Trans/Forming Utopia Volume II: The 'Small Thin Story'

RUSSELL, Elizabeth, Trans/Forming Utopia Volume II: The 'Small Thin Story', Oxford, Bern / Berlin / Bruxelles / Frankfurt am Main / New York / Wien, Peter Lang, 2009, 235 p.

ISBN  978-3-03911-348-4

RÉSUMÉ

Is the utopian project dead? Is it possible to imagine a utopian society or a utopian world in the aftermath of the collapse of ideologies? This book contains eighteen essays which are the result of the 7th International Conference of Utopian Studies held in Spain in 2006, either debating the subject, or suggesting alternative readings to some of the theoretical ideas raised within utopian studies.
This volume focuses on the importance of narratives in utopian literature. They define the world we live in and the world we wish to live in. Through narratives of confession, and indeed through silence itself, the unconscious emerges and desire is articulated. The articles in this volume question and challenge the power of the word, the stability of meaning, and the relationship between thought and action in the construction of utopia and dystopia. They also point to the various literary frameworks of utopian and dystopian narratives, thus connecting stories from the past, present and future of both real and imaginary and communities.

TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Elizabeth Russell: Introduction - Maggie Gee: Utopia and the Living Body: Drought, Flood, Terror and Engineering in the Garden of Earthly Delights - Dolors Collellmir: The Ecological Paradigm in Jeannette Armstrong's Novel Whispering in Shadows - Benjamin Smith: The Secret Garden as Ecoregion: A Green Approach to a Children's Novel - Maria Odette Canivell: Waslala: Beyond U-topia - Jennifer E. Michaels: Confronting German Terrorism: F.C. Delius's Trilogy Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn) - Celia Wallhead: Two Takes on Terrorism in Kashmir: Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown and Justine Hardy's The Wonder House - Renata Koba: The Other Side of History: Alternate World(s) of The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick - Alireza Omid Bakhsh: The Roots of Dystopia in Iran - Ana Raquel Fernandes: London Fields: Martin Amis's Postmodern Dystopia - Ana Cláudia Romano Ribeiro: The Meaning of Hermaphroditism in Gabriel de Foigny's Utopia The Southern Land Known - Teresa Requena: The Brook Farm Heterotopia: Utopian Socialism and Gender in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance - Mercè Cuenca: 'My Heroine Would Be Myself': The Promise of a Queer Utopia in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar - Beatriz Domínguez García: The Utopian Future of Humankind in Three Novels by Sheri S. Tepper: The Power of the Feminine - María Dolores Gimeno Puyol: Viaje al País de los Ayparchontes: the Limits of a Spanish Utopia in the Eighteenth Century - José Eduardo Reis: The Aporias of a Portuguese Literary Utopia: Irmânia by Ângelo Jorge - Hande Tekdemir: Utopic Reflections in the Capital of the 'Other Empire': Contemporary British Detective and Travel Fiction in Post-Ottoman Istanbul - Pere Gifra Adroher: Travel Writing on Andorra: Utopia in the Pyrenees - Pere Gallardo: The Road to Perdition is Paved in Technicolour.

BIOGRAPHIE

Elizabeth Russell is a senior lecturer in British literatures and critical theory in the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain. She has published articles in the area of utopian studies, feminisms and multiculturalisms. Recent publications include Somnis d'Utopies published in Catalan (2007) and two edited volumes of essays: Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities (2002) and Loving Against the Odds: Women's Writing in English in a European Context (Peter Lang, 2006). She is also a member of two research groups: GRÈC (Gènere, raça, ètnia i classe) and T-CLAA (Transformacions Culturals i Literàries en angles i alemany).