Download or read book Functions of the Fantastic written by Joseph L. Sanders and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1995-11-14 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of 23 essays represents the best papers from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Scholars representing diverse perspectives on the fantastic address a variety of works—including those by Jane Austen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen Donaldson, Ursula Le Guin, Jean Baudrillard, Anatole France, William Blake, and Angela Carter. Subjects addressed range from children's tales and classic literature to paper sculptures and popular television series. Containing provocative applications of scholarly observation to practical life, this volume will be of interest to scholars of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and popular culture, and to others who want to know which topics are currently in vogue in the field.
Download or read book The Weird written by Jeff VanderMeer and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 2482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon. The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Exploring the Fantastic written by Ina Batzke and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2018-03-31 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fantastic represents a wide and heterogeneous field in literary, cultural, and media studies. Encompassing some of the field's foremost voices such as Fred Botting and Larissa Lai, as well as exciting new perspectives by junior scholars, this volume offers a mosaic of the fantastic now. The contributions pinpoint and discuss current developments in theory and practice by offering enlightening snapshots of the contemporary Anglophone landscape of research in the fantastic. The authors' arguments and analyses thus give new impetus to the field's theoretical and methodological approaches, its textual materials, its main interests, and its crucial findings.
Download or read book The Global Vampire written by Cait Coker and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-01-24 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.
Download or read book The Utopian Fantastic written by Martha A. Bartter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-04-30 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia forms a major aspect of human desire, one that is as important as religion. Understanding utopia and the ways in which it can collapse into dystopia is crucial in many disciplines. Fantastic literature (including science fiction and fantasy) is the only form of literature that takes utopia/dystopia seriously. Therefore, analysis of these works provides a basis for serious experimentation in social science. In this volume, critics analyze contemporary literary thought experiments such as 1984 and We. They show how utopian experiments can easily slide into dystopia. Exploring these fictional sociocultural, political experiments gives us new ways to think about our lives and culture. While literature, history, and political science professors may find this book useful, it can also serve as a call to arms to anyone dedicated to maintaining freedom and humane living in the world today.
Download or read book Report from Planet Midnight written by Nalo Hopkinson and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nalo Hopkinson has been busily (and wonderfully) “subverting the genre” since her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won a Locus Award for SF and Fantasy in 1999. Since then she has acquired a prestigious World Fantasy Award, a legion of adventurous and aware fans, a reputation for intellect seasoned with humor, and a place of honor in the short list of SF writers who are tearing down the walls of category and transporting readers to previously unimagined planets and realms. Never one to hold her tongue, Hopkinson takes on sexism and racism in publishing in “Report from Planet Midnight,” a historic and controversial presentation to her colleagues and fans. Plus... “Message in a Bottle,” a radical new twist on the time travel tale that demolishes the sentimental myth of childhood innocence; and “Shift,” a tempestuous erotic adventure in which Caliban gets the girl. Or does he? And Featuring: Our Outspoken Interview, an intimate one-on-one that delivers a wealth of insight, outrage, irreverence, and top-secret Caribbean spells.
Download or read book The Island of Eternal Love written by Daína Chaviano and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hearing the life story of a mysterious old woman in a Little Havana bar, Cuban-American Cecilia learns about three generations of a family of diverse origins that includes such members as a reverent Chinese widow, an African slave, and a Spanish matriarch
Download or read book The Curse of the Werewolf written by Bourgault du Coudray Chantal and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2006-08-25 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Half-man-half-myth, the werewolf has over the years infiltrated popular culture in many strange and varied shapes, from Gothic horror to the 'body horror' films of the 1980s and today's graphic novels. Yet despite enormous critical interest in myths and in monsters, from vampires to cyborgs, the figure of the werewolf has been strangely overlooked. Embodying our primal fears - of anguished masculinity, of 'the beast within' - the werewolf, argues Bourgault du Coudray, has revealed in its various lupine guises radically shifting attitudes to the human psyche. Tracing the werewolf's 'use' by anthropologists and criminologists and shifting interpretations of the figure - from the 'scientific' to the mythological and psychological - Bourgault du Coudray also sees the werewolf in Freud's 'wolf-man' case and the sinister use of wolf imagery in Nazism. "The Curse of the Werewolf" looks finally at the werewolf's revival in contemporary fantasy, finding in this supposedly conservative genre a fascinating new model of the human's relationship to nature. It is a required reading for students of fantasy, myth and monsters. No self-respecting werewolf should be without it.
Download or read book Evaporating Genres written by Gary K. Wolfe and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of provocative essays on how the fantastic genres evolve and grow In this wide-ranging series of essays, an award-winning science fiction critic explores how the related genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror evolve, merge, and finally "evaporate" into new and more dynamic forms. Beginning with a discussion of how literary readers "unlearned" how to read the fantastic during the heyday of realistic fiction, Gary K. Wolfe goes on to show how the fantastic reasserted itself in popular genre literature, and how these genres themselves grew increasingly unstable in terms of both narrative form and the worlds they portray. More detailed discussions of how specific contemporary writers have promoted this evolution are followed by a final essay examining how the competing discourses have led toward an emerging synthesis of critical approaches and vocabularies. The essays cover a vast range of authors and texts, and include substantial discussions of very current fiction published within the last few years.
Download or read book Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth Century British Fiction written by Jason Marc Harris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.
Download or read book Critical Discourses of the Fantastic 1712 1831 written by David Sandner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging literary histories that locate the emergence of fantastic literature in the Romantic period, David Sandner shows that tales of wonder and imagination were extremely popular throughout the eighteenth century. Sandner engages contemporary critical definitions and defenses of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fantastic literature, demonstrating that a century of debate and experimentation preceded the Romantic's interest in the creative imagination. In 'The Fairy Way of Writing,' Joseph Addison first defines the literary use of the supernatural in a 'modern' and 'rational' age. Other writers like Richard Hurd, James Beattie, Samuel Johnson, James Percy, and Walter Scott influence the shape of the fantastic by defining and describing the modern fantastic in relation to a fabulous and primitive past. As the genre of the 'purely imaginary,' Sandner argues, the fantastic functions as a discourse of the sublime imagination, albeit a contested discourse that threatens to disrupt any attempt to ground the sublime in the realistic or sympathetic imagination. His readings of works by authors such as Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, and James Hogg not only redefine the antecedents of the fantastic but also offer a convincing account of how and why the fantastic came to be marginalized in the wake of the Enlightenment.
Download or read book A Stanislaw Lem Reader written by Stanisław Lem and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1997-11-12 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Lem Reader, Peter Swirski has assembled an in-depth and insightful collection of writings by and about, and interviews with, one of the most fascinating writers of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Strange Shadows written by Steve Behrends and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1989-04-04 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strange Shadows opens a window into the dark, visionary worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, whose verbal black magic was a significant force in the American science fiction and fantasy movement of the 1930s. This annotated collection of his previously unpublished works provides a unique opportunity to savor the full range of Smith's literary contribution. Featuring fantasies and ironic short stories, prose-poems, plays, unfinished stories, and more than 100 story synopses, it offers valuable documentation and commentary on the work of one of the most distinctive and consistently interesting modern masters of the fantasy genre. An introduction by Robert Bloch (the author of Psycho) examines Smith's work and places it in historical perspective. Among the highlights of the collection are the satirical title story; variant drafts of two of Smith's most famous stories--The Coming of the White Worm and The Beast of Averoigne--and a play entitled The Dead Will Cuckold You, which has been hailed as a masterpiece. The editor's annotations include extensive quotations from Smith's correspondence to H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and other important fantasy authors, together with textual commentary and discussion of connections between published and unpublished works. Information on lost writings and lists of published story titles, characters, and place names are supplied. An important resource for fantasy readers and scholars, this book will appeal to those with an interest in dark fantasy, science fiction, and the history of American science fiction.
Download or read book Here Be Dragons written by Stefan Ekman and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First in-depth study of the use of landscape in fantasy literature Winner of the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies (2016) Fantasy worlds are never mere backdrops. They are an integral part of the work, and refuse to remain separate from other elements. These worlds combine landscape with narrative logic by incorporating alternative rules about cause and effect or physical transformation. They become actors in the drama—interacting with the characters, offering assistance or hindrance, and making ethical demands. In Here Be Dragons, Stefan Ekman provides a wide-ranging survey of the ubiquitous fantasy map as the point of departure for an in-depth discussion of what such maps can tell us about what is important in the fictional worlds and the stories that take place there. With particular focus on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Ekman shows how fantasy settings deserve serious attention from both readers and critics. Includes insightful readings of works by Steven Brust, Garth Nix, Robert Holdstock, Terry Pratchett, Charles de Lint, China Miéville, Patricia McKillip, Tim Powers, Lisa Goldstein, Steven R. Donaldson, Robert Jordan, and Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess.
Download or read book Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy 2 volumes written by Robin Anne Reid and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 789 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Works of science fiction and fantasy increasingly explore gender issues, feature women as central characters, and are written by women writers. This book examines women's contributions to science fiction and fantasy across a range of media and genres, such as fiction, nonfiction, film, television, art, comics, graphic novels, and music. The first volume offers survey essays on major topics, such as sexual identities, fandom, women's writing groups, and feminist spirituality; the second provides alphabetically arranged entries on more specific subjects, such as Hindu mythology, Toni Morrison, magical realism, and Margaret Atwood. Entries are written by expert contributors and cite works for further reading, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students and general readers love science fiction and fantasy. And science fiction and fantasy works increasingly explore gender issues, feature women as central characters, and are written by women writers. Older works demonstrate attitudes toward women in times past, while more recent works grapple with contemporary social issues. This book helps students use science fiction and fantasy to understand the contributions of women writers, the representation of women in the media, and the experiences of women in society.
Download or read book Monsters in the Machine written by Steffen Hantke and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American film industry produced a distinct cycle of films situated on the boundary between horror and science fiction. Using the familiar imagery of science fiction--from alien invasions to biological mutation and space travel--the vast majority of these films subscribed to the effects and aesthetics of horror film, anticipating the dystopian turn of many science fiction films to come. Departing from projections of American technological awe and optimism, these films often evinced paranoia, unease, fear, shock, and disgust. Not only did these movies address technophobia and its psychological, social, and cultural corollaries; they also returned persistently to the military as a source of character, setting, and conflict. Commensurate with a state of perpetual mobilization, the US military comes across as an inescapable presence in American life. Regardless of their genre, Steffen Hantke argues that these films have long been understood as allegories of the Cold War. They register anxieties about two major issues of the time: atomic technologies, especially the testing and use of nuclear weapons, as well as communist aggression and/or subversion. Setting out to question, expand, and correct this critical argument, Hantke follows shifts and adjustments prompted by recent scholarly work into the technological, political, and social history of America in the 1950s. Based on this revised historical understanding, science fiction films appear in a new light as they reflect on the troubled memories of World War II, the emergence of the military-industrial complex, the postwar rewriting of the American landscape, and the relative insignificance of catastrophic nuclear war compared to America's involvement in postcolonial conflicts around the globe.
Download or read book The A to Z of Fantasy Literature written by Brian Stableford and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-08-13 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once upon a time all literature was fantasy, set in a mythical past when magic existed, animals talked, and the gods took an active hand in earthly affairs. As the mythical past was displaced in Western estimation by the historical past and novelists became increasingly preoccupied with the present, fantasy was temporarily marginalized until the late 20th century, when it enjoyed a spectacular resurgence in every stratum of the literary marketplace. Stableford provides an invaluable guide to this sequence of events and to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks the evolution of fantasy from the origins of literature to the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulses creating and shaping fantasy literature, the problems of its definition and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes cross-referenced entries on more than 700 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum, while more than 200 other entries describe the fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that ranges from general textbooks and specialized accounts of the history and scholarship of fantasy literature, through bibliographies and accounts of the fantasy literature of different nations, to individual author studies and useful websites.
