New Releases by Paul Kent

A "Choice" Outstanding Academic Book, "Science Fiction Before 1900" is an accessible and fascinating overview of the evolution and early history of science fiction. Investigating works that marked significant turning points in the early evolution of the genre, including "Frankenstein," "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur''s Court" and "The Time Machine," Paul Alkon places these works in context. He also discusses science fiction and its complex relationship to other genres. This book will be a great addition to the emerging field of science fiction study. A chronology of significant events, works and figures from the genre''s history, notes and references and an extensive bibliographic essay with recommended reading round out the volume.

A very personal approach to the grief, fear, discrimination, and outrage that frequently accompany a death from AIDS. With extensive experience counseling both gay and non-gay clients in all stages of HIV involvement, Los Angeles-based psychotherapist Paul Kent Froman offers practical, individual strategies and solutions to the often overwhelming emotional problems encountered by those dealing with the loss of a loved one from AIDS.

A new look at the passive is an investigation of the possibility of establishing a cross-linguistically valid characterization of the passive in terms of its morphological and syntactic properties. When it comes to morphology it is demonstrated that the traditional conception of the morpheme with its emphasis on the relationship between form and meaning must be replaced by a semiotic framework which distinguishes structural and functional properties of morphological categories. The passive is then shown to be a functional property of various, yet distinct morphological categories and not a structural property of a single category; thus the passive cannot be defined as a cross-linguistically valid morphological category. When it comes to syntax it is demonstrated that the passive cannot be defined as a syntactic structure, a syntactic process, nor a means of changing grammatical functions/relations. It is furthermore demonstrated that current typological attempts at defining the passive in terms of a prototype fail to give us a valid characterization of the passive. Finally, it is suggested that the passive can be defined as a complex cognitive structure composed of a number of distinct features, each of which corresponds to the structural meaning/function of those individual morphological categories that are employed in the expression of passive constructions.

For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin''s romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age. Paul Alkon''s Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, the forgotten writings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are the precursors of such well-known masterpieces of the form as H.G. Wells''s The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley''s Brave New World, and George Orwell''s 1984. The first secular story to break the imaginative barrier against tales of the future, Epigone marked the emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin''s courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, The Year 2440, The Last Man, and The World As It Will Be. Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin''s great metafictional Le roman de l''avenir, "the novel of the future." Both a narrative of the future and a poetics of the new genre, this book identified in the previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which the possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In the introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of the futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define the aesthetics of a major transformation in the relation between literature and time still stands as the basis for the poetics of futuristic fiction. Tracing the early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the key works of the earliest writers of the genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about the formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of the future could achieve their full power in the works of later novelists.

This monograph, discussing various aspects involved with a typology of word order, strives to take a next step towards a better understanding of the profound unity underlying languages. The volume is divided into five sections: 1) Word order typology; 2) A critical analysis of word order typology; 3) Word order within comparative constructions; 4) Word order in the comparative construction in the Rigveda; 5) Diachronic aspects of word order withing comparative constructions.

This book provides a new reading of Johnson that emphasizes his moral discourse. The ideas in Johnson’s essays are contrasted, as moral writings, with the moral ideas Johnson discussed in his sermons. This is one of the first books on Johnson to explore the essayist’s focus on moral thinking as central to his writing.