H.G. Wells was described by one of his European critics as a 'seismograph of his age'. He is one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction, and as a novelist, essayist, educationalist and political propagandist his influence has been felt in every European country. This collection of essays by scholarly experts shows the varied and dramatic nature of Wells's reception, including translations, critical appraisals, novels and films on Wellsian themes, and responses to his own well-publicized visits to Russia and elsewhere. The authors chart the intense ideological debate that his writings occasioned, particularly in the inter-war years, and the censorship of his books in Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain. This book offers pioneering insights into Wells's contribution to 20th century European literature and to modern political ideas, including the idea of European union. Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe Review

H. G. Wells and All Things Russian is a fertile terrain for research and this volume will be the first to devote itself entirely to the theme. Wells was an astute student of Russian literature, culture and history, and the Russians, in turn, became eager students of Wells’s views and works. During the Soviet years, in fact, no significant foreign author was safer for Soviet critics to praise than H. G. Wells. The reason was obvious. He had met – and largely approved of – Lenin, was a close friend of the Soviet literary giant Maxim Gorky and, in general, expressed much respect for Russia’s evolving Communist experiment, even after it fell into Stalin’s hands. While Wells’s attitude towards the Soviet Union was, nevertheless, often ambivalent, there is definitely nothing ambiguous about the tremendous influence his works had on Russian literary and cultural life.

Beyond his pivotal place in the history of scientific thought, Charles Darwin's writings and his theory of evolution by natural selection have also had a profound impact on art and culture and continue to do so to this day. The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe is a comprehensive survey of this enduring cultural impact throughout the continent. With chapters written by leading international scholars that explore how literary writers and popular culture responded to Darwin's thought, the book also includes an extensive timeline of his cultural reception in Europe and bibliographies of major translations in each country.

Urban mindscapes are structures of thinking about a city, built on conceptualisations of the city’s physical landscape as well as on its image as transported through cultural representation, memory and imagination. This book pursues three main strands of inquiry in its exploration of these ‘landscapes of the mind’ in a European context. The first strand concerns the theory and methodology of researching urban mindscapes and urban ‘imaginaries’. The second strand investigates some of the representations, symbols and collective images that feed into our understanding of European cities. It discusses representations of the city in literature, film, television and other cultural forms, which, in James Donald’s phrase, constitute ‘archives of urban images’. The third and last section of the volume concentrates on the relationship between the collective mindscapes of cities, urban policy and the practice of city marketing.

A pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining D.H. Lawrence's reception and influence in Europe

First published in 1897, H.G. Wells's alien invasion narrative The War of the Worlds was a landmark work of science fiction and one that continues to be adapted and referenced in the 21st century. Chronicling the novel's contexts, its origins and its many multi-media adaptations, this book is a complete biography of the life – and the afterlives – of The War of the Worlds. Exploring the original text's compelling sense of place and vivid recreation of Wells's Woking home and the concerns of fin-de-siécle Britain, the book goes on to chart the novel's immediate international impact. Starting with the initial serialisations in US newspapers, Peter Beck goes on to examine Orson Welles's legendary 1938 radio adaptation, TV and film adaptations from George Pal to Steven Spielberg, Jeff Wayne's rock opera and the numerous other works that have taken their inspiration from Wells's original. Drawing on new archival research, this is a comprehensive account of the continuing impact of The War of the Worlds.

A major scholarly collection of international research on the reception of James Joyce in Europe

A major, groundbreaking intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about SF. It effects a series of vital shifts in SF theory and criticism, away from prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement and towards the empirically grounded understanding of an amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts.

Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism brings together twenty-six essays charting the development of Andrew Milner’s distinctively Orwellian version of cultural materialism between 1981 and 2015. The essays address three substantive areas: the sociology of literature, cultural materialism and the cultural politics of the New Left, and utopian and science fiction studies. They are bookended by two conversations between Milner and his editor J.R. Burgmann, the first looking back retrospectively on the development of Milner’s thought, the second looking forward prospectively towards the future of academia, the political left and science fiction.