Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction
The Oceanic Imaginary in Literature since the Information Age
Authors: Ahlberg, S.
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- About this book
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Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction offers fresh readings of what has been called "transatlantic literature". In selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts it discovers a shift from oceanic, place-based knowledge to an atmospheric, placeless circulation of information. Consonant with the displacements of the Information Age, this book reads contemporary narrative as it imagines and navigates today's virtual spaces. An important conclusion of the book is that intellectual resources are finite and should be used sustainably. Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web. Instead, the book reimagines place as a practice in the way it is communicated and narrated. Ultimately, this book empowers the reader to reimagine a future for narrative in the Information Age.
- About the authors
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Sofia Ahlberg teaches in the Department of Creative Arts and English at La Trobe University, Australia. Her previous publications include articles in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, and Studies in the Humanities.
- Reviews
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"Atlantic Afterlives asks a haunting question: how are we to preserve knowledge and narrative from the smooth, cancelling comforts of pure information? The book offers no single answer, but Ahlberg's subtle and imaginative readings of a range of contemporary writers, from Cormac McCarthy to Michel Faber, from Annie Proulx to Michel Houellebecq, provide many new ways of thinking about literature's relation to a changing world." - Michael Wood, Emeritus Professor of English, Princeton University, USA
"Atlantic Afterlives asks a haunting question: how are we to preserve knowledge and narrative from the smooth, cancelling comforts of pure information? The book offers no single answer, but Ahlberg's subtle and imaginative readings of a range of contemporary writers, from Cormac McCarthy to Michel Faber, from Annie Proulx to Michel Houellebecq, provide many new ways of thinking about literature's relation to a changing world." - Michael Wood, Emeritus Professor of English, Princeton University, USA
- Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Introduction
Pages 1-15
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Narrative without Borders
Pages 19-43
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Apocalypse Then and Now
Pages 45-68
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Through a Border Darkly
Pages 71-95
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A Post-Atlantic Divorce
Pages 97-122
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction
- Book Subtitle
- The Oceanic Imaginary in Literature since the Information Age
- Authors
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- S. Ahlberg
- Series Title
- The New Urban Atlantic
- Copyright
- 2016
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan US
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
- eBook ISBN
- 978-1-137-47922-8
- DOI
- 10.1057/9781137479228
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-1-137-47921-1
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XII, 212
- Topics
