Memory, imagination and desire in contemporary Anglo-American literature and film

This volume offers a series of analyses on the renewed interest of western culture in themes and aesthetic proposals that either look back to the past or recreate future worlds. The turn of the century has witnessed artistic efforts to reconsider past literary and cinematographic forms and adapt them to the new social concerns of contemporary artists and readers/viewers. Similarly, science-fiction and utopian narratives have attempted to reshape the world as we know it and speculate about the mysteries the future might hold for us. This book includes contributions that focus on and problematise the dialogue between past, present and future in literary works and films produced within the English-speaking context in the last two decades of the 20th century. It is divided in five sections – maps of the postmodern, the postcolonial experience, stories revisited, popular narrative genres and views of the future – which attempt to include all the motifs associated with that dialogue, from the interaction of memory and history to the reformulation of old stories and forms, or the representation of dystopian and utopian futures.