This set of eight volumes presents the reader with selected primary texts in the genre now generally known as future fiction. The chosen texts are designed to explore the dominant characteristics of the genre and examine how it changed over the 18th and 19th centuries.

This timely book investigates fiction that speculates about wars likely to break out in the near or distant future. Ranging widely across periods and conflicts real and imagined, Future Wars explores the interplay between politics, literature, science fiction, and war in a range of classic texts. Individual essays look at Reagan's infamous “Star Wars” project, nuclear fiction, Martian invasion, and the Pax Americana. The use of future war scenarios in military planning dates back to the nineteenth century, and Future Wars concludes with a US Army officer's assessment of the continuing usefulness of future wars fiction.

Victorian Time examines how literature of the era registers the psychological impact of the onset of a modern, industrialized experience of time as time-saving technologies, such as steam-powered machinery, aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time.

This set of eight volumes presents the reader with selected primary texts in the genre now generally known as future fiction. The chosen texts are designed to explore the dominant characteristics of the genre and examine how it changed over the 18th and 19th centuries.

This set of eight volumes presents the reader with selected primary texts in the genre now generally known as future fiction. The chosen texts are designed to explore the dominant characteristics of the genre and examine how it changed over the 18th and 19th centuries.

Two centuries ago, native New Yorker Washington Irving exploded onto the literary scene of Europe with the publication of his breakout collection of stories, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Published in England and America in 1819–1820, and universally praised for its inventive characters and soul-searching qualities, including the immortal tales “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the volume enjoyed remarkable transatlantic success, allowing Irving to become the first of his nation to support himself as a professional author. In this distinctive collection, historians and literary scholars come together to reassess Irving’s imaginative world and complex cultural legacy. Alternately a satirist and a nostalgia merchant, Irving was ever absorbed in reconstituting a lost past, which the volume dubs “Rip Van Winkle’s Republic.” The assembled scholars explore issues of Anglo-American culture, the power of imagery, race, and the treatment of time and history in Irving’s vast body of literature, as well as his status as a bibliophile, an antiquarian, and a prominent figure in an age of literary celebrity. Edited by acclaimed historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Rip Van Winkle’s Republic marks a rediscovery of this marvelous author of social satire and fabled tales of the past.

This set of eight volumes presents the reader with selected primary texts in the genre now generally known as future fiction. The chosen texts are designed to explore the dominant characteristics of the genre and examine how it changed over the 18th and 19th centuries.