I analyze the current return of academic rural doubt in the US in terms of an old intellectual quandary: what is the rural? I argue that scholars have two dominant epistemologies of the rural, what I term first rural and second rural, and correspondingly different political visions. By first rural I mean the material moment of the rural, to which we typically grant priority. By second rural I m...

In this article I examine one of the thorniest aspects of the relationship between feminism and postmodernism, in order to see what a discursive analytic approach can contribute to this important debate. The problem I refer to concerns the threat that the postmodern turn—despite its benefits—is said to pose for a politically committed feminism. I begin with a brief recapping of the postmodernis...

‘The political world of make-believe mingles with the real world in strange ways, for the make-believe world may often mold the real one. In order to be viable, in order to serve its purpose, whatever that purpose may be, a fiction must bear some resemblance to fact. If it strays too far from fact, the willing suspension of disbelief collapses. And conversely it may collapse if it strays too fa...

Individuals who read more tend to have stronger verbal skills than those who read less. Interestingly, what you readmaymake a difference. Past studies have found that reading narrative fiction, but not expository nonfiction, predicts verbal ability. Why this difference exists is not known. Here we investigate one possibility: whether fiction texts contain more of the words typically evaluated b...

Fiction retrieval has become one of the interesting special issues within information science during the past few years. This is a consequence of several facts. The most important of them is the need for fiction retrieval and secondly, the possibilities for creating retrieval systems for fiction have increased, due to the development of computerised environments for information retrieval. The m...

Medical romance fiction is a subgenre of popular romance fiction that features medical professionals in their work environment. This essay explores the way professionalism is portrayed in popular medical romance fiction written during the early twenty-first century, a period of significant disruption in both the public image and self-understanding of organized medicine. I analyze a selection of...

In “Truth in Fiction,” David Lewis raises four objections to a Meinongian semantics of fiction. Lewis does not deny that a Meinongian logic of fiction could be made to work, but identifies disadvantages in Meinongian semantics as a reason for recommending his own possible worlds alternative. A Meinongian semantics proposes to explain meaning without ontological prejudice. It analyzes the meanin...

Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, environment, theory, method.

Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, environment, theory, method.

Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, environment, theory, method.