Milner, Andrew
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Critic, Editor.
(1950- ) British-born academic, in Australia for many years, sociologist of literature and cultural theorist; educated as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he studied sociology; his PhD thesis was published as John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (1981). He taught in Sociology at the London School of Economics and at Goldsmiths College, London, in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, and in Comparative Literature at Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, where he was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in 2000, becoming Professor of English and Comparative Literature in 2012, Professor Emeritus in 2013. Milner has a long-standing interest in sf, which he traces back to his boyhood enthusiasm for Dan Dare. He has published academic essays on sf in a number of scholarly journals, notably Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and Southern Review. He convened three international conferences around the theme of Utopia, Dystopia and sf, held at Monash University in 2005, 2007 and 2010, and co-edited the resulting conference volumes. Milner also co-convened the academic stream at the 68th World Science Fiction Convention (see Worldcon) and edited a collection of Raymond Williams's writings on utopia and sf. The second edition of his Literature, Culture and Society (2005) deals extensively with sf and includes discussions of Mary Shelley, Karel Čapek, Fritz Lang and Ridley Scott. But Locating Science Fiction (2012) is arguably a more important contribution to academic sf studies. It seeks to move sf theory and criticism away from the prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement associated with Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin, towards a more sociologically-informed understanding of the genre as a messy amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts. [JRB]
Andrew John Milner
born Leeds, West Yorkshire: 9 September 1950
works
- John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (London: Macmillan, 1981) [nonfiction: hb/]
- The Road to St Kilda Pier: George Orwell and the Politics of the Australian Left (Sydney, New South Wales: Stained Wattle Press, 1984) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction (Sydney, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1991); second edition (London: University College London Press, 1994) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Cultural Materialism (Melbourne, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1993) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Literature, Culture and Society (London: University College London Press, 1996); second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Class (London: Sage Publications, 1999) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) with Jeff Browitt [nonfiction: third edition: hb/]
- Re-Imagining Cultural Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2002) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Locating Science Fiction (Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2012) [nonfiction: hb/Frank R Paul]
- Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018) [nonfiction: coll: hb/]
works as editor
- Postmodern Conditions (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Berg, 1990) with Chris Worth and Philip Thomson [nonfiction: hb/]
- Discourse and Difference: Post-Structuralism, Feminism and the Moment of History (Melbourne, Victoria: Monash University, 1990) with Chris Worth [nonfiction: pb/]
- Postwar British Critical Thought (London: Sage Publications, 2005) [nonfiction: published in four volumes: hb/]
- Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia (Melbourne, Victoria: Arena Publications, 2006) with Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage [nonfiction: pb/]
- Demanding the Impossible: Utopia and Dystopia (Melbourne, Victoria: Arena Publications, 2008) with Matthew Ryan and Simon Sellars [nonfiction: pb/]
- Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia (Oxford, Oxfordshire, and Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2010) [nonfiction: pb/photographic]
- Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe (Melbourne, Victoria: Arena Publications, 2011) with Simon Sellars and Verity Burgmann [nonfiction: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry