Bøger af Caroline McCracken-Flesher

Out of the mainstream but ahead of the tide, that is Scottish Science Fiction. Science Fiction emphasizes ';progress' through technology, advanced mental states, or future times. How does Scotland, often considered a land of the past, lead in Science Fiction? ';Left behind' by international politics, Scots have cultivated alternate places and different times as sites of identity so that Scotland can seem a futuristic fiction itself. This book explores the tensions between science and a particular society that produce an innovative science fiction. Essays consider Scottish thermodynamics, Celtic myth, the rigors of religious ';conversion,' Scotland's fractured politics yet civil society, its languages of alterity (Scots, Gaelic, allegory, poetry), and the lure of the future. From Peter Pan and Dr. Jekyll to the poetry of Edwin Morgan and the worlds of Muriel Spark, Ken Macleod, or Iain M. Banks, Scotland's creative complex yields a literature that models the future for Science Fiction.

'There is something about the story that sings', wrote William James. Scots agree, choosing Kidnapped to represent Edinburgh as a UNESCO City of Literature. Readers worldwide concur, keeping the novel in print and in translation since its publication in 1886. The New Edinburgh Edition of Kidnapped is the first full, scholarly edition of this popular and important book. This edition brings out the variety and the energy of Stevenson's text and his writing process for the first time. Readers can see and appreciate for themselves the author's thoughtful and determined negotiations between his Scottish subject and voice, the imperatives of genre determined by contemporary critics, and his growing international audience. For instance, they will be surprised to discover that David sets out not from Essendean, but the less romantic 'Ogilvy', or that though the stolid David becomes more 'English' in the process of Stevenson's revisions, Uncle Ebeneezer becomes more pawkily Scottish. Following the text Stevenson emphasised (the first book publication), but making available a manuscript never before faithfully represented, and exposing the various stages of Stevenson's revisions, this edition manifests the real richness of Stevenson's artistic work as it evolved in a lively contemporary world.