<!CDATATranscending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Utilizing nearly two hundred ...examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn uses this system to explore how fiction writers construct their fantastic worlds. Mendlesohn posits four categories of fantasy--portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal--that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to extensive coverage of some of the best books in the contemporary field. Offering a wide-ranging discussion and penetrating comparative analysis, Rhetorics of Fantasy will excite fans and provide a wealth of material for scholarly and classroom discussion.
Includes discussion of works by over 100 authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Mieville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams>
In this book, Blackford historicizes the appeal of the Persephone myth in the nineteenth century and traces figurations of Persephone, Demeter, and Hades throughout girls' literature of the ...nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illuminates developmental patterns and anxieties in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Nutcracker and Mouse King, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. The story of the young goddess's separation from her mother and abduction into the underworld is, at root, an expression of ambivalence about female development, expressed in the various Neverlands through which female protagonists cycle and negotiate a partial return to earth. The myth conveys the role of female development in the perpetuation and renewal of humankind, coordinating natural and cultural orders through a hieros gamos (fertility coupling) rite. Meanwhile, popular novels such as Twilight and Coraline are paradoxically fresh because they recycle goddesses from myths as old as the seasons. With this book, Blackford offers a consideration of how literature for the young squares with broader canons, how classics flexibly and uniquely speak through novels that enjoy broad appeal, and how female traditions are embedded in novels by both men and women.
Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination
Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The ...promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter.
The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries , Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games , Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin , and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.
In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”
Chinese culture of the Six Dynasties period (220-589) saw a blossoming of stories of the fantastic.Zhiguai, "records of the strange" or "accounts of anomalies," tell of encounters with otherness, in ...which inexplicable and uncanny phenomena interrupt mundane human affairs. They depict deities, ghosts, and monsters; heaven, the underworld, and the immortal lands; omens, metamorphoses, and trafficking between humans and supernatural beings; and legendary figures, strange creatures, and natural wonders in the human world.Hidden and Visible Realms, traditionally attributed to Liu Yiqing, is one of the most significantzhiguaicollections, distinguished by its varied contents, elegant writing style, and fascinating stories. It is also among the earliest collections heavily influenced by Buddhist beliefs, values, and concerns. Beyond the traditionalzhiguainarratives, it includes tales of karmic retribution, reincarnation, and Buddhist ghosts, hell, and magic. In this annotated first complete English translation,Zhenjun Zhang gives English-speaking readers a sense of the wealth and wonder of thezhiguaicanon.Hidden and Visible Realmsopens a window into the lives, customs, and religious beliefs and practices of early medieval China and the cultural history of Chinese Buddhism. In the introduction, Zhang explains the key themes and textual history of the work.
In Horror Literature and Dark Fantasy: Challenging Genres, more than a dozen scholars and teachers explore the pedagogical value of using horror literature in the classroom to teach critical literacy ...skills to students in secondary schools and higher education.
Monstrous Bodies is a cultural and literary history of ambiguous bodies in imperial Japan. It focuses on what the book calls modern monsters--doppelgangers, robots, twins, hybrid creations--bodily ...metaphors that became ubiquitous in the literary landscape from the Meiji era (1868-1912) up until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Such monsters have often been understood as representations of the premodern past or of "stigmatized others"--figures subversive to national ideologies. Miri Nakamura contends instead that these monsters were products of modernity, informed by the newly imported scientific discourses on the body, and that they can be read as being complicit in the ideologies of the empire, for they are uncanny bodies that ignite a sense of terror by blurring the binary of "normal" and "abnormal" that modern sciences like eugenics and psychology created. Reading these literary bodies against the historical rise of the Japanese empire and its colonial wars in Asia, Nakamura argues that they must be understood in relation to the most "monstrous" body of all in modern Japan: the carefully constructed image of the empire itself.
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