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Writing and Fantasy brings together essays which restore a sense of the fantastic as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. It moves on from two conventional fields of discussion: the psychoanalytic, where phantasies are produced by the emergence of the consciousness, and the social, where fantasies are the production of nineteenth-century individualism. Chapters run from the classical period to the twentieth century, each focusing on a local reading of how fantasy acts as a strategy to contain or exploit specific historical and cultural moments. A wide variety of sites are investigated including the feminization of the wild west, originary and maternal spaces, highwaywomen, financial credit, and the ideal home. Multiple genres containing fantasy are explored, ranging from ghost stories to feminist utopias.
Aids to the reader include an introduction summarising recent discussions of fantasy, illustrations dealing with visual fantasies, and an annotated bibliography. The new research presented here will be of great interest to academics and students in literature, history and cultural studies departments who are working in the field of the historical development of concepts of fantasy, cultural opposition, and the imbrication of politics and modes of representation.
List of contents
Acknowledgements General Editors' Preface Writing and Fantasy: An Introduction, CERI SULLIVAN AND BARBARA WHITE PART ONE: EARLY 1. Modern Fantasy and Ancient Dreams, CHRIS PELLING 2. The Fairy Mistress in Medieval Literary Fantasy, CAROLYNE LARRINGTON 3. Haunting the Middle Ages, MARK PHILPOTT 4. Chivalry: Fantasy and Fear, RICHARD W. KAEUPER PART TWO: EARLY MODERN 5. Dreaming of Eve: Edenic Fantasies in John Milton's `Paradise Lost', MARGARET KEAN 6. Jonson, the Antimasque and the Literary Fantastic: `The Vision of Delight', LESLEY E. MICKEL 7. Writing Sexual Fantasy in the English Renaissance: Potency, Power and Poetry, DANIELLE CLARKE 8. Silly Money, Fantastic Credit, CERI SULLIVAN 9. The Politics of Escapism: Fantasies of Travel and Power in Richard Brome's `The Antipodes' and Ben Jonson's `The Alchemist', JULIE SANDERS 10. Travel and Sexual Fantasy in the Early Modern Period, DANIEL CAREY 11. Jenny Voss: the Fantasy of Female Criminality, BARBARA WHITE PART THREE: TWENTIETH CENTURY 12. The Grotesque Utopias of Jeanette Winterson and Monique Wittig, LUCIE ARMITT 13. Fantasy, Childhood, and Literature: in Pursuit of Wonderlands, KARIN LESNIK-OBERSTEIN 14. The Decline and Fall of the Great English Ghost Story, JULIAN THOMPSON 15. `Never Love a Cowboy': Romance Fiction and Fantasy Families, PETER STONELEY 16. Fantasy and the Ideal of the Individual in Twentieth-Century English Domestic Architecture, TIMOTHY MOWL PART FOUR: SELECTED DOCUMENTS 17. Herodotus 7. 12-19 18. Tacitus, `Annals' 16. 1-3 19. Plutarch, `Marius' 45 20. Plutarch, `Sulla' 37 21. From `The Confession of Arnaud Gelis, alias Botheler, of Mas-Saint-Antonin de Pamiers, a heretical convert' 22. `Concerning Henry Nodus who after his death appeared visibly to many people' from Caesarius of Heisterbach, `Dialogus Miraculorum' 23. From Ben Jonson, `The Vision of Delight' (1617) 24. From Henry Neville, `The Isle of Pines' (1668) 25. From `The London Jilt' (1684) Notes on contributors Select bibliography Index
About the author
Ceri Sullivan Barbara White
Summary
Providing a guide to fantasy writing from the classical period to the 20th century, this text focuses on different examples of how fantasy has acted as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. A wide variety of styles and genres are investigated.
