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Roemer, Kenneth M

(1945-    ) US academic and author whose works of sf interest have focused on Utopias, beginning with The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900 (1976), which remains perhaps the most sophisticated reading of utopian literature in America in the decade after the publication of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888). the essays in America as Utopia (coll 1980) examine widely divergent authors, a gamut running from B F Skinner to Kurt Vonnegut. Utopian Audiences: How Readers Locate Utopia (2003) uses reader response theory to analyze the tactics a reader might use to grasp for practical use the abstracted armamentarium of the typical written utopia.

Roemer's extensive work on Native American literatures, including the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005) with Joy Porter, is not listed below. [JC]

Kenneth Morrison Roemer

born East Rockaway, New York: 6 June 1945

works (selected)

• The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900 (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1976) [nonfiction: hb/Harold M Stevens, from unacknowledged original]
• America as Utopia (New York: Burt Franklin, 1980) [nonfiction: coll: in the publisher's American Cultural Heritage series: hb/]
• Build Your Own Utopia: An Interdisciplinary Course in Utopian Speculation (Washington, District of Columbia: University Press of America, 1981) [nonfiction: chap: pb/]
• Utopian Audiences: How Readers Locate Utopia (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) [nonfiction: in the publisher's Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book series: pb/]

works as editor

• Utopian Studies 1 (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1987) with Gorman Beauchamp and N D Smith [anth: hb/]

links

• Kenneth M Roemer at University of Texas Arlington
• Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Picture Gallery

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 20:32 pm on 7 September 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/roemer_kenneth_m>