<!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>
When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades ...passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency. Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including 28 Days Later, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Children of Men, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Firefly, and Doctor Who: Series 3. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency. The first full study of black female characters in speculative film and television, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before shows why heroines such as Lex in AVP and Zoë in Firefly are inspiring a generation of fans, just as Uhura did.
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.”
Fantasy proneness (FP; the tendency to immersion in imagination) is linked to psychopathology and suggested to be a maladaptive coping strategy. However, some evidence suggests it can be a positive ...trait. We examined whether the FP-emotional distress relationship is mediated by coping strategy. Participants completed the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale, the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire measure of coping strategies, the Creative Experiences Questionnaire FP scale (Study 1; N = 248) and the newly developed Fantasy Questionnaire which measures fantasy across two subscales, creative and imaginative (Study 2; N = 208). In Study 1, FP presented positive associations with emotional distress, with maladaptive coping strategies self-blame, rumination and catastrophizing, and with adaptive strategies positive refocussing, planning and positive reappraisal. Mediation indicated that self-blame and rumination partially accounted for the negative relationship between FP and distress, while positive refocussing ameliorated it. In Study 2, creative fantasy showed no relationship with distress, though imaginative fantasy was positively associated, with self-blame mediating the relationship. A tendency to fantasise can negatively influence psychological outcomes particularly in the presence of maladaptive coping. Our data support the suggestion that fantasy proneness is multi-componential and that not all aspects are linked to negative emotion.
•Fantasising is generally linked to psychopathology and maladaptive coping strategies.•Study 1 showed mediating effects of positive refocussing, rumination and self-blame.•In Study 2 imaginative, but not creative, fantasy was related to emotional distress.•We found a positive mediating effect of self-blame on this relationship.•Only certain types of fantasy are linked to negative emotions and poor coping.
The article is devoted to a general overview of the concept of fantasy and its typology, as well as to the results of research into the position of Cossack fantasy in the literary discourse. During ...the work on the article, materials devoted to the following main areas were used: fantasy in academic discourse; types of fantasy classifications; essential elements of a fantasy narrative; examples of Cossack fantasy in scientific research. The article uses a comparative research method. The author of the scientific study introduces the most common definitions of fantasy and the main types of classification of this type of literature. To confirm the originality of fantasy, as well as other vectors of intellectual activity that build their complex structure around the Cossack heritage, we proposed the concept of "Cossackopeia" to describe this complex and sometimes fragmentary phenomenon. In the article, we paid more attention to the artistic and literary vector of Cossackopeia. Based on the ideas of John Clute about taproot texts, Brian Atterbery about the "fuzzy set" of fantasy texts, Fara Mendelsohn and her thoughts about how the fantastic element penetrates the narrative, as well as Robert Boyer and Kenneth Zagorsky and their spatiotemporal system of events, we formed a definition of "Cossack fantasy". This allows us to say that the Cossack fantasy, using the Western European canon, has every opportunity to expand it to create original pseudo-historical worlds and even form a narrative projection of space-time far from Earth.
Cossack fantasy is unjustifiably in the shadow of scientific research; therefore, it deserves a detailed analysis of its genre and typological features. In the future, the article's author sees the development of the metaconcept of Cossackopoeia and the establishment of the Cossack fantasy in this artistic phenomenon.
What exactly is the fantastic? In the twentieth-century world, our notions of what is impossible are assaulted every day. To define the nature of fantasy and the fantastic, Eric S. Rabkin considers ...its role in fairy tales, science fiction, detective stories, and religious allegory, as well as in traditional literature.
The examples he studies range from Grimm's fairy tales to Agatha Christie, fromChildhood's Endto the novels of Henry James, from Voltaire to Robbe-Grillet toA Canticle for Leiboivitz. By analyzing different works of literature, the author shows that the fantastic depends on a reversal of the ground rules of a narrative world. This reversal signals most commonly a psychological escape, often from boredom, to an unknown world secretly yearned for, whose order, although reversed, bears a precise relation to reality.
Originally published in 1977.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
PDF
