Roger Luckhurst
Biographic Data
| ID | 178985 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Roger Luckhurst |
| GIVEN NAMES | Roger |
| FAMILY NAME | Luckhurst |
| SIGNATURE | LUCKHURST R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birkbeck, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2685-7283 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 7 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking…
Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age
Beauty and the Beast
The article is a reflection on the category of the beautiful in the work of Professor Hilary Fraser in the context of Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College
Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life by Steven Shaviro
Reviewed by: Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life by Steven Shaviro Roger Luckhurst Life, Jim, But Not as We Know It. Steven Shaviro. Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life. Goldsmiths, 2021. 181 pp. £17.50. This elegant and lucid book modestly offers eight chapters of eight close readings of science-fiction texts, structured around questions of life and embodiment—or what the British sociologist Nikolas Rose would call “the polit…
Brexitland's dark ecologies: New British landscape writing
This essay offers a taxonomy of the New British Landscape writing, first identified in 2008. It suggests five principal ways of organising this large and growing body of work: through the thematics of rewilding, trauma, folk horror, walking as counter-memory, and a fascination with provisional edgelands. The contextual framework suggests that landscape writing marks an attempt to bolster place against the abstraction of space in modernity, a tact…
The Ghost Club, 1882–1936: Strong Bonds, Weak Connections
The Ghost Club was founded to discuss matters spiritual, psychic and occult in 1882 by Spiritualist William Stainton Moses and mystic Alfred Alaric Watts. It was intended as a club ruled by a gentleman’s code of honour—with all matters discussed kept strictly confidential. While maintaining secrecy, it also obsessively minuted and documented its discussions, leaving behind thousands of pages of records that have yet to be properly investigated, o…
Arthur Conan Doyle and Medical London: Reading the Topography of Round the Red Lamp
This essay explores the short period of time that Arthur Conan Doyle spent between March and June 1891 when he moved his family into rooms in Bloomsbury and took a consulting room near Harley Street in an attempt to set up as an eye specialist. This last attempt to move up the professional hierarchy from general practitioner to specialist tends to be seen as a final impulsive move before Conan Doyle decided to become a full-time writer in June 18…
Sina Farzin Susan M. Gaines Roslynn D. HaynesUnder the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel
580 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Peele’s Us (2019) came to mind, who plays NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” (1988) rather than calling the police as her owner-masters are slaughtered by mysterious house invaders. This move calls the AI’s assumed whiteness into question while positioning the acousmatic computer itself as a potentially violent home invader. These points are outside the scope of Faber’s book by her own admission, but her careful…
The Chinese Virus
The Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula
Bram Stoker's Dracula is the most famous vampire in literature and film. This new collection of sixteen essays brings together a range of internationally renowned scholars to provide a series of pathways through this celebrated Gothic novel and its innumerable adaptations and translations. The volume illuminates the novel's various pre-histories, critical contexts and subsequent cultural transformations. Chapters explore literary history, Gothic …
Ballard: The Next Generation
The Time Machine
The Time Traveller* (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burnt brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and t…
The weird: A Dis/Orientation
This essay attempts to explore the recent resurgence of interest in ‘weird fiction’ from Arthur Machen in the 1890s via H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s to the rise of the New Weird in 2003 and beyond in the works of China Miéville, M. John Harrison and Jeff VanderMeer. It aims to provide an overview of its slippery genre status, existing as it does in the interstices of gothic and science fiction, decadent and pulp fiction. But it also recognizes th…
High‐Rise 1975/2015
By 1975
King Solomon's Mines
Don’t you see that we are buried alive?’ When Allan Quatermain is approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to search for Sir Henry’s missing brother, deep in the African interior, he agrees to lead their expedition. Quatermain has a map to the fabled King Solomon’s Mines, whose treasure the missing man sought to attain. Their journey takes them to Kukuanaland, where they find a warrior tribe in thrall to King Twala. Soon the whi…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience. Science fiction in America has long served to reflect the country's hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears. The ideas and conventions associated with science fiction are pervasive throughout American film and television, comics and visual arts, games and gaming, a…
Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present
Joan Gordon Wins 2014 Pilgrim Award
Compelling but Uneven Collection
Gothic Colonies, 1850–1920
Tales from the British Museum
The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction
Popular commercial fiction emerged in the nineteenth century, with serialised novels and sensational penny dreadfuls. Today it remains a multi-million dollar industry giving pleasure to many, but it is also a field of growing interest for scholars and students of literature. This Companion covers the major developments in the history of popular fiction, with specially commissioned chapters on pulp fiction, bestsellers, and comics and graphic narr…
A Clockwork History of Ideas
Laboratories for Global Space-Time: Science-Fictionality and the World's Fairs, 1851-1939
This article examines the world's fair movement between The Great Exhibition of 1851 and The New York World's Fair of 1939, suggesting that these sites are science-fictional spaces that expose their mass audiences to forms of space-time compression that enable early figurations of globalization. Fair sites embody specific forms of economic transfer and exchange that anticipate dreams of the borderless flows of capital in some current versions of …
The Time Machine
The Time Traveller* (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burnt brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and t…
The weird: A Dis/Orientation
This essay attempts to explore the recent resurgence of interest in ‘weird fiction’ from Arthur Machen in the 1890s via H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s to the rise of the New Weird in 2003 and beyond in the works of China Miéville, M. John Harrison and Jeff VanderMeer. It aims to provide an overview of its slippery genre status, existing as it does in the interstices of gothic and science fiction, decadent and pulp fiction. But it also recognizes th…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Border Policing: Postmodernism and Science Fiction
A central tenet of definitions of postmodernism is the erasure of the border between so-called "high" and "low" culture. There is now, it is claimed, an intermixing and blurring of previously autonomous and differentiated forms, a distinction associated with a superseded modernism. Such claims would appear to present SF critics with the potential to escape the constrictions of arguing in terms of the "mainstream" and the "ghetto," or equivalent t…
Brexitland's dark ecologies: New British landscape writing
This essay offers a taxonomy of the New British Landscape writing, first identified in 2008. It suggests five principal ways of organising this large and growing body of work: through the thematics of rewilding, trauma, folk horror, walking as counter-memory, and a fascination with provisional edgelands. The contextual framework suggests that landscape writing marks an attempt to bolster place against the abstraction of space in modernity, a tact…
King Solomon's Mines
Don’t you see that we are buried alive?’ When Allan Quatermain is approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to search for Sir Henry’s missing brother, deep in the African interior, he agrees to lead their expedition. Quatermain has a map to the fabled King Solomon’s Mines, whose treasure the missing man sought to attain. Their journey takes them to Kukuanaland, where they find a warrior tribe in thrall to King Twala. Soon the whi…
Laboratories for Global Space-Time: Science-Fictionality and the World's Fairs, 1851-1939
This article examines the world's fair movement between The Great Exhibition of 1851 and The New York World's Fair of 1939, suggesting that these sites are science-fictional spaces that expose their mass audiences to forms of space-time compression that enable early figurations of globalization. Fair sites embody specific forms of economic transfer and exchange that anticipate dreams of the borderless flows of capital in some current versions of …
The two cultures, or the end of the world as we know it
This essay examines the 'war' of science and culture in the twentieth century – its terms in part fixed by C. P. Snow's influential polemic on 'The two cultures' in the 1950s – which continued into the 1990s with a series of intellectual skirmishes sometimes referred to as the 'science wars'. Military metaphors can quickly become apocalyptic on both sides. Rather than contributing to this overheated rhetoric, I suggest instead that we need to ack…
Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects
This essay introduces the work of controversial historian and philosopher of science and technology, Bruno Latour. It suggests that his theories of hybrid objects, his analyses of networks that criss-cross normally discrete categories of science, politics, and culture, and his displacement of the modern/postmodern paradigm can offer productive new readings of science fiction, permitting critics to rethink the genre's relation to science and socie…
The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction
The cultural phenomenon of alien abduction narratives has been met with silence or contempt by most of the academic community. This is an understandable response, given the mix of credulity, pseudo-scientific legitimation and uncontrolled paranoia surrounding the discourse of abduction. This essay argues that however outlandish the claims of UFOlogists and abduction researchers, the phenomenon is worthy of study for its evidence of an increasing …
Border Policing: Postmodernism and Science Fiction
A central tenet of definitions of postmodernism is the erasure of the border between so-called "high" and "low" culture. There is now, it is claimed, an intermixing and blurring of previously autonomous and differentiated forms, a distinction associated with a superseded modernism. Such claims would appear to present SF critics with the potential to escape the constrictions of arguing in terms of the "mainstream" and the "ghetto," or equivalent t…
Nuclear Criticism: Anachronism and Anachorism
Queer theory (and Oscar Wilde): Review essay
(1995). Queer theory (and Oscar Wilde): Review essay. Journal of Gender Studies: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 333-340
Horror and beauty in rare combination’: The miscegenate fictions of Octavia butler
The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction
The cultural phenomenon of alien abduction narratives has been met with silence or contempt by most of the academic community. This is an understandable response, given the mix of credulity, pseudo-scientific legitimation and uncontrolled paranoia surrounding the discourse of abduction. This essay argues that however outlandish the claims of UFOlogists and abduction researchers, the phenomenon is worthy of study for its evidence of an increasing …
Dreamlands of Consumption
The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901
The Invention of Telepathy explores one of the enduring concepts to emerge from the late nineteenth century. Telepathy was coined by Frederic Myers in 1882. He defined it as “the communication of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense”. By 1901 it had become a disputed phenomenon amongst physical scientists yet was the “royal road” to the unconscious mind. Telepathy was discussed by eminent men and wo…
Cultures of Technology
Cultural Governance, New Labour, and the British SF Boom
This essay explores the resurgence of British sf in the 1990s in the context of the transformation of British cultural life, in particular following the election of the New Labour government in May 1997. The argument does not propose that the Boom starts with this election, only that Blairism consolidates trends in cultural policy that had been nascent throughout the 1990s. In particular, recent political theory about what has been called “cultur…
Bruno Latour's Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects
This essay introduces the work of controversial historian and philosopher of science and technology, Bruno Latour. It suggests that his theories of hybrid objects, his analyses of networks that criss-cross normally discrete categories of science, politics, and culture, and his displacement of the modern/postmodern paradigm can offer productive new readings of science fiction, permitting critics to rethink the genre's relation to science and socie…
The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration ; Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: the Brutal Tongue
The two cultures, or the end of the world as we know it
This essay examines the 'war' of science and culture in the twentieth century – its terms in part fixed by C. P. Snow's influential polemic on 'The two cultures' in the 1950s – which continued into the 1990s with a series of intellectual skirmishes sometimes referred to as the 'science wars'. Military metaphors can quickly become apocalyptic on both sides. Rather than contributing to this overheated rhetoric, I suggest instead that we need to ack…
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged...I was suddenly struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror.’ Stevenson’s short novel, published in 1886, became an instant classic. It was a Gothic horror that originated in a feverish nightmare, whose hallucinatory setting in the murky back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence. The respectable doctor’s mysterious relationship with his disreputable associa…
The Uncanny After Freud: The Contemporary Trauma Subject and the Fiction of Stephen King
For about twenty years, Western culture has staged and restaged a particularly dramatic scene which tells us much about the nature of the contemporary subject. A distressed and disoriented individual is assailed by their own memory. He or she discovers, by involuntary flashbacks or perhaps by hypnotic regression, a whole tranche of memory that had been lying dormant, walled off or hidden away (somehow) in the psyche. The occluded memories always …
Late Victorian Gothic Tales
Reflections on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking
In 1993, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins published Reconstructing Illness, a study of memoirs about the experience of disease, dysfunction or death for which she coined a new term: pathography. In a move familiar from the brief flowering of the 'personal criticism' movement in the late 1980s, Hawkins confessed that her academic interest had been motivated by her own father's death: the critical work thus shared the very impulse it sought to analyse. In Rec…
The Productive Convergence of SF Criticism and Critical Theory
This book has been a long time coming. For those who have read CsicseryRonay' s incisive essays, reviews, and commentaries in Science Fiction Studies and elsewhere for twenty years, this book has been a really long time coming. And, you know, I need to take at least some of the blame for that. I sent my first piece to SFS in 1991 when I was still a blissfully ignorant grad student. Instead of a clip round the ear, as you might reasonably expect, …
The mummy's curse: A study in rumour
We associate the curse of the mummy with the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen in February 1923 and the death, six weeks later, of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. In fact, this curse rehearsed two prior curse stories associated with Victorian gentleman and which circulated as gossip and rumour in the late Victorian era. This essay tries to recover those fugitive narratives in the belief that they help reveal more of the cultural significance of the…
Science Fiction and Cultural History
In 199 1 , the eminent historian Keith Thomas began his keynote speech to a Dutch congress on cultural history with an embarrassing confession: have never thought of myself as a cultural historian, and I am not quite sure what 'cultural history' is. In the United Kingdom there is no such subject. There are scarcely any chairs or lectureships in cultural history, no departments of cultural history, no journals of cultural history, no conferences o…
Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard
Dracula
‘It was butcher work...the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam.’ Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic shocker introduced Count Dracula to the world, an ancient creature bent on bringing his contagion to London, the very heart of the British Empire. Only a handful of men and women stand between Dracula and his long-cherished goal, but they are vulnerable and weak against the cunning and supernatur…
The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction
Popular commercial fiction emerged in the nineteenth century, with serialised novels and sensational penny dreadfuls. Today it remains a multi-million dollar industry giving pleasure to many, but it is also a field of growing interest for scholars and students of literature. This Companion covers the major developments in the history of popular fiction, with specially commissioned chapters on pulp fiction, bestsellers, and comics and graphic narr…
A Clockwork History of Ideas
Laboratories for Global Space-Time: Science-Fictionality and the World's Fairs, 1851-1939
This article examines the world's fair movement between The Great Exhibition of 1851 and The New York World's Fair of 1939, suggesting that these sites are science-fictional spaces that expose their mass audiences to forms of space-time compression that enable early figurations of globalization. Fair sites embody specific forms of economic transfer and exchange that anticipate dreams of the borderless flows of capital in some current versions of …
Science Versus Rumour: Artefaction and Counter-Narrative in the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum
Stories of the mummy's curse persist, despite efforts of the enlightened museum to dismiss these tales as superstition. This article follows the story of one particular “cursed” artefact in the British Museum, using archives and other resources to reconstruct the “true” story behind the circulated rumour. The paper concludes that the mummy's curse is a displaced account of the violence of colonial and museal appropriation of objects, a counter-na…
Art (36 works) · History (27 works) · Literature (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Art history (17 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis (8 works) · Political science (8 works)