Suvin: ∗metamorphoses∗ Of Science Fiction: On The Poet & Hist Of A Literary Genre (cloth): On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre - Hardcover

SUVIN

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300022506 ISBN 13: 9780300022506

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1977

Synopsis

Returning to print for the first time since the 1980s, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is the origin point for decades of literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres. Darko Suvin's paradigm-setting definition of SF as "the literature of cognitive estrangement" established a robust theory of the genre that continues to spark fierce debate, as well as inspiring myriad intellectual descendants and disciples. Suvin's centuries-spanning history of the genre links SF to a long tradition of utopian and satirical literatures crying out for a better world than this one, showing how SF and the imagination of utopia are now forever intertwined. In addition to the 1979 text of the book, this edition contains three additional essays from Suvin that update, expand and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface that situate the book in the context of the decades of SF studies that have followed in its wake.

About this title

Review

This book marked the beginning of theoretically sophisticated science fiction criticism; it changed the whole field, and remains a startling introduction to a discussion that has not ended since its first appearance.
(Kim Stanley Robinson, author of 2312 and Aurora)

Suvin's classic book is not only a fundamental history of science fiction which deprovincializes our rather narrow and English-language view of the canon; it is also a powerful theoretical intervention in the criticism and theory of the genre, which reunited it with the traditions of utopia as a genre. Not only did this paradigm shift transform our relationship to the latter, it also restored a political and social content to science fiction itself, making of the latter an implicit or explicit Brechtian estrangement-effect. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is thereby an indispensable companion to the study of both genres, which durably integrates them into literary history and theory as such.
(Fredric Jameson, Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University)

About the Author

Darko Suvin, scholar, critic and poet, was born in Yugoslavia, studied at the universities of Zagreb, Bristol, the Sorbonne and Yale and has taught in Europe and North America. He is Professor Emeritus of McGill University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of numerous books and articles on literature and dramaturgy, culture, utopian and science fiction and political epistemology, as well as three volumes of poetry. In recent years he has been writing mainly about SFR Yugoslavia and communism. Gerry Canavan is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. His research focuses on the relationship between science fiction and the political and cultural history of the post-war period, with special emphasis on ecology and the environment. He is an editor at Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television, as well as the author of Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Octavia E. Butler (2016).

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1977
• ISBN 10: 0300022506
• ISBN 13: 9780300022506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336