What do literary dystopias reflect about the times? In Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase, contributors address this amorphous but pervasive genre, using diverse critical methodologies to examine how North America is conveyed or portrayed in a perceived age of crisis, accelerated uncertainty, and political volatility.
Drawing from contemporary novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and the work of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson (to name a few), this book examines dystopian literature produced by North American authors between the signing of NAFTA (1994) and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (2011). As the texts illustrate, awareness of and deep concern about perceived vulnerabilities—ends of water, oil, food, capitalism, empires, stable climates, ways of life, non-human species, and entire human civilizations—have become central to public discourseover the same period.
By asking questions such as “What are the distinctive qualities of post-NAFTA North American dystopian literature?” and “What does this literature reflect about the tensions and contradictions of the inchoate continental community of North America?” Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase serves to resituate dystopian writing within a particular geo-social setting and introduce a productive means to understand both North American dystopian writing and its relevant engagements with a restricted, mapped reality.
Originally from Nova Scotia, I moved to Vancouver in 1997 to teach at UBC. My teaching and research interests include 19th-21st century literary and cultural studies; the Gothic inheritance, especially in popular culture and late Victorian literature; dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives; representations of youth and childhood; and composition including technical writing
Born in Rossland, BC; raised in various small towns across British Columbia. BA and MA from UVic; PhD (focused on contemporary novelist Peter Ackroyd) from UBC. Interests range from dystopian literature and crime fiction to gender and sexuality. Also: fiction-writing (novels and short stories) whenever possible.
Tara Lee completed a PhD (SFU) in Asian Canadian literature, with field specialties in Canadian Literature and 18th century British Literature. Her teaching currently focuses on critical race studies, dystopian literature, YA literature, techno/new media studies, Canadian literature, and academic writing.
Elizabeth Cooper’s The Rival Widows, or Fair Libertine provides a unique opportunity to restore to scholarly and pedagogical attention a neglected female writer and a play with broad and significant implications for studies of eighteenth-century history, culture and gender. Following the adventures of Lady Bellair, a “glowing, joyous young Widow,” the storyline regenders standard expectations about desire, marriage, libertinism and sentiment. The play has not been reprinted since 1735; therefore this old-spelling edition gives scholars access to an important but neglected resource for studies of women writers and eighteenth-century theatre.
In an original and extensive introduction, Tiffany Potter presents cultural and historical information that highlights the scholarly implications of this newly available play. She offers a brief biographical sketch of the playwright; a summary of sources for specific elements of the play; an overview of the theatrical climate of the time (with particular focus on the conditions leading to the Licensing Act of 1737); a discussion of the place of women in eighteenth-century society; a summary of symbiotic cultural discourses of libertinism and sensibility in the early eighteenth century; and a discussion of the general cultural significance of Cooper’s demonstration of the malleability of prescriptive gender roles.
Further value is added to this edition through its appendices, which reproduce documents relating to the playwright Elizabeth Cooper and to the Licensing Act of 1737 (including the text of the Act itself).
Tiffany Potter (PhD Queen’s) teaches 18th-century studies. Her research continues to evolve, from earlier work on libertinism and gender in fiction and theatre, to representations of indigenous women in 17th- and 18th-century North American contact and captivity narratives, and women writers in England. She also works in television studies, co-editing with CW Marshall an award-winning critical collection on SciFi’s Battlestar Galactica (Bloomsbury 2008), and the first scholarly collection on HBO’s The Wire (Bloomsbury 2009).
This book explores Indigenous American literature and the development of an inter- and trans-Indigenous orientation in Native American and Indigenous literary studies. Drawing on the perspectives of scholars in the field, it seeks to reconcile tribal nation specificity, Indigenous literary nationalism, and trans-Indigenous methodologies as necessary components of post-Renaissance Native American and Indigenous literary studies. It looks at the work of Renaissance writers, including Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Sacred Water (1993), along with novels by S. Alice Callahan and John Milton Oskison. It also discusses Indigenous poetics and Salt Publishing’s Earthworks series, focusing on poets of the Renaissance in conversation with emerging writers. Furthermore, it introduces contemporary readers to many American Indian writers from the seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, from Captain Joseph Johnson and Ben Uncas to Samson Occom, Samuel Ashpo, Henry Quaquaquid, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, Sarah Simon, Mary Occom, and Elijah Wimpey. The book examines Inuit literature in Inuktitut, bilingual Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, and literature in Indian Territory, Nunavut, the Huasteca, Yucatán, and the Great Lakes region. It considers Indigenous literatures north of the Medicine Line, particularly francophone writing by Indigenous authors in Quebec. Other issues tackled by the book include racial and blood identities that continue to divide Indigenous nations and communities, as well as the role of colleges and universities in the development of Indigenous literary studies
I am a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation, appointed as Professor in the Department of English and the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. My work in Indigenous literary studies takes up questions and issues of kinship, belonging, sexuality, personhood, and nationhood, and engages historical, political, aesthetic, and representational contexts and concerns.
The open-air pulpit within the precincts of St. Paul’s Cathedral known as ‘Paul’s Cross’ can be reckoned among the most influential of all public venues in early-modern England. Between 1520 and the early 1640s, this pulpit and its auditory constituted a microcosm of the realm and functioned at the epicentre of events which radically transformed England’s political and religious identities. Through cultivation of a sophisticated culture of persuasion, sermons at Paul’s Cross contributed substantially to the emergence of an early-modern public sphere. This collection of 24 essays seeks to situate the institution of this most public of pulpits and to reconstruct a detailed history of some of the more influential sermons preached at Paul’s Cross during this formative period.
Dr. Stanwood has been a Professor of English at the University of British Columbia since 1975, and Professor Emeritus since 1998. He has also taught at Tufts University, and at the universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Cambridge, York (UK), Mainz and Würzburg.
Torrance Kirby
Torrance Kirby, DPhil (1988) in Modern History, Christ Church, University of Oxford, is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Director of the Centre for Research on Religion at McGill University. He has published extensively on the thought of Richard Hooker and recently edited A Companion to Richard Hooker (Brill, 2008).
Marinetti Dines with the High Command is a work that dramatizes the turbulent life and times of F. T. Marinetti, founder of Futurism, the first global art movement. Marinetti’s artistic career raises enduring questions about art and politics because of his association with Fascism, and the second part of my work is an essay which explores the implications of this association. What makes Marinetti unique is that it is the first work that assesses Marinetti’s life in the context of a command performance he gave for the German High Command in January of 1934 — and the spectacular conclusion to that performance.
My research focus on media theory and Canadian Studies finds common ground in my publications on foundational media theorist Marshall McLuhan. I am the author of McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (U Toronto P, 2002) and of Remediating McLuhan (Amsterdam UP, 2016), the editor of McLuhan Bound (Gingko, 2015), and the curator of spectresofmcluhan.arts.ubc.ca. Forthcoming publications include the introduction to the German translation of McLuhan’s Understanding Media (2015); “Mechanical Brides and Vampire Squids” in Vilém Flusser and Marshall McLuhan (Videopool, 2015); “Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory,” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, ed. C. Sugars (2015); “Canadian Cinema and the Intellectual Milieu,” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema, ed. W. Straw and J. Marchessault (2016); and “Anthems and Anthologies,” Anthologizing Canadian Literature (WLUP, 2015), ed. R. Lecker.
Laurel Brinton with Michael Adams and R, D. Falk, editors
De Gruyter Mouton
2014
This volume brings together papers from the 11th Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Conference, held in Vancouver in May 2012. In the last few years, the cognitive study of language has begun to examine the interaction between language and other embodied communicative modalities, such as gesture, while at the same time expanding the traditional limits of linguistic and cognitive enquiry into creative domains such as music, literature, and visual images. Papers in this collection show how the study of language paves the way for these new areas of investigation. They bring issues of multimodal communication to the attention of linguists, while also looking through and beyond language into various domains of human creativity. This refreshed view of the relations across various communicative domains will be important not only to linguists, but also to all those interested in the creative potential of the human mind.
Laurel Brinton is a specialist in the English Language, with a focus on the history of English. My particular areas of interest include English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics (discourse markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in English with a Linguistics Emphasis in 1981, and I have been working at UBC ever since.
Traditional literary criticism once treated Thomas Nashe as an Elizabethan oddity, difficult to understand or value. He was described as an unrestrained stylist, venomous polemicist, unreliable source, and closet pornographer. But today this flamboyant writer sits at the center of many trends in early modern scholarship. Nashe’s varied output fuels efforts to reconsider print culture and the history of the book, histories of sexuality and pornography, urban culture, the changing nature of patronage, the relationship between theater and print, and evolving definitions of literary authorship and ‘literature’ as such.
This collection brings together a dozen scholars of Elizabethan literature to characterize the current state of Nashe scholarship and shape its emerging future. The Age of Thomas Nashe demonstrates how the works of a restless, improvident, ambitious young writer, driven by radical invention and a desperate search for literary order, can restructure critical thinking about this familiar era.
These essays move beyond individual and generic conceptions of authorship to show how Nashe’s career unveils the changing imperatives of literary production in late sixteenth-century England. Thomas Nashe becomes both a marker of the historical milieu of his time and a symbolic pointer gesturing towards emerging features of modern authorship.
I specialize in Renaissance poetry and queer theory. I have written three monographs and numerous articles and book chapters and co-edited three essay collections. I am currently writing a book on poetic paraphrase and essays on mid 17th-century poetry and on Renaissance women and textual production. I am also finishing an edition of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and beginning a co-written book on Milton’s early verse.
This volume brings together papers from the 11th Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Conference, held in Vancouver in May 2012. In the last few years, the cognitive study of language has begun to examine the interaction between language and other embodied communicative modalities, such as gesture, while at the same time expanding the traditional limits of linguistic and cognitive enquiry into creative domains such as music, literature, and visual images. Papers in this collection show how the study of language paves the way for these new areas of investigation. They bring issues of multimodal communication to the attention of linguists, while also looking through and beyond language into various domains of human creativity. This refreshed view of the relations across various communicative domains will be important not only to linguists, but also to all those interested in the creative potential of the human mind.
Barbara Dancygier is a cognitive linguist, interested in the applications of metaphor theory, blending, and construction grammar to a variety of phenomena, especially the expression of viewpoint. She also works on the applications of cognitive linguistic theories to various discourse types, especially literary discourse and multimodal forms in digital and creative contexts. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on “Understanding multimodal communication,” which will investigate artifacts combining language, image, and materiality, form the cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics perspective.
