Books & eBooks

Locating Science Fiction is a ground breaking and potentially paradigm-shifting book, a major intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about SF. It effects a series of vital shifts in the way SF theory and criticism has conceptualised its subject, away from prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement and towards the empirically grounded understanding of what is actually a messy amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts.

Science Fiction explores the genre from 1895 to the present day, drawing on examples from over forty countries. It raises questions about the relationship between science fiction, science, and technology, and examines the interrelationships between spectacle, narrative and self-reflexivity, paying particular attention to the role of special effects in creating meaning and affect.

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality.

Why did Kurt Vonnegut shun being labeled a writer of science fiction (SF)? How did Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin find themselves in a public argument about the nature of SF? This volume explores the broad category of SF as a genre, as one that challenges readers, viewers, teachers, and scholars, and then as one that is often itself challenged (as the authors in the collection do).

100 Masters of Mystery and Detective Fiction is a response to the growing attention paid to genre fiction in schools and universtites. Since Edgar Allan Poe invented the modern mystery story in the mid-19^th century, the number of authors writing in this field has steadily grown.

This reference provides a selective guide to the important criticism of American mystery and detective novels and presents general features of the genre and its historical development over the past two centuries. Critical approaches covered in the volume include story as game, images, myth criticism, formalism and structuralism, psychonalysis, Marxism and more. Comparisons with related genres, such as gothic, suspense, gangster, and postmodern novels, illustrate similarities and differences important to the understanding of the unique components of mystery and detective fiction.

Continuing the Salem Press tradition of Critical Survey series, Critical Survey of Mystery & Detective Fiction, Revised Edition, provides detailed analyses of the lives and writings of major contributors to the fascinating literary subgenre of mystery and detective fiction.

The detective novel is both a product of the twentieth century and a response to the needs of readers forced to deal with social and political insecurities of the time. Thus codes of modernity are the essence of the genre, and its plausibility relies upon the degree of the readers’ expectations, demands, and vicarious experiences. Even one of mystery fiction’s hallmarks, the seemingly improbable but consequential encounter with strangers, is assimilated in the modern sensibility, which has been shaped by concepts of trust and confidence, of rationalism and emotion, of expertise and amateurism, and of ideology and morality.

Something sinister is afoot out there—and this newly updated readers’ advisory has all the clues to help librarians solve the mystery of which titles readers should check out next.

When Edgar Allan Poe set down the tale of the accursed House of Usher in 1839, he also laid the foundation for a literary tradition that has assumed a lasting role in American culture. “The House of Usher” and its literary progeny have not lacked for tenants in the century and a half since: writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King have taken rooms in the haunted houses of American fiction.

History and criticism of twentieth-century British horror.

For all the horror fans that haunt your library, this is the must-have guide. Readers’ advisers and reference librarians will appreciate the key tools provided to expand upon this genre, including listings of top books, authors, and award winners within eleven horror subgenres—like mummies, biomedical, monsters, and splatterpunk. Clear descriptions of characteristics within subgenres are provided throughout.

In a compact, readable, and accessible book, Roger B. Salomon explores the nature of horror in literature and in life. Rather than minimizing horror by narrowly associating it with psychological drives, persecution, or extremism, he approaches horror through the medium of narrative as a significant and enduring physical and metaphysical reality.

Taking its title from Umberto Eco’s postscript to The Name of the Rose, the novel that inaugurated the New Historical Fiction in the early 1980s, Constructing the World provides a guide to the genre’s defining characteristics.

The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the Biblical Song of Songs to Disney’s princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure.

The Historical Romance explores the ways in which romance authors seek to represent our fantasies of life in the past. Examining how the cut-and-thrust swashbucklers of the 1930s gave way to female-orientated romances, Helen Hughes takes a comprehensive look at how romance authors have dealt with the turbulent question of female independence, and how traditional attitudes towards love, marriage and women's sexuality have been approached in more recent texts.

Whether set in ancient Egypt, Feudal Japan, the Victorian Age, or Civil War-era America, historical fiction places readers squarely at the center of fascinating times and places, making it one of the most popular genres in contemporary publishing. The definitive resource for librarians and other book professionals, this guide provides an overview of historical fiction’s roots, highlighting foundational classics, and explores the genre in terms of its scope and style.