); but it also touches on some more comprehensive issues, for the questions it discusses are questions regarding the relationship between mind, reality and unreality. The first two chapters survey the thinking about the imagination in the history of philosophy. The main trends and the main problems are discussed, particularly in respect of the (positive or negative) evaluation of imagination. The subsequent chapters investigate the role of the imagination from a closer point of view. How is it that imagination appears in literary art? Central topics of discussion are the nature of narrativity, of fictional discourse and fictional objects, of realistic fiction, of symbolism and metaphor. Moreover, the similarities (both real and imagined) between literature and the other arts are explored. In all chapters attention is paid to the problem of the value of art and literary imagination. The last chapter addresses this issue head-on. In particular, it attempts to define the value of literature in relation to science.

Author : Bruce Holsinger
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2023-02-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780300271485

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On Parchment by Bruce Holsinger Pdf

A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia “Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history.”—Kirkus Reviews For centuries, premodern societies recorded and preserved much of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures. These remains make up a significant portion of the era’s surviving historical record. In a study spanning three millennia and twenty languages, Bruce Holsinger explores this animal archive as it shaped the inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world, from the leather rolls of ancient Egypt to the Acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Holsinger discusses the making of parchment past and present, the nature of the medium as a biomolecular record of faunal life and environmental history, the knotty question of “uterine vellum,” and the imaginative role of parchment in the works of St. Augustine, William Shakespeare, and a range of Jewish rabbinic writers of the medieval era. Closely informed by the handicraft of contemporary makers, painters, and sculptors, the book draws on a vast array of sources—codices and scrolls, documents and ephemera, works of craft and art—that speak to the vitality of parchment across epochs and continents. At the center of On Parchment is the vexed relationship of human beings to the myriad slaughtered beasts whose remains make up this vast record: a relationship of dominion and compassion, of brutality and empathy.

Author : Nuria Haristiani,Yulianeta Yulianeta,Yanty Wirza,Wawan Gunawan,Ari Arifin Danuwijaya,Eri Kurniawan,Dante Darmawangsa,Suharno Suharno,Nia Nafisah,Ernie Dyah Imperiani
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 685 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2023-01-14
Category : Education
ISBN : 9782494069916

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Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (ICOLLITE 2022) by Nuria Haristiani,Yulianeta Yulianeta,Yanty Wirza,Wawan Gunawan,Ari Arifin Danuwijaya,Eri Kurniawan,Dante Darmawangsa,Suharno Suharno,Nia Nafisah,Ernie Dyah Imperiani Pdf

This is an open access book. The rapid advancement of technology has created new civilization in this digital era which affects almost all aspects of life including language, literature, culture, and education. The digital era brings opportunities as well as challenges that people have to deal with. Thus, some adjustments need to be done in order to keep up with those changes. Studies on language, literature, culture, and education need to be continuously conducted and developed to revitalize those aspects in facing the dynamic changes of the digital era. In relation to this, Faculty of Language and Literature Education, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (FPBS UPI) hosts this year’s International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture (ICOLLITE) with the theme “Revitalization of Language, Literature, Culture, and Education in the Digital Era” as a forum for experts and professionals to share their research, ideas, and experiences on this issue. Presenters and participants are welcome to discuss and disseminate current issues and offer solutions to the challenges of our time. Discussions on current trends in digital literacies are expected to pave way to learn from each other for betterment as one big society of humankinds, regardless of their social, economic, and cultural backgrounds.

Author : Kathleen Renk
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2012-03-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781136582318

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Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature by Kathleen Renk Pdf

This book examines the ways in which contemporary British and British postcolonial writers in the after-empire era draw connections between magic (defined here as Renaissance Hermetic philosophy) and science. Writers such as Tom Stoppard, Zadie Smith, and Margaret Atwood critique both imperial science, or science used in service to empire, and what Renk calls "imperical science," a distortion of rational science which denies that reality is holistic and claims that nature can and should be conquered. In warning of the dangers of imperical science, these writers restore the connection between magic and science as they examine major shifts in scientific thinking across the centuries. They reflect on the Copernican Revolution and the historic split between magic and science, scrutinize Darwinism, consider the relationship between Victorian science and pseudo-science, analyze twentieth-century Uncertainty theories, reject bio/genetic engineering, call for a new approach to science that reconnects science and art, and ultimately endeavor to bring an end to the imperial age. Overall, these writers forge a new discourse that merges science with the arts and emphasizes a holistic philosophy, a view shared by both Hermetic philosophy and recent scientific theories, such as chaos or complexity theory. Along with recent books that focus on the relationship between contemporary literature and science, this work focuses on contemporary British literature’s critique of science and the ways in which postcolonial literature addresses the relationship between magic, science, and empire.

Author : Michael R. Page
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2016-03-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317025276

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The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells by Michael R. Page Pdf

At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science,' beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining the interchange between emerging scientific ideas-specifically evolution and ecology-new technologies, and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, Page shows how British writers from Darwin to H.G. Wells confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world, of human species, and of the self. The wide range of authors covered in Page's ambitious study permits him to explore an impressive array of topics that include the role of the Romantic era in the molding of scientific and cultural perspectives; the engagement of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley with questions raised by contemporary science; Mary Shelley's conflicted views on the unfolding prospects of modernity; and how Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, and W.H. Hudson responded to the implications of evolutionary theory. Page concludes with the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, to demonstrate how evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the century.

Author : Ewa Barbara Luczak
Publisher : Springer
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2016-04-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137545794

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Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination by Ewa Barbara Luczak Pdf

A disturbing but ultimately discredited strain in American thought, eugenics was a crucial ideological force in the early twentieth century. Luczak investigates the work of writers like Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to consider the impact of eugenic racial discourse on American literary production from 1900-1940.

Author : Susanne Rinner
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2013-02-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780857457554

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The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination by Susanne Rinner Pdf

Through a close reading of novels by Ulrike Kolb, Irmtraud Morgner, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Bernhard Schlink, Peter Schneider, and Uwe Timm, this book traces the cultural memory of the 1960s student movement in German fiction, revealing layers of remembering and forgetting that go beyond conventional boundaries of time and space. These novels engage this contestation by constructing a palimpsest of memories that reshape readers’ understanding of the 1960s with respect to the end of the Cold War, the legacy of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Topographically, these novels refute assertions that East Germans were isolated from the political upheaval that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. Through their aesthetic appropriations and subversions, these multicultural contributions challenge conventional understandings of German identity and at the same time lay down claims of belonging within a German society that is more openly diverse than ever before.

Author : John Rasko,Gabrielle O'Sullivan,Rachel Ankeny
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2006-01-26
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0521822777

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The Ethics of Inheritable Genetic Modification by John Rasko,Gabrielle O'Sullivan,Rachel Ankeny Pdf

Is inheritable genetic modification the new dividing line in gene therapy? The editors of this searching investigation, representing clinical medicine, public health and biomedical ethics, have established a distinguished team of scientists and scholars to address the issues from the perspectives of biological and social science, law and ethics, including an intriguing Foreword from Peter Singer. Their purpose is to consider how society might deal with the ethical concerns raised by inheritable genetic modification, and to re-examine prevailing views about whether these procedures will ever be ethically and socially justifiable. The book also provides background to define the field, and discusses the biological and technological potential for inheritable genetic modification, its limitations, and its connection with gene therapy, cloning, and other reproductive interventions. For scientists, bioethicists, clinicians, counsellors and public commentators, this is an essential contribution to one of the critical debates in current genetics.

Author : Peter Morton
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2014-08-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317629252

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The Vital Science (Routledge Revivals) by Peter Morton Pdf

In this title, first published in 1984, Peter Morton argues that in late Victorian Britain a group of novelists and essayists quite consciously sought and found ideas in post-Darwinian biology that were susceptible to imaginative transformation. The period between 1860 and 1900 was a time of great confusion in biology; the natural selection hypothesis was in retreat before its acute critics, and no extension of evolutionary theory to human affairs was too bizarre to attract its quota of enthusiasts. Writers capitalised on this prevailing uncertainty and used it to their own artistic or polemic ends. A fascinating and interdisciplinary title, this reissue will interest students of late Victorian literature, as well as historians of biological theory between The Origin of Species and Mendel.