Devoted to Tolkien, the teller of tales and co-creator of the myths they brush against, these essays focus on his lifelong interest in and engagement with fairy stories, the special world that he ...called faërie, a world they both create and inhabit, and with the elements that make that world the special place it is. They cover a range of subjects, from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings and their place within the legendarium he called the Silmarillion to shorter works like "The Story of Kullervo" and "Smith of Wootton Major." From the pen of eminent Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, the individual essays in this collection were written over a span of twenty years, each written to fit the parameters of a conference, an anthology, or both. They are revised slightly from their original versions to eliminate repetition and bring them up to date. Grouped loosely by theme, they present an unpatterned mosaic, depicting topics from myth to truth, from social manners to moral behavior, from textual history to the micro particles of Middle-earth. Together these essays present a complete picture of a man as complicated as the books that bear his name—an independent and unorthodox thinker who was both a believer and a doubter able to maintain conflicting ideas in tension, a teller of tales both romantic and bitter, hopeful and pessimistic, in equal parts tragic and comedic. A man whose work does not seek for right or wrong answers so much as a way to accommodate both; a man of antitheses. Scholars of fantasy literature generally and of Tolkien particularly will find much of value in this insightful collection by a seasoned explorer of Tolkien's world of faërie.
London is one of the more popular settings for urban fantasy, standing out by offering both a great many famous locations and a history of two millennia. This article argues that the city's past is ...used to create a sense of "Londonness" by examining ten urban fantasy versions of London. It identifies and analyzes the functions of four prominent elements of history in these texts: the city's origin and pre-origin, the Great Fire of 1666, the periods of building various subterranean tunnels, and the notion that London, at some point, has gone through an architectural Era of Uglification. Through these, London is portrayed as a literary place suitable to urban fantasy: it is a modern city but with a long history reaching back to a beginning where facts and legends mix. This long history gives rise to supernatural entities that hide in the underground tunnels constructed at various points in the city's history.
The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy ...Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Johnson’s Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative’s reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.
The tales featured in The World of Dew and Other Stories are sometimes terrifying, sometimes touching, sometimes provocative, and occasionally very silly. They function both as windows through which ...readers can glimpse vast universes waiting to be explored and as mirrors reflecting our own reality back at us in a strange and unfamiliar light.
Tolkien's writings are imbued with the perspectives of their narrators and within them, the narrators' biases. This is most evident in the bias against the dwarves, particularly in the third age. ...Dismissing testimonials from neutral sources and dwarves alike, scholars have continuously inaccurately treated the anti-dwarf bias as a criticism of the Dwarves' relationship with nature. The criticisms levelled by scholars have led to the dwarves being dismissed as particularly environmentally destructive, a direct contradiction to how the dwarves interact with natural spaces and how they construct their own. Consequently, a more nuanced reading of the dwarves lends itself to the dismantling of the negative prejudices and stereotypes levied against the Dwarves and offers them a more just treatment in their own history.
The fantastic has been particularly prolific in Hispanic
countries during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, largely
due to the legacy of short-story writers as well as the
Latin-American boom ...that presented alternatives to the model of
literary realism. While these writers' works have done much to
establish the Hispanic fantastic in the international literary
canon, women authors from Spain and Latin America are not always
acknowledged, and their work is less well known to readers. The aim
of this critical anthology is to render Hispanic female writers of
the fantastic visible, to publish a representative selection of
their work, and to make it accessible to English-speaking readers.
Five short stories are presented by five key authors. They attest
to the richness and diversity of fantastic fiction in the Spanish
language, and extend from the early twentieth to the twenty-first
century, covering a range of nationalities, cultural references and
language specificities from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico and
Argentina.
It has become something of a critical commonplace to claim that science fiction does not actually exist in Argentina. This book puts that claim to rest by identifying and analyzing a rich body of ...work that fits squarely in the genre. Joanna Page explores a range of texts stretching from 1875 to the present day and across a variety of media-literature, cinema, theatre, and comics-and studies the particular inflection many common discourses of science fiction (e.g., abuse of technology by authoritarian regimes, apocalyptic visions of environmental catastrophe) receive in the Argentine context. A central aim is to historicize these texts, showing how they register and rework the contexts of their production, particularly the hallmarks of modernity as a social and cultural force in Argentina. Another aim, held in tension with the first, is to respond to an important critique of historicism that unfolds in these texts. They frequently unpick the chronology of modernity, challenging the linear, universalizing models of development that underpin historicist accounts. They therefore demand a more nuanced set of readings that work to supplement, revise, and enrich the historicist perspective.
El objetivo de este artículo es explorar las diversas significaciones en el proceso creativo del artista argentino Martin La Spina, dentro de un contexto específico: el campo artístico platense. Se ...indaga la praxis del artista en su búsqueda de una iconografía particular en una selección de pinturas, que parten de diversas apropiaciones de los maestros del renacimiento europeo configurando nuevas obras que aluden a un mundo onírico y simbólico. Sus producciones inauguran una travesía hacia los mundos posibles mediante un conjunto de motivos presentes en la composición; la exploración de diversos códigos, el encuentro de fantasía y realidad, de sueños y de transmutación de naturalezas. Palabras clave: apropiación / contemporaneidad / simbolismo / naturaleza / alegoría. The purpose of this article is to explore the significances in the creative process of Martin La Spina, an Argentinian artists, in the specific context of La Plata's artistic field. The artist's work consists of a series of paintings with a particular iconography that appropriates the works of artists from the European renaissance, creating new pieces that evoke a symbolic and oneiric world. La Spina's work embarks on a journey into different worlds by the means of a series of motives in its composition, the exploration of different codes, the relationship between fantasy and reality, the representation of dreams and the transmutation of nature. Keywords: Appropriation / contemporaneity / Symbolism / Nature / Painting.
Using a sample of self-reported "spontaneous" accounts (ostensibly sincere and unprimed, N = 426), we calibrated a 32-item, Rasch-based "Survey of Strange Events (SSE)" to quantify the phenomenology ...of ghostly episodes while assessing response biases related to experients' age and gender. This inventory included psychological experiences typical of haunts, and physical manifestations common to poltergeist-like disturbances. Results supported earlier suggestions that "spontaneous" accounts have a predictable (cumulative) behavioral pattern and show a unidimensional factor structure. Further, compared to spontaneous accounts, we identified strong response biases on the SSE across four control conditions (i.e., Lifestyle, Primed, Fantasy, and Illicit). Statistical modeling successfully predicted group memberships with good accuracy, corroborating that spontaneous experiences differ systematically in certain ways from "impostors." The SSE is a robust measure of overall intensity of ghostly episodes (Rasch reliability = 0.87) and serves as a standard operationalization of specific anomalies in surveys, fieldwork studies, and investigations that code free-response data or spontaneous case material for quantitative analysis.
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