LITERARY STUDIES
Wide-range studies that shed light on moments, periods, or centuries in the development of literature, focusing on an entire national or transnational corpus. We also encourage critical studies of genres and subgenres, especially inasmuch as they identify new trends or reveal less-known characteristics of traditional forms.
Histopias
Dracula: A Study of Editorial Practices
Dracula Invades England
A (late) postmodernist phenomenon, histopias are fictional retellings of the history of the world. They often use utopian/dystopian scenarios, which are necessary as “world-historical effect”: the end and/or rebirth of the world offer the possibility of narrating the fate of all mankind. Whether novelists or playwrights, histopian authors use a structural pattern that mirrors the way in which the world tells itself: both continuous and discontinuous, in turn linear, cyclical, or radial.
The foremost examples of histopias analysed here are Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, although the discussion of this fictional subgenre includes authors such as Bernard Shaw, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Calasso, William T. Vollmann.
History, in the view of many histopian authors, is not unlike Borges’s “Library of Babel,” that is, “limitless and periodic,” consisting of a single volume with an infinite number of pages, each of which is divided “into other analogous leaves. The inconceivable central leaf would have no reverse.” Both A History of the World, organized around its central section, and Cloud Atlas, all whose sections are divided into analogous ones, but whose central section has no reverse, feign infinity and eternal recurrence in an effort to contain all of History.
Our books are made for the college classroom. They have beautiful covers and layout, to entice students to read. The margins are slightly bigger, so students can take discreet notes. The paper, the fonts, the spacing between the lines create a flowing rhythm and encourage reading.
- Strong editorial matter: introductions and annotations that are reflective of current scholarship as well as editorial practices;
- Useful apparatus in our In the classroom series that guide instructors and students through the most important aspects of the period, author’s life, publications;
- Monographs and collections of essays that engage with issues upfront and that offer ways to understand the world, be it the past or the present.
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UP is an indepedent publisher, peer-reviewed, and employee-owned. established in 2014 in Montreal, Canada.
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