Handful Of Texts Research Articles

‘Is it okay to have a child?’: figuring subjectivities and reproductive decisions in response to climate change

In this article, we engage feminist theorisations of figurations as “performative images that can be inhabited” (Haraway 1997/2018) to trace some of the figures which are animating stories about climate change and reproduction in Global North contexts. We focus our reading on a handful of texts which circulate around the question of ‘Is it okay to have a child, given our climate conditions and futures?’ Throughout, we consider the relationship between figurations and our subjective becomings in response to environmental devastations. We critique and resist the hegemonic figuring of ‘the human subject’ as rational and unitary (Braidotti 2014), as this figure naturalises the Western social power relations of advanced capitalism, population control and human exceptionalism. Seeking multiplicity, we look for figures and subjective openings which enable us to become response-able to the pain of ecological worlds dying around us (Haraway 2016), including from our disciplinary location of psychology.

Truths from Morocco: Knowledge Production and Danish-Moroccan Encounters in the Eighteenth Century

AbstractIn the 1750s the Danish kingdom and the Moroccan Empire came into contact, and concluded a bilateral treaty. As part of the accord, a Danish chartered company was established. The company was short-lived and the “special relationship” between the two powers soon withered. A result of this episode was a handful of texts that sought to describe Morocco to a Danish audience—an adventure tale, a captive narrative, an orientalist chorography, and a biography of the emperor—which sought to produce truths about the Danish encounters with Morocco, but also truths about the place and the peoples of Morocco. The article discusses these texts, where they originated, to whom they circulated, and what they had to tell about Morocco.

:Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500

:<i>Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500</i>

Neighbors and Ghosts

Abstract This essay argues for the centrality of Polish-Jewish relations for Polish history. I look at a handful of texts (including history and literature) that show the continued nature of autobiographical elements in the exploration of the Polish and Jewish past and the violence that defined it. The conversations about a difficult past play a crucial role not only in the process of understanding the impact/importance of the past for the present, but they also loom large over any interracial, interethnic, or interreligious dialogues. Finally, continued reflection on the Holocaust and the violence that accompanied it (experienced, witnessed, and instigated) provides an opportunity not only for national soul-searching, but ultimately also for understanding the various factors that condition us as Poles.

The Question of the Effectiveness of Coptic Pharmacological Prescriptions

AbstractCoptic pharmacological texts offer a multitude of medical prescriptions concerning various afflictions, such as eye or skin irritations, affections of the viscera, or even psychological complaints. The content of these texts is medical, and in most cases bereft of any magical or religious ideas. They usually compile prescriptions according to symptoms and/or afflictions, without any further organising principle. Only a handful of texts are grouped according to the illness or to the medicinal plants used. Almost every prescription follows a pattern, with four formal elements: 1) the medical indication (or purpose), 2) the (basic) ingredients, 3) the procedure and application, and 4) the effects and/or the effectiveness of a remedy, or further information. In this article, I give an overview of the entire corpus of Coptic medical prescriptions, explore the four main elements, and especially the discussions of efficacy. I also examine the material in light of placebo research, to see whether something like a placebo effect may have influenced how the pharmacological texts were formulated.

And Yet It Quakes! (Nietzsche and Voltaire)

One of a handful of texts written by Sarah Kofman in the interim between the publication of her Explosion (1992, 1993), a 700-page analysis of Ecce Homo, and her sudden death in 1994, ‘And Yet It Quakes!’ is an unflinching contribution to her perennial analysis of Nietzsche's legacy. The essay opens with a presentation of the responses of Voltaire and Nietzsche to natural catastrophe: an earthquake in Lisbon in the case of the former, an earthquake in Ischia for the latter. Drawing on a metaphoric architecture of quaking or shakenness to draw together a variety of themes and problematics, the essay elaborates a rich comparative study of these two thinkers on the basis of their hasty passing-on from the ‘“humanitarian” considerations’ which such catastrophes might evoke. After analysing the influence of Voltaire on Nietzsche and the rich synergies between the two, with particular reference to irony and laughter, to aristocratism, and to the function of a polemical hostility to Rousseau within their various projects, Kofman's essay closes with a complex — and somewhat ambivalent — affirmation of the radicality of the Nietzschean project. (This text, first published in Furor shortly before Kofman's death, is collected in the posthumous Imposture de la beauté et autres textes (Galilée, 1995) and in Tributs à Voltaire (Furor, 2017). The ayant-droit is favourable to publication.)

Post-truth, propaganda and the transformation of the spiral of silence

In 2016, post-truth was named word of the year. Since then a handful of texts have sought to further describe and explore the notion, moving beyond the initial definition given by the Oxford Dictionary. This paper rejects the term ‘post-truth’, in favor of propaganda; since post-truth tends to be utilised as an evaluative term of contemporary political public discourse, as articulated by specific politicians, predominantly through social media. Taking the field of information management as its starting point, our approach underlines the diachronic character of persuasion efforts through information management, understood as propaganda in the public sphere. As a notion, propaganda, in contrast to post-truth, encapsulates both the diachronic character of information management in the public sphere and the ground-breaking transformation of the process of personal opinion expression, initially described by the spiral of silence model, through the emergence of new interactive media.

Through Indian Sign Language: The Fort Sill Ledgers of Hugh Lennox Scott and Iseeo, 1889–1897 ed. by William C. Meadows

Through Indian Sign Language: The Fort Sill Ledgers of Hugh Lennox Scott and Iseeo, 1889-1897, ed. William C. Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015, 520 pp., hardbound, $55, ISBN: 978-080614-727-7)HUGH LENOX SCOTT (1853-1934) was a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army. He is well known among students of Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) as the organizer of the very first conference both in and on this sign language in Browning, Montana, in 1930; as the author of a couple of articles on PISL; and for his attempt to make a filmed dictionary of the language in the 1930s. From 1891 to 1897 he was the commander of Troop L, 7th Cavalry, which consisted exclusively of Native American soldiers. Iseeo (1849-1927) was a lifelong member of this troop and a good friend of Scott's. Iseeo did not speak English when Scott arrived at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and Scott did not speak Kiowa, but Scott had learned a northern variety of PISL from Native Americans farther north before he arrived in Oklahoma. Scott and Iseeo communicated throughout their lives exclusively in PISL (and dictated letters when they were separated). Scott had a keen interest in Plains Indians, and he interviewed Iseeo, a knowledgeable keeper of Kiowa traditions, many times, and other members of this army unit, as well as other visitors. The stories were all told to Scott in sign language, and Scott wrote them down in English. This eventually led to three notebooks, totaling almost five hundred handwritten pages.The main body of the book consists of a diplomatic edition of the sign language stories translated into English by Scott (pp. 157-453). The texts have been carefully edited by William C. Meadows, anthropologist and an expert in Kiowa culture and history. Meadows also wrote an excellent introduction (pp. 3-155) about Scott, Iseeo, and all of the other Native consultants in Troop L, as well as those who contributed texts.The trickster stories, origin myths, fables, migration stories, and texts about lake monsters, belief systems, medicine, sexual miracles, military achievements, and battles, as well as manuals such as the one on how to catch a bald eagle with your bare hands, are fascinating. One often notices similarities between these Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddoan myths and those from other Native American groups. I believe the chapters on the stories could have profited from more extensive cross-referencing, as some of the stories recur in different versions. In addition, more comparative comments would have been welcome, along the lines of Scott himself, who made marginal notes on parallels in Blackfoot narrative traditions, for example. But that is my only criticism with regard to this fascinating book.What this book can teach us about sign languages in general and about Plains Indian Sign Language in particular is of more interest to readers of SLS.The lexicon of PISL is fairly well documented, with at least a dozen published dictionaries (see Davis [2010], who counted more than thirteen thousand identified tokens of some thirty-five hundred distinct signs). Surprisingly, however, PISL grammar is poorly documented. Only a handful of texts have been published or are otherwise accessible through film recordings, sequences of photographs, or transcripts of signs, and there is no grammatical sketch of more than a few pages in length. As the language is severely endangered, we can be thankful that Jeffrey Davis has been documenting the language for more than a decade, even if his published work thus far is more sociolinguistic and historical than grammatical.The current book is therefore a welcome addition to the scarce materials on PISL, and this time directly from a Native viewpoint. Information about the language can be found in five types of sources in the book. Meadows provides a very good historical overview of PISL research, with new facts and observations, in his introduction, adding to the existing scholarship on PISL. …

"Queer Aswang Transmedia: Folklore as Camp"

In recent years, the aswang—a supernatural creature of Philippine folklore that is often associated with female monstrosity and patriarchal misogyny—is being flamboyantly queered across a range of media. The aswang is a centuries-old transmedial, transgeneric figure whose monstrosity has been interpellated by gender-essentialist agendas while nonetheless epitomizing disruptive gender instabilities. In the handful of texts that comprise queer aswang transmedia—a 2011 Filipino novel (Ricky Lee’s Si Amapola sa 65 na Kabanata [Amapola in 65 Chapters]), mainstream film (Mga Bata ng Lagim [Children of Terror], dir. Mar S. Torres, 1964), and amateur digital video (Amabilis 2, 2011)—the aswang, an iconic female monster, is being destabilized and re-imagined. Gay men (or more accurately, bakla subjects) are occupying the place formerly reserved for monstrous women. This queering of aswang transmedia is a forceful, funny, yet undeniably risky reapproriation lodged in language (“swardspeak”) and a kind of pinoy [Filipino] camp style. This essay attempts to theorize a distinctly Filipino camp sensibility in relation to queer time. It wrestles with queer aswang transmedia’s implications for both temporality (since anachronism underpins the cultural figures of both bakla and aswang) and visibility (queer scholars argue that the bakla, stigmatized as effeminate and lower class, is increasingly the object of forcible bourgeois erasure in the face of the urban gay scene’s aspirations toward an imagined gay globality).

Queer Aswang Transmedia: Folklore as Camp

In recent years, the aswang—a supernatural creature of Philippine folklore that is often associated with female monstrosity and patriarchal misogyny—is being flamboyantly queered across a range of media. The aswang is a centuries-old transmedial, transgeneric figure whose monstrosity has been interpellated by gender-essentialist agendas while nonetheless epitomizing disruptive gender instabilities. In the handful of texts that comprise queer aswang transmedia—a 2011 Filipino novel (Ricky Lee’s Si Amapola sa 65 na Kabanata [Amapola in 65 Chapters]), mainstream film (Mga Bata ng Lagim [Children of Terror], dir. Mar S. Torres, 1964), and amateur digital video (Amabilis 2, 2011)—the aswang, an iconic female monster, is being destabilized and re-imagined. Gay men (or more accurately, bakla subjects) are occupying the place formerly reserved for monstrous women. This queering of aswang transmedia is a forceful, funny, yet undeniably risky reapproriation lodged in language (“swardspeak”) and a kind of pinoy [Filipino] camp style. This essay attempts to theorize a distinctly Filipino camp sensibility in relation to queer time. It wrestles with queer aswang transmedia’s implications for both temporality (since anachronism underpins the cultural figures of both bakla and aswang) and visibility (queer scholars argue that the bakla, stigmatized as effeminate and lower class, is increasingly the object of forcible bourgeois erasure in the face of the urban gay scene’s aspirations toward an imagined gay globality).

Computers and the Superfold

Could it be that Deleuze's most lasting legacy will lie in his ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, a mere 2,300-word essay from 1990? While he discussed computers and new media infrequently, Deleuze admittedly made contributions to the contemporary discourse on computing, cybernetics and networks, particularly in his late work. From the concepts of the rhizome and the virtual, to his occasional interjections on the digital versus the analogue, there is a case to be made that the late Deleuze has not only influenced today's discourse on new media but also proposes an original set of arguments about society and politics at the turn of the new millennium. Focusing on the ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ and a handful of texts that surround it, we will reconstruct an image of what it means to live in the information age. This will have consequences for how we define the digital and the analogue, what the computer means, and ultimately provide some insight into one of the more elusive terms in all of Deleuze, the superfold.

Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy (review)

Reviewed by: Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy Elizabeth Scharffenberger Gregory W. Dobrov (ed.). Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy. Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. Pp. xv, 579. $279.00. ISBN 978-90-04-10963-6. This volume presents thirteen substantial essays by highly respected specialists in Greek comedy. The essays average a robust thirty-five to forty pages in length, and they are organized into three sections. At the heart of the collection are the four essays covering Aristophanes (Ralph M. Rosen), the origins of ancient Greek comedy and fifth-century comedians other than Aristophanes (Ian C. Storey), “Middle Comedy” (W. Geoffrey Arnott), and “New Comedy” (Stanley Ireland). These contributions are prefaced by the editor’s historical overview of critical approaches to the study of Greek comedy and by four additional introductory essays, which supply contexts for this enterprise by detailing the nuts and bolts of comic performances in Athens and elsewhere (J. Richard Green on “The Material Evidence” and Eric Csapo on “The Production and Performance of Comedy in Antiquity”), and by considering the intersections of comedy with politics (S. Douglas Olson) and myth and ritual (Angus M. Bowie). In the third section, two essays treat the transmission of the plays of Aristophanes (Alan H. Sommerstein) and comic fragments (Heinz-Günther Nesselrath) from antiquity to the present day; the two other contributions address the structure and meters employed in comedy (Bernhard Zimmermann) and the phonology, syntax, and other linguistic phenomena in fifth-century comedy (Andreas Willi). A bibliography and subject index round out the volume, and several illustrations of vase paintings, mosaics, and reliefs—some of which are not yet well-known—complement Green’s review of the material evidence for the performances and reception(s) of comedy. One would expect this group of “A-list” experts, as Dobrov identifies them in his preface (vii), to deliver first-rate scholarship, and these gentlemen [End Page 567] certainly meet that expectation. Each essay is lucid, informative, and engaging, and taken together they provide a well-rounded picture of the aspects of Greek comedy that have intrigued spectators and scholars for centuries—from its elusive origins to the various choices and accidents that determined the survival of the scraps of information and the handful of texts and fragments in our possession today. Although every contribution deserves praise, it seems wise to mention the merits of those that, in my view, exemplify the strengths of the volume as a whole: Olson’s “Comedy, Politics, and Society” (ch. 2), Csapo’s chapter on the conditions under which comedies were performed and viewed in antiquity (ch. 4), and especially ch. 7 on Aristophanes by Rosen, who took what could have been a ho-hum assignment and did something completely creative and truly helpful, a model of what one can do in these kinds of essays. This volume lacks essays devoted specifically to gender (a topic that is not listed in the subject index—“women” receives but two entries), and to the modern theatrical reception of ancient Greek comedy, although the reception of New Comedy by Plautus and Terence is discussed by several contributors including Dobrov, whose introduction quite intriguingly posits theatrical reception as “an implicit form of criticism” (20). Perhaps the judgment was that topics such as gender and modern reception have been or will be amply covered in other recent or forthcoming publications (e.g., Edith Hall and Amanda Wrigley’s Aristophanes in Performance: 421 b.c.e.–a.d. 2007, or the soon-to-be-published Cambridge Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann). Nonetheless, the noninclusions are noticeable. The division of labor among the individual essays seems for the most part appropriate. An exception is Bernhard Zimmermann’s short contribution on both the structure and the meter of Greek comedy. These two broad topics, each of which might easily take up a chapter on its own, cannot be adequately covered in just fifteen pages, and one consequence of the compressed treatment is a lack of sustained engagement with L. P. E. Parker’s magnificent 1997 analysis of the songs of Aristophanes, which explains...

Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English, Pranav Jani, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010

Abstract Decentering Rushdie argues that postcolonial studies has consistently underestimated the investment of the English-language Indian novel in the nation by focusing on a handful of texts that conform to Western assumptions about the bankruptcy of the postcolonial nation-state. Taking Salman Rushdie’s work as the sign of a presumed homology between postcolonialism and a postmodern distrust of totality, Jani demonstrates that his novels are hardly representative of the range of Indian writing in English. Instead, in a series of expert readings of less well-known texts, he demonstrates the commitment to the decolonising project that exists even within the inevitably cosmopolitan worldview of Indians writing in a colonial language. Situating his work within foundational debates in postcolonial studies, this review demonstrates the fresh light he sheds on the vexed relations among historical location, political ideology and literary form.

The German Language: A Linguistic Introduction by Jean Boase-Beier , Ken Lodge (review)

MLR, 100.2, 2005 537 interlocking of formal and functional aspects of discourse is central to the explo? ration of the relationship between text?that is, a work of literature, or as Warner suggests, adopting the term advanced by Nigel Fabb, 'verbal art'?and context. Also explicit in this approach is the assumption that there is a coherence or organizing structure that causes collections of words and sentences to coalesce around a unified discourse that has cultural significance for those who create and comprehend it. Finally, Warner considers as counterproductive the tendency taken perhaps to an indefensible extreme in post-structuralism whereby undue weight is ascribed to the elusiveness of textual meaning. Acknowledging and even celebrating the notion that literarytexts can have a number ofmeanings, such a position does not, however, j ustify the conclusion that such meanings are bafflinglyindeterminate. Indeed, the flexibility, multi-functionality, and contextual sensitivity of verbal communication, especially in the hands of producers of literary texts, are qualities that should be applauded. Warner demonstrates the worthiness of such an approach in a series of close examinations of some exemplary texts from the early modern Spanish writers mentioned above, some seemingly conventional, including Machado's 'El hospicio' and 'A Jose Maria Palacio', while others are more problematical, such as Valle-Inclan's esperpento Los cuernos de don Friolera, or downright experimental, as evinced in his analysis of Garcia Lorca's experimental play Asi quepasen cinco anos. In all of these meticulously developed arguments, Warner makes it clear that his theoretical framework is pre? cisely that, a loose rather than strict model that allows forthe individual initiative of old-fashioned close reading and personal inspiration and idiosyncrasies. In the final analysis, the book is a demonstration of how one might put such a critical perspective to use. Now that I have complimented the author on some genuine achievements, I must confess to a certain scepticism with regard to the study's potential capacity to gain adherents to the cause of a written literature ofutterances. The factthat an entire book is devoted to the elucidation of the benefits of approaching only a handful of texts, ex? emplary readings to be sure, nevertheless makes one wonder if,in the long run, it was worth such a long run. It also needs to be stated that the actual readings are not com? prehensive interpretations of even this small number of texts. The attention to detail and the meticulousness of the argument seem to be almost goals in themselves. While the readings are certainly intelligent, they are not complete in an ultimately satisfying sense. The closest one comes to this is in the treatment of Lorca's Asi que pasen cinco anos, which most critics agree is to be interpreted as a staged dream. Again, the issue ofhow the utterances of the subconscious might differfromthose that are consciously articulated is not raised. There is nothing on the novel. Thus, while I certainly think that this has been a worthwhile effort,I am leftto wonder about the lasting influence that this book will have on the study of early modern Spanish literature. Tulane University, New Orleans C. Christopher Soufas, Jr The German Language: A Linguistic Introduction. By Jean Boase-Beier and Ken Lodge. Oxford: Blackwell. 2003. 254 pp. ?5? (pbk ?14.99). ISBN 0-63123138 -2 (pbk 0-631-23139-0). This book, intended for second- and final-year undergraduates, is more demanding than, say, Sally Johnson's Exploring the German Language (London: Arnold, 1998) or Charles Russ's The German Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction (London: Routledge, 1994). It takes a broadly generativist approach (in marked contrast to the decidedly anti-generativist one in Christopher Beedham's German Linguistics: An Introduction (Munich: iudicium, 1995)) which even non-generativists like myself 538 Reviews can appreciate for the consistent theoretical framework it provides. An introductory chapter (1) is followed by chapters on syntax (2), morphology (3), phonetics (4), phonology (5), and lexis (6), then stylistics (7), historical background (8), and con? temporary variation (9). Chapter 1's introduction to E-language and I-language, principles and parameters, structure dependency, and the modular language faculty might seem daunting, but in fact offersa very readable guide...

Through a gloss darkly: Aldhelm's riddles in the British Library MS Royal 12.C.xxiii (review)

176 Reviews grasped the significance of the tetralogy for the play but gave a 'deeply anachronistic' (p. 92) reading of the ending, and Anthony Sher's acrobatic Richard. Glen Byam Shaw's and William Gaskill's productions at the R.S.C. show the way forward by their balance and truth to the text. The main faults of the book are some rather long sentences, which may be, paradoxically, the result of a straggle to say it all as briefly as possible, and the absence of notes. Kevin Magarey Department of English University of Adelaide Stork, Nancy P., Through a gloss darkly: Aldhelm's riddles in the British Library MS Royal 12.C.xxiii (Studies and texts, 98), Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990; paper; pp. vii, 274; 1 plate; R.R.P. CAN$39.50. In a study of Old English glosses in Latin manuscripts published in 1982, R.I. Page issued a call for a way of publishing gloss material that would go beyond the customary lists of transcribed lemmata and glosses. Such transcripts 'cannot give even the lexicographer all he needs, whereas the student who is interested, not just in Latin-Old English equivalents, but in the nature of glossing, the reasons it took the form it did, and the audience the glosses appealedto,will find many of the existing editions of limited use. There is no substitute for the manuscript, but there may be better ways of publishing the gloss material, of defining it more precisely, and it is time these were explored'. Page's challenge is admirably met in this new edition of Aldhelm's 100 Latin Enigmata and then associated glosses in a single manuscript: London, British Library, Royal 12.C.xxiii, fols. 79v-103v. Of Canterbury provenance and early eleventhcentury date, Royal 12.C.xxiii was written as a glossed manuscript, with interlinear Latin glosses designed to be transmitted along with the text. Generous margins were left for more extensive commentary glosses. The text hand, a finely written Caroline script, is responsible for all the Latin glosses and for 32 of the 77 O E glosses. A single second hand has contributed the remaining vernacular glosses. The O E glosses evidently had a lesser status and were added in an ad hoc fashion, having a much looser association than the Latin scholia with Aldhelm's text. The introduction covers a wide range of topics in a concise and practical form and in a lucid, easy style that makes the material accessible to the nonspecialist reader. After a full description of the manuscript and its contents, Stork discusses the often complex relationships between the extant manuscripts and their sets of glosses. Then follows a brief but systematic explication of all the types of gloss represented in the manuscript: metrical, grammatical, Reviews 177 syntactical, textual, lexical and the commentary glosses that draw so heavily on Isidore's Etymologiae. Her conclusion addresses such broader matters as the relation between text and gloss, the peculiarities of English manuscripts and the audience of theriddles.The appendices are especially useful. T w o indices of the Latin-Latin lexical glosses are provided, listed under both lemma and gloss, and an alphabetical list of the O E glosses in Appendix C is complemented by an analysis of the same material ananged in order of appearance in the manuscript on pp. 52-4. A n index to the commentary glosses is followed by an index of sources, a comprehensive bibliography and a general index. This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive edition of Aldhelm's text with full apparatus and notes. Rather the focus isfirmlyon the gloss material and its relation to the text in a single manuscript. Thus her edition presents an innovative reconstruction of each manuscript page with both interlinear and marginal glosses carefully located and clearly and accurately set out. The measure of her success with the layout can be gauged by comparison with the frontispiece plate, which reproduces folio 83r of the manuscript. Stork's edition allows us to read an important school text in the pedagogic context in which it was studied in later Anglo-Saxon England. Paul Sonell Department of English Otago...

"Grokking" Science Fiction

Walter E. Meyers. Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. 257 pp. Patricia S. Warrick. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980. 282 + xvii pp. Gary K. Wolfe. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979. 250 + xvii pp. There are many good reasons why students of American literature and culture should take note of science fiction. In the present context I need simply point out that not only is genre science fiction essentially an American inven- tion (whatever illustrious antecedents might be adduced) but it is an invention which has made a considerable impact on the world at large. Although there is a "respectable" British and European tradition of "mainstream" "science fiction" which predated or arose in blissful ignorance of the various American pulp magazines which fostered genre science fiction (such as Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories and John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction), that tradition consists of only a handful of texts. Science fiction as we know it today (that is to say, basically American and British science fiction) was shaped, directly or indirectly, by those tawdry American magazines. It is this body of work, which appeared from roughly 1930 onwards, that forms the subject matter of the three books under review. Walter E. Meyers speaks for all three authors when he observes that "The material surveyed here is chiefly American, with a large helping of British fiction, a blend typical of the genre as a whole" (p. 3).