Fin-De-Siecle Fictions, 1890s-1990s - Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire

H.G. Wells wanted his epitaph to be 'God damn you all, I told you so'. But how accurate were his predictions of industrial warfare and global conflict, especially as his descriptions of an aerial bombing of New York in War in the Air has been compared tothe terrorist attacks of 9/11? Did the late Victorians really 'discover the future' or did the 1990s simply recycle the 1890s? At the aftermath of 2012, this book is 'looking backward' and identifies startling connections between the apocalyptic fantasies of the last two centuries' ends and traces intriguing links between Nietzsche and chaos theory, Dracula and The X-Files, the Borg Queen and H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha, among others.

List of contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire 1. When Time Shall Be No More: Entropy, Degeneration, History 2. The Eternal Return of Chaos 3. Dusk of the Nations: Century's End and Imperial Crisis 4. Terminal Bodies: New Men and Women for the '00s Conclusion: Post-Millennial Apocalypse Bibliography Index

Report

"For anyone with an interest in fin-de-si cle fictions of all forms, including Gothic, horror, SF, steampunk, and cyberpunk, or even just science geeks who want to develop their understanding of the wider implications and impacts of technology and invention, Mousoutzanis's Fin-de-Si cle Fictions will be an inspiration for years to come." (Jillian Wingfield, The British Society for Literature and Science, October 29, 2019)

Product details

• Authors: A Mousoutzanis, A. Mousoutzanis, Aris Mousoutzanis, Mousoutzanis a
• Publisher: Palgrave UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 23.05.2014
• EAN: 9781137263650
• ISBN: 978-1-137-26365-0
• No. of pages: 267
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; B, Fiction & related items, Fiction, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literature: history & criticism, Literary theory, European Literature, Literature, Modern—19th century, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Literature, Modern—20th century, Twentieth-Century Literature, British literature, British and Irish Literature, Fiction Literature, Palgrave Literature Collection, Literature—Philosophy, America—Literatures, North American Literature, America;crisis;fiction;Narrative;time