Mediating the World in the Novels of Iain Banks : The Paradigms of Fiction.
Title:
Mediating the World in the Novels of Iain Banks : The Paradigms of Fiction.
Author:
Pisarska, Katarzyna.
ISBN:
9783653020069
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (353 pages)
Series:
Mediated Fictions ; v.1
Mediated Fictions
Contents:
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The Case of Iain (M.) Banks -- CHAPTER 1 Ab Ovo. The Wasp Factory as the Blueprint of Fictional Worlds -- 1.1. Model ONE: Alternative Worlds -- 1.2. Model TWO: Community Worlds -- 1.3. Model THREE: Mythical Worlds -- 1.4. Model FOUR: Apocalyptic Worlds -- CHAPTER 2 Alternative Worlds Walking on Glass, The Bridge, and Transition -- 2.1 Language, Literature, and Multiple Reality in Walking on Glass -- 2.2. Into the Subconscious: The Dream Worlds of The Bridge -- 2.3. Across the Multiverse: The Many Worlds of Transition -- CHAPTER 3 Community Worlds The Crow Road, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, Espedair Street, and Stonemouth -- 3.1. The Wor(l)ds of Magic, Memory, and Truth in The Crow Road -- 3.2. Gardens of Love and Communities of the Heart in The Steep Approach to Garbadale -- 3.3. The Land of Music and the Music of Homeland in Espedair Street -- 3.4. Big Movies and Private Narratives in Stonemouth -- CHAPTER 4 Mythical Worlds. Whit, Canal Dreams, and The Business -- 4.1. Into the Unholy Lands: the Pilgrimage of a Goddess in Whit -- 4.2. A Female Samurai's Journey to the Centre in Canal Dreams. -- 4.3. The Virgin, the Mother, the Crone: the Return of a Mythical Woman in The Business. -- CHAPTER 5 Apocalyptic Worlds. A Song of Stone, Complicity, and Dead Air -- 5.1. King Arthur in Distress: Post-apocalyptic Transgressions in A Song of Stone -- 5.2. From Virtual Reality to the Waste Land: Public Apocalypse and Post-traumatic Syndrome in Complicity -- 5.3. On-Screen Catastrophes and Post-apocalyptic Romances in Dead Air -- CHAPTER 6 Coda: The Quarry -- CONCLUSION -- Bibliography -- Index.
Abstract:
«Katarzyna Pisarska's Mediating the World is a pioneering attempt at a structural-semiotic analysis of Iain Banks's literary fiction considered as a single oeuvre. All Banks's fictions, she argues, are organized around the question of mediation between character and world, whether the mediation be social, impersonal and objective on the one hand, or individual, personal and subjective on the other. This insight gives rise to a typology of four different kinds of 'world modeling'. All four, she argues, derive from The Wasp Factory, but thereafter one or other is dominant in each of the later novels. The result is a powerfully productive methodology for reading Banks.» (Andrew Milner, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, Monash University, Melbourne) «Depicting the variety of Iain Banks's multiple fictional realities, his escapist dream worlds, lands of music and of memory, the universes of the past and of the future, mythical regions and apocalyptic quarters, Katarzyna Pisarska's thought-provoking inquiry presented in Mediating the World exposes the full scope of Banks's oeuvre characteristics: its paradigm of postmodernist fiction, its roots in Scottish literary and cultural tradition, its interest in history and, self-reflectingly, also in the story telling. The survey of the fifteen novels demanded from its author not only superior interpreting talent, but also outstanding erudition and remarkable industry.» (Andrzej Zgorzelski, Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of Gdansk).
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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