Download or read book Contours of the Fantastic written by Michele Langford and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1990-05-23 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the world of the imaginary, the dream, the uncanny, the paranormal, and all forms of speculative fiction, Contours of the Fantastic is a collection of twenty-two essays that were originally presented at the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts at Houston in 1987. The volume gives valuable perspectives on the territory covered by the fantastic, showing the diversity of the field and the variety of approaches used to survey and comprehend it. Each essay brings its own method of investigation--phenomenological, theoretical, historical, sociological, psychological, textual--in an effort to situate the border between reality and fantasy and the passage from one to the other. Authors and works discussed in the volume include Balzac, Dickens, Poe, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley, Albee's The Zoo Story, Pynchon, Coleridge's Christabel, Le Fanu's Carmilla, and Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant trilogies. Following the editor's introductory essay, the work is divided into 7 sections: Fantasy and Discontinuity, Theory of National Fantasy--Tradition and Invention, Fantastic Vision in Children's Literature, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, Fusion, Transfusion, and Transgression in the Fantastic, The Fantastic and Science, and The Fantastic World--Space and Time. Individual essays within these major divisions zero in on specific works of fantasy; offer a psychology of fantasy writers; analyze language; assess fantasy from a national perspective; and investigate Christian horror in fiction. The final two sections delineate the border between fantasy and reality--in science and in relation to space and time. Among the outstanding contributors are Brian Aldiss, novelist, poet, and critic, author of more than two dozen books-- many of which are considered science fiction classics; Vivian Sobchack, science fiction film critic and writer on semiotics and phenomenology; and Nancy Willard, author of prize-winning novels, collected stories, poetry, and children's books. Generalists in literature and the arts, sociology, the natural sciences, engineering, and aeronautics as well as students and scholars, aestheticians, and critics of the fantasy/science fiction genres in literature, film, and art will find this collection both a useful and fascinating volume.
Download or read book Contours of Descent written by Robert Pollin and published by Verso. This book was released on 2005-10-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of modernity and modernism are among the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this new, muscular intervention, Pollin explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner.
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 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.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature written by Allen Stroud and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-12 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.
Download or read book Breakable written by Tammara Webber and published by Tammara Webber. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As a child, Landon Lucas Maxfield believed his life was perfect. His future was filled with promise—until tragedy tore his family apart and made him doubt everything he'd ever believed. All he wanted was to leave his past behind—no reminders, no complications. But when he met Jacqueline Wallace, his desire to be everything she needed came so easy… As easy as it could be for a man who’d learned that the soul is breakable, and everything he had hoped for could be ripped away in a heartbeat. Companion novel to Easy (Contours of the Heart Book 1)
Download or read book Aardman Animations written by Annabelle Honess Roe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bristol-based animation company Aardman is best known for its most famous creations Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. But despite the quintessentially British aesthetic and tone of its movies, this very British studio continues to enjoy international box office success with movies such as Shaun the Sheep Movie, Flushed Away and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Aardman has always been closely linked with one of its key animators, Nick Park, and its stop motion, Plasticine-modelled family films, but it has more recently begun to experiment with modern digital filmmaking effects that either emulate 'Claymation' methods or form a hybrid animation style. This unique volume brings together leading film and animation scholars with children's media/animation professionals to explore the production practices behind Aardman's creativity, its history from its early shorts to contemporary hits, how its films fit within traditions of British animation, social realism and fantasy cinema, the key personalities who have formed its ethos, its representations of 'British-ness' on screen and the implications of traditional animation methods in a digital era.
Download or read book Sweet written by Tammara Webber and published by Tammara Webber. This book was released on 2015-04-27 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SWEET is the third book in the Contours of the Heart series
Download or read book Cavell on Film written by William Rothman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2005-04-21 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensive collection offers a substantially complete retrospective of Stanley Cavell's previously uncollected writings on film. Cavell is the only major philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition who has made film a central concern of his work, and his work offers inspiration and new directions to the field of film studies. The essays and other writings in this volume, presented in the order of their composition, range from major theoretical statements and extended critical studies of individual films or filmmakers to occasional pieces, all of which illuminate Cavell's practice of philosophy as it has developed in the more than three decades since the publication of The World Viewed. All periods of Cavell's career are represented, from the 1970s to the present, and the book includes many previously unpublished essays written since the early 1990s. In his introduction, William Rothman provides a useful and eloquent overview of Cavell's work on film and his aims as a philosopher more generally.
Download or read book Time Consciousness and Writing written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time, Consciousness and Writing brings together a collection of critical reflections on Peter Malekin’s “model of the mind”, which he saw as a crucial yet often neglected aspect of critical theory in relation to theatre, literature and the arts. The volume begins with a selection of Peter Malekin’s own writings that lay out his critique of western culture, its overstated claims to universal competence and validity, and lays out an alternative view of consciousness that draws partly on Asian traditions and partly on underground traditions from the west. The essays that follow, commissioned for this volume, critically examine Malekin’s ideas, drawing out their implications in a variety of contexts including theatre, liturgical performance, poetry and literature. The book ends with an assessment of future prospects opened by this work.
Download or read book State of the Fantastic written by Nicholas Ruddick and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1992-07-22 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of twenty essays originally presented at the Eleventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts contains five parts: on fantasists and their work, contemporary fantastic theory and practice, studies in the British and European fantastic, studies in American fantasy and science fiction, and sex and techno-horror in fantastic literature and film. What all the essays here have in common is that their authors are all aware of the tremendous latent power, for good and ill, of the fantastic text. We are given timely reminders of the dangers, as well as the appeal, of elves and how narrators in fantastic fictions take advantage of our desire to be part of a narrative community. We learn how some contemporary fantasists assimilate literary and scientific theory, while others seem in their fiction to require a new sociology to account for it.
Download or read book Out of the Night and Into the Dream written by Gregory Kent Stephenson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1991-10-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Empire of the Sun and other acclaimed novels and stories, British science fiction writer J. G. Ballard is here given a penetrating analysis, his work being explored in terms of its internal coherence, its continuity and development, and its mythic and metaphysical aspects. Ballard's fiction is widely considered to be a critique of our secular, rational, technological culture, but this study departs from earlier ones that label him a fatalistic or nihilistic writer obsessed with entropy, devolution, and dissolution in showing him, instead, to be most deeply concerned with the redemption and regeneration of the human psyche. With Ballard's focus so much on visionary perception and mystical transcendence, Gregory Stephenson argues for his placement in the Romantic visionary tradition. A comprehensive examination of Ballard's work, this study traces his output and accomplishments over four decades, exploring their thematic development. Ballard is considered in relation to a number of British and American writers of the post-World War II era--within and beyond the often too-rigidly applied categorization of science fiction, as well as to poets and novelists of the past.
Download or read book Between Literature and Science written by Peter Swirski and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2000-09-11 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through close analysis of Eureka and The Purloined Letter, Swirski evaluates Poe's epistemological theses in the light of contemporary philosophy of science and presents literary interpretation as a cooperative game played by the author and reader, thereby illuminating how we read fiction. The analysis of Poe's little-studied Eureka provides the basis for his discussion of Lem's critique of scientific reductionism and futurological forecasts. Drawing on his own interviews with Lem as well as analysis of his works, Swirski considers the author's scenarios involving computers capable of creative acts and discusses their socio-cultural implications. His analysis leads to bold arguments about the nature of literature and its relation to a broad range of other disciplines.
Download or read book Ethical Encounters written by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays on dimensions of theatre ethics at the heart of contributions to this volume demonstrate how individual academics and theatre artists have thought about the ethical implications of theatre, and present the concepts and paradigms that have guided and influenced their thinking. They raise relevant issues and debate these in clearly defined, but not uniform ways—ways that have helped them to come to terms with the issues they raise. The reader may agree or disagree with individual authors or individual arguments. If such agreement or disagreement supports them to form and develop their own opinions and resultant actions, this book has served its purpose. This volume arises from the 2007 and 2008 TaPRA conferences and all of its essays, at one level or another, reflect upon what is possible within the environment of theatre. Possibility is one form of ethical engagement with the boundaries of philosophy and performance and reminds us of the inherently political aspect of any ethical question. So whilst the most obviously ethically oriented papers appear towards the end of the volume, in a separate section, let us bear in mind that throughout certain limits of representation will always be in question for any understanding of theatre.
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 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 Fantasy written by Richard Mathews and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a broad definition of fantasy to include myth, folklore, legend and fairy tale, this survey of the genre will entice as well as inform any student interested in the mysterious, mystical or magical. Beloved authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Morris and Robert E. Howard are examined closely.
