Pierre Bourdieu Andrew John Milner (born 9 September 1950) is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University.
In 2013 he was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin.
[3] Milner's academic interests include literary and cultural theory, the sociology of literature, utopia, dystopia and science fiction.
His work has been published in English in Australia, India, the US and the UK and has been translated into French, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Persian and Korean.
Both develop a substantive account of the capitalist literary mode of production, focussing on technologies of mechanical reproduction and social relations of commodification.
Milner argued that Williams had stood in an essentially analogous relation to the British 'culturalist' tradition as Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to French structuralism and Jürgen Habermas to German critical theory.
In 2010 Milner published, under the title Tenses of Imagination, an edited collection of Williams's writings on utopia, dystopia and science fiction.
Milner's book relocates science fiction in relation not only to these other genres and media, but also to the historical and geographic contexts of its emergence and development.
Inspired by Williams, Bourdieu and Franco Moretti's application of world systems theory to literary studies, it drew on the disciplinary competences of comparative literature, cultural studies, critical theory and sociology to produce a powerfully distinctive mode of analysis, engagement and argument.
In 2023 Milner co-authored Science Fiction and Narrative Form with David Roberts and Peter Murphy, a book inspired by and in a sense a sequel to Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel.