Alternative Worlds: Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900

by Ricarda Vidal (Editor), Ingo Cornils (Editor)

In an attempt to counteract the doom and gloom of the economic crisis and the politicians' overused dictum that 'there is no alternative', this interdisciplinary collection presents a number of alternative worlds that were conceived over the course of the last century. While change at the macro level was the focus of most of the ideological struggles of the twentieth century, the real impetus for change came from the blue-sky thinking of scientists, engineers, architects, sociologists, planners and writers, all of whom imagined alternatives to the status quo.
Following a roughly chronological order from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present, this book explores the dreams, plans and hopes as well as the nightmares and fears that are an integral part of alternative thinking in the Western hemisphere. The alternative worlds at the centre of the individual essays can each be seen as crucial to the history of the past one hundred years. While these alternative worlds reflect their particular cultural context, they also inform historical developments in a wider sense and continue to resonate in the present.

333 pages, Paperback

First published December 16, 2014

About the author

Ricarda holds a PhD in Cultural Studies. She is the author of Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms (Peter Lang, 2013) and co-editor of The Power of Death (Berghahn, 2014) and Alternative Worlds (Peter Lang, 2014). She has published on speed, the car and driving as cultural phenomena, Modernism (in particular Futurism), urban space and art in relation to gentrification, as well as society’s fascination with death and murder, and most recently, alternative worlds and utopias. Currently she is pursuing a practice-based research project into the wondrous world of translation within the fine arts and poetry. This links her academic career with her freelance activities as translator and curator. Besides public workshops and exhibitions, the project includes the publication of journal articles and an edited collection on intersemiotic translations.