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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.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction: Learning to Resist the Wolf by Nicholas Ruddick
A Manifesto for FantasistsOh God, Here Come the Elves! by Jane Yolen
Unreal Rhetorics: Contemporary Fantastic Theory and PracticeFantasy and the Narrative Transaction by Brian Attebery
Specular SF: Postmodern Allegory by Veronica Hollinger
Knowing about Knowing: Paradigms of Knowledge in the Postmodern Fantastic by Peter Malekin
Im/maculate: Some Instances of Gnostic Science Fiction by Reinhold Kramer
The Reproduction of the Body in Space by Elisabeth Vonarburg
Recovering the Numinous: Studies in the British and European FantasticM.G. Lewis and Later Gothic Fiction: The Numinous Dissipated by Robert F. Geary
The Taming of the Screw: Rohmer's Filming of Kleist's "Die Marquise von O . . . " by Mary Rhiel
Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Fantastic by Tony Chadwick and Virginia Harger-Grinling
Caricature, Parody, Satire: Narrative Masks as Subversion of the Picaro in Patrick Süskind's "Perfume" by Edith Borchardt
From the Empire of the Senseless: Studies in American Fantasy and Science FictionReality, Fiction and Wu in "The Man in the High Castle" by Jianjiong Zhu
Zelazny's Black: The Sidekick as Second Self by Carl B. Yoke
Suicide, Murder, Culture, and Catastrophe: Joanna Russ's "We Who Are About To . . . " by Patrick D. Murphy
Getting a Kick out of Chaos: "Fortunate Failure" in Greg Bear's Future Histories by Len Hatfield
Out of Blue Water: Dream Flight and Narrative Construction in the Novels of Toni Morrison by Grace A. Epstein
Dominance and Subversion: The Horizontal Sublime and Erotic Empowerment in the Works of Kathy Acker by Greg Lewis Peters
Machine Nightmares: Sex and Techno-Horror in Fantastic Literature and FilmThe Dawn Patrol: Sex, Technology, and Irony in Farmer and Ballard by Gary K. Wolfe
The Making of Frankenstein's Monster: Post-Golem, Pre-Robot by Norma Rowen
"Westworld," "Futureworld," and the World's Obscenity by J. P. Telotte
The Animal at the Door: Modern Works of Horror and the Natural Animalby Marian Scholtmeijer
Index
About the author
NICHOLAS RUDDICK is Associate Professor of English at the University of Regina in Canada. He is the editor of
State of the Fantastic, a collection of essays (Greenwood, 1992), and the author of
British Science Fiction: A Chronology, 1478-1990 (Greenwood, 1992).
