Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century

   • Nina Engelhardt, Julia Hoydis

   Pages 1-17Open Access

3. The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction

   • Natalie Roxburgh

   Pages 19-35

4. Neuropathologies: Cognition, Technology, and the Network Paradigm in Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Dave Eggers’s The Circle

   • Julius Greve

   Pages 37-53

5. New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction

   • Kanta Dihal

   Pages 55-74

6. Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body

   • Paola Carbone

   Pages 75-91

7. Towards a Posthumanist Conceptualization of Society: Biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation

   • Pia Balsmeier

   Pages 93-111

8. Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman

   • Paul Hamann

   Pages 113-131

9. The Lures and Limitations of the Natural Sciences: Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree

   • Elizabeth E. J. Gilbert

   Pages 133-151

10. “It’s for Fellows Only!”: On the Postcolonial Stance of Matthew Brown’s Maths Film The Man Who Knew Infinity

    • Norbert Schaffeld

    Pages 153-171

11. Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and the Technologies of Modernism

    • Simon de Bourcier

    Pages 173-191

12. Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone

    • Ellen Moll

    Pages 193-212

13. Correction to: Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century

    • Nina Engelhardt, Julia Hoydis

    Pages C1-C1

14. Back Matter

    Pages 213-217

    PDF

This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama. The ten case studies, covering a range of British and American texts from the late twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, reflect the diversity of representations of science in contemporary fiction, including psychopharmacology and neuropathology, quantum physics and mathematics, biotechnology, genetics, and chemical weaponry. This collection considers how texts engage with science and technology to explore relations between bodies and minds, how such connectivities shape conceptions and narrations of the human, and how the speculative view of science fiction features alongside realist engagements with the Victorian period and modernism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, contributors offer new insights into narrative engagement with science and its place in life today, in times past, and intimes to come.

Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

• science fiction
• speculative fiction
• science and literature
• medicine and literature
• posthumanism
• technology and literature
• epistemology
• knowledge transformation
• realism in science fiction

“In this exciting new volume of critical essays on the forms, histories, and interventions of twenty-first-century fictions of science, the editors and contributors draw our attention to a growing and vibrant field. The range and accessibility of the work is to be applauded, and it is likely to inspire other scholars to further excavate the rich examinations of science offered by our contemporary literary traditions.” (Martin Willis, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University, UK)

• University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

  Nina Engelhardt

• University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

  Julia Hoydis

Nina Engelhardt is Assistant Professor at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She is author of Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics (2018) and has co-edited several special issues, including “Doing Science: Texts, Patterns, Practices” (2017) and “Above. Degrees of Elevation” (2020). She has previously held research and teaching positions at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh) and the University of Cologne.

Julia Hoydis is Assistant Professor at the University of Cologne, Germany. She is author of Tackling the Morality of History: Ethics and Storytelling in the Works of Amitav Ghosh (2011). Co-edited volumes and special issues include “21^st Century Studies” (2015), “Doing Science: Texts, Patterns, Practices” (2017), and Teaching the Posthuman (2019). Her second monograph, Risk and the English Novel From Defoe to McEwan, is forthcoming (2019).

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