Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy – serie

This book offers a first step toward spanning the gap between the writing of male critics of speculative fiction, who do not devote enough attention to the contributions of new female voices to this genre, and feminist critics, who should study a genre that opens all possibilities to women. Although Barr clarifies speculative texts for those who may not be familiar with them, her study is neither a complete survey of speculative fiction nor an introduction to the recent concerns of feminist theory; it applies contemporary feminist theory to contemporary speculative fiction.

This comprehensive volume explores the relationship between sex and the fantastic in science fiction and fantasy literature. More than a dozen scholars have contributed essays in which they discuss almost two hundred novels, short stories, tales, plays, poems, myths, and nearly one hundred authors--from Aldiss to Zelazny. The collection is divided into three main sections, the first of which is devoted to the theoretical analysis of the relationship between sexuality and the fantastic. This section contains essays on sexuality and the allure of fantasy, and sexuality and knowledge in science fiction. The second section turns to thematic analyses and includes essays that explore such themes as sexuality and death, forbidden sexuality, sexual attitudes and the search for ethics in contemporary culture, sex and technology, sexual encounters with aliens, sexuality and comedy, and homosexuality in fantasy and science fiction. The third section, devoted to feminist views of sexuality in fantastic literature, includes several studies of the depiction of sexuality in the works of female fantasists, and focuses most closely on Russ, Piercy, LeGuin, and Carter. Examined here is the potential use of science fiction as a vehicle for theorizing about women and for questioning their condition in society. The volume also includes an introductory overview and critical commentary on the literature and a comprehensive, contributor-compiled bibliography of primary works and scholarship on sexuality and related issues in fantastic literature.

The relationship between fantasy and the feminine is explored in this compelling study of women writers of the genre. Spivak provides a revisioning of such archetypes as the wizard, the hero, and the dragon, and considers why women writers are currently dominating this field formerly occupied almost exclusively by men, as well as how women readers identify with the enchanted quest. Chapters provide a feminist perspective and analysis of leading women fantasists of the past two decades as well as promising new voices.The relationship between fantasy and the feminine is explored in this compelling study of women writers of the genre. Spivak provides a revisioning of such archetypes as the wizard, the hero, and the dragon, and considers why women writers are currently dominating this field formerly occupied almost exclusively by men, as well as how women readers identify with the enchanted quest. Chapters provide a feminist perspective and analysis of leading women fantasists of the past two decades as well as promising new voices.

The first examples of travel to the past appear early in the nineteenth century, but it was not until the publication of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court that we see a hero taking advantage of a combination of hindsight and advances in technology to build an empire in the past. Given that this scenario is such a common twentieth-century fantasy, its late appearance is somewhat surprising. As fewer and fewer writers find travel to the future an appealing scenario, travel to the past and to paratime--alternative universes--have come increasingly to the forefront. Twain's Connecticut Yankee contains, explicitly or implicitly, most of the problems and themes which later writers have wrung out of past time-travel. Concentrating on travel to the past, this study details, both in Twain's seminal work and in its science fiction successors, the various roles played by the traveller to the past--nostalgic, tourist, imperialist, Oedipal hero, and existential isolate--and attempts to relate these roles both to the rest of Twain's work and to the world-view of contemporary America.While other writers have dealt with time travel as part of a general survey of science fiction, Foote's study is among the first to relate it to the body of Mark Twain's work and to attempt to account for the appeal of time travel to the past in historical, geographical, and psychological terms. Because it straddles several disciplines, it will appeal to those interested in science fiction, American literature, and popular culture.

This study provides a fascinating look at the various ways in which 20th-century fantasy writers have used Welsh Celtic mythology and folklore in their work. Following the theories formulated by such scholars as John Vickery and Joseph Campbell, the use of Celtic materials by each of the authors is discussed from a mythology-in-literature perspective. Sullivan presents an extensive accounting of the Celtic material used and explores the primary ways in which the authors incorporate it into their fiction, both structurally and thematically.Sullivan identifies and analyzes the nature and extent of Welsh Celtic influence on subsequent cultures and their literatures, and he considers some of the previous attempts to evaluate this influence. The appendixes provide valuable background materials, including critical commentary on the Welsh collection of myths, legends, folktales, and beliefs that are of major importance in the work of the six authors represented. Also included are extensive bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. Illuminating reading for students and scholars of mythology, modern fantasy, and children's literature, this book sheds new light on the Welsh influence in literature and opens paths for further research.

Focusing on the connection between metaphor and myth, Thelma Shinn provides a methaphoric reading of fantastic literature by women that enables the reader to glimpse its underlying mythic purpose and content. She examines some seventy novels by twenty-four women writers and draws on a rich variety of secondary sources in literature, women's studies, science fiction/fantasy scholarship, and comparative mythology.

This important contribution to the study of science fiction explores the origins of the basic literary traditions of the genre. Thematic, rather than chronological, organization sets this work apart from previous analyses. The entire range of literary invention within science fiction is explored from its earliest beginnings through the past hundred years of serious development. Emphasis is on enabling the reader to perceive the evolution of science fiction as an organic whole, rather than a mere accumulation of works linked solely by popular publishing trends.

This fascinating study of literary theory is the first work of its kind to examine the intersection of fantasy and postmodernism, and to analyze contemporary fantasy writers comparatively. After carefully developing working definitions of postmodernism and fantasy, the author goes on to analyze works by various postmodernist fantasy writers. Olsen's approach is eclectic, bringing to each text or textual complex those forces he feels most interestingly stir up its sediment--be they biographical, structural, psychoanalytic, philosophical, reader-response, or otherwise. Finally he argues that postmodern fantasy is the literary equivalent of deconstructionism, for it interrogates all we take for granted about language and experience, giving these no more than shifting and provisional status. It may be seen as a mode of radical skepticism that believes only in the possiblilty of total intelligibility.

During the recent resurgence of interest in Cabell's work, literary scholars have given the fantasy aspect of his novels only cursory consideration, assigning them a place in the popular high fantasy tradition established by William Morris. Riemer shows us a different and more innovative writer who, though drawing on the medieval, mythological, and folk sources associated with high fantasy, wrote in a darker, satirical vein that is closer in spirit to some of our postmodern writers. Rather than expressing an idealized, heroic view of the past, Cabell's work exploits the tension between those ideals and reality.Raised on glamorous overblown tales of Confederate gallantry in the Civil War, Cabell realized very early in life that even the Arthurian generals of the Confederacy had human failings and that modern Richmond was a far cry from Camelot. His acute awareness of the discrepancies between myth and reality, and his perception that belief could invest myth with the substance and power of reality, became central to the issues Cabell explored through literary fantasy. Questioning the nature of reality, he satirized human behavior and commented dramatically on our frequent inability to make accurate distinctions between either the real and the illusory, or the real and the ideal. Though the fantasy novels were generally well received, some readers complained that Cabell's irreverence and humor betrayed a lack of respect for the true nature of the Middle Ages and its values. Riemer devotes a chapter to each of the major fantasy works on which Cabell's reputation rests. Jurgen, which was banned briefly by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice after its publication in 1919, is Cabell's best-known work. Other fantasy novels considered are The Cream of the Jest, Figures of Earth, The High Place, The Silver Stallion, and Something about Eve. Riemer's study offers stimulating discussion and major new insights on a novelist whose works are deservedly regaining a wide readership. This book will be of interest for courses or studies in modern American fiction and fantasy fiction.

Although better known today for such classic and influential science fiction novels as Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker and Sirius, Olaf Stapledon also wrote eight other science fiction books, seven volumes of philosophy and social criticism, and hundreds of reviews, lectures, and articles. Common to all his works is a moral vision that is characterized by ecstatic joy and revolutionary zeal, though tempered by detachment and skepticism. This is the first book collection of original essays devoted entirely to Stapledon. Where previous critical interpretation has concentrated on individual works by the author, these essays deal with larger issues in Stapledon's writings and with his relationship to such forces as Marxism and literary modernism.The articles develop new avenues for the exploration of Stapledon's work, focusing on philosophical, linguistic, political, and structural elements, and showing how Stapledon's non-fictional writing may illuminate aspects of the fiction. In addition, the book includes Stapledon's hitherto unpublished manuscript Letters to the Future as well as a primary and secondary bibliography. An important contribution to the study of science fiction and fantasy, The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon will be of interest to scholars and students of Stapledon and of the genre.

During the first part of the nineteenth century, the Lost Worlds Romance, a new literary form, appeared in which an explorer, most often a scientist, made a voyage to what was then considered to be a remote part of the earth where he discovered a fantastic lost world. This book surveys the Lost Worlds Romance from its beginnings as it evolved from travel literature and utopian fiction to its eclipse when there were no more unexplored corners of the earth and it took to the stars, evolving into modern Science Fiction.Interestingly, these romances reflect the developing natural and social sciences of the times in which they were written. The themes of evolution, teleportation, human longevity, euthanasia, other dimensions, reincarnation, uses of radium, utopian and dystopian societies, among many others, play a prominent part in the discussion of these works. Darwin, Marx, and Freud are shown to have especially influenced the authors of these romances. The book also demonstrates that at a time when the sexual mores of mainline fiction were fairly repressed, writers of the Lost Worlds Romance were permitted much liberty with the erotic imagination. The treatment given to women in these romances is explored.

One of the most prolific, honored, and widely read science fiction writers, Robert Silverberg has forged a professional career that began in the 1950s and has flourished in succeeding decades. From the very beginning, he was perceived as a promising and potentially brilliant author, and he has persisted long enough to win more Hugo and Nebula Awards than any other writer. After first gaining fame for his magazine fiction, he embraced the ideals and methods of literary science fiction in the late 1960s and crafted a number of novels marked by symbolism and irony. After a period of silence in the 1970s, he resumed his career and has attracted growing amounts of critical attention. This book offers a broad study of Silverberg's growth as a writer and illuminates a career that still eludes easy assessment. Chapman not only explores Silverberg's works, but also illuminates the many factors that shaped the evolution of his works. What emerges is a complete picture of Silverberg and his craft.An introductory chapter overviews Silverberg's career and provides some biographical information. The chapters that follow look at various phases in his development. These include an apprenticeship period, a journeyman period, a climactic period of mastery, and a second period of mature work, following a hiatus in the 1970s. Included are discussions of such works as Revolt on Alpha C, Thorns, The Book of Skulls, Shadrach in the Furnace, and Lord Valentine's Castle. The volume gives special attention to the larger literary contexts of Silverberg's writings and to the forces that influenced him.

Strange Shadows opens a window into the dark, visionary worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, whose verbal black magic was a significant force in the American science fiction and fantasy movement of the 1930s. This annotated collection of his previously unpublished works provides a unique opportunity to savor the full range of Smith's literary contribution. Featuring fantasies and ironic short stories, prose-poems, plays, unfinished stories, and more than 100 story synopses, it offers valuable documentation and commentary on the work of one of the most distinctive and consistently interesting modern masters of the fantasy genre.An introduction by Robert Bloch (the author of Psycho) examines Smith's work and places it in historical perspective. Among the highlights of the collection are the satirical title story; variant drafts of two of Smith's most famous stories--The Coming of the White Worm and The Beast of Averoigne--and a play entitled The Dead Will Cuckold You, which has been hailed as a masterpiece. The editor's annotations include extensive quotations from Smith's correspondence to H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, and other important fantasy authors, together with textual commentary and discussion of connections between published and unpublished works. Information on lost writings and lists of published story titles, characters, and place names are supplied. An important resource for fantasy readers and scholars, this book will appeal to those with an interest in dark fantasy, science fiction, and the history of American science fiction.

This book provides a detailed study of the relationship between science fiction and other genres. After discussing the problems inherent in classifying works according to genre, Pierce notes how science fiction sometimes incorporates plots from other literary forms. He then explores the relationship between science fiction and related genres, such as fantastic romances and techno-thrillers. The book next examines those science fiction writers who have successfully written in other literary forms, as well as authors active in other genres who have turned to science fiction to treat particular themes. Pierce also discusses the literary and stylistic aspects of science fiction. Throughout the book, Pierce's coverage is encyclopedic in nature. He provides examples from numerous works, and the volume closes with a detailed bibliography.

Surely one of America's most popular novelists, Stephen King has only recently begun to receive serious attention from scholars and literary critics. The Dark Descent assembles fifteen illuminating original essays that consider King from a variety of intellectual orientations, addressing the major novels and central thematic concerns that represent King's contributions to American letters and elevating King scholarship to a new level of critical discourse. This volume places King firmly within the canon of contemporary American fiction.The essayists are concerned with explicating the meanings of individual narratives and creating critical contexts for their interpretion. While covering a broad range of his works and using multiple theoretical approaches--including reader-response, mythic, psychoanalytic, and structuralist criticism--to offer insights into King's fiction, most of the essayists reflect on one of two central theses: that King's body of literature may be seen as having been deeply influenced by the mainstream traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European fictions, and that the narratives may be read as profound commentary on the major political and social tensions shaping contemporary American life. King's supernatural horrors reflect actual horrors, and his compelling style makes art out of horror fiction. A King chronology, bibliography and an expository introduction flank the analytical essays.

This book deals with the eight major figures in the Arthurian legends and how they have been individually represented in literature from its beginnings up to the present day. The characters discussed are: Arthur the king, his queen Guenevere, his wizard Merlin, his half-sister Morgan le Fay, his faithful seneschal Sir Kay, his warrior nephew Gawain, his knight and rival Lancelot, and his incestuous son and nemesis Mordred. These characters are first identified in terms of their medieval origins, then explored in their varied depictions in modern fantasy fiction. The pattern that emerges is largely one of polarization of personality. The first study of Arthurian materials to focus specifically on the characterization of individuals, this book also achieves an original perspective on the evolution of individual characters from mythic prototypes.

Willingham presents a historical survey of science fiction drama and focusses particularly on the history of attempts to stage science fiction. Little attention has been given to science fiction drama, though numerous science fiction plays exist. This volume gives special attention to works intended for adult audiences, with emphasis on the nature of science fiction drama, its origins and history, the staging of science fiction plays, and works by representative playwrights. The appendix offers an annotated list of 328 science fiction plays, with entries grouped in five categories: original drama, adaptations, musicals and operas, theatre pieces and multi-media works, and Frankenstein dramas. An extensive bibliography concludes the volume.

While literary utopias depict an ideal society and reflect an optimistic belief in the triumph of humanity and government, dystopias present a society marked by suffering caused by human and political evils. This book offers a detailed study of several literary dystopias and analyzes them as social criticism. The volume begins with a discussion of utopias, dystopias, and social criticism. By drawing upon the theories of Freud, Nietzsche, and others, Booker sets a firm theoretical foundation for the literary explorations that follow. The chapters that come next discuss Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's 1984 as social criticism of totalitarianism, Stalinism, the dangers of capitalism, and fascism. Later chapters consider dystopias after World War II, contemporary communist dystopias, and postmodernist dystopias in the West.

One hundred years after his creation by Bram Stoker, Dracula is still fascinating us. This study traces the changing nature of film representations of Dracula, from the early silent adaptations to recent popular dramas. Holte suggests that vampire films and Dracula adaptations have become an independent genre, the dark romance, with its own set of narrative conventions and audience expectations combining horror and eroticism. This engaging study provides readers with a natural history of the vampire, an examination of the work of Bram Stoker, a history and analysis of many film adaptations of Dracula, a survey of contemporary criticism and theory, and an extensive annotated bibliography of vampire film, fiction, and criticism.

This book contains 11 essays and a comprehensive bibliography. The essays reveal the extent to which Philip K. Dick's personal obsessions pre-figured postmodernist concerns with humanity's self-alienation, cultural and personal paranoia, and the politics of simulation, deceit, and self-deception. The contributors reveal how Dick's ontological concerns, stated in his repeated questioning of What is real?, are also political concerns. Thus, they examine the philosophical and religious foundations on which his work rests, offering much-needed arguments which reveal both his philosophical depth and the extent to which he drew from esoteric and occult religions. His cultural critique also receives significant exposition, as the contributors reveal how Dick's fiction enacts the larger cultural struggles of cold war America, with its conflicting private visions and public realities, and its personal and political loyalties. The contributors argue for the significance of heretofore neglected or marginalized texts of Dick as well, including in their discussions many early short stories from the early 1950s and neglected novels of the mid-1960s, arguing that there is a need to understand how Dick shaped (or misshaped) his fictions so as to reimagine the life of his society.

The Irish writer Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) has suffered a regrettable decline in critical esteem. Although one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of the early 20th century, he seems to have fallen out of fashion with both the Irish critical community and with enthusiasts of fantasy literature. But Dunsany was one of the critical figures in modern fantasy, a significant influence on Tolkien, Le Guin, and other writers. His own work, written over a 50-year span and covering nearly every literary mode (short story, novel, play, essay, poem), is itself rich with meaning. In this, the first academic study of Dunsany's work, Joshi establishes that Dunsany has a remarkable grasp of the symbolic function of fantasy, and that he used fantasy, horror, and the supernatural as metaphors for his most deeply held convictions on life and society. His entire work is unified by a single overriding theme—the need for human reunification with the natural world—even though this theme takes on many different forms (e.g., scorn of industrialization, demonstration of the moral superiority of animals over human beings, rumination on the extinction of the human race). The course of Dunsany's long career—proceeding from early short stories and plays about the edge of the world to full-length novels to tales of comic fantasy (such as the popular Jorkens stories) to sensitive works about Ireland—reveals a writer constantly searching for new ways to express his central philosophic and aesthetic conceptions. Joshi's volume may best be described as an exercise in literary excavation—an attempt to unearth an unjustly forgotten writer and to show that his work is in need of further study and analysis.

This collection of 23 essays represents the best papers from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Scholars representing diverse perspectives on the fantastic address a variety of works—including those by Jane Austen, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen Donaldson, Ursula Le Guin, Jean Baudrillard, Anatole France, William Blake, and Angela Carter. Subjects addressed range from children's tales and classic literature to paper sculptures and popular television series. Containing provocative applications of scholarly observation to practical life, this volume will be of interest to scholars of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and popular culture, and to others who want to know which topics are currently in vogue in the field.

The first comprehensive critical study of hard science fiction, this book reveals how the term hard science fiction originated, and how arguments about its range and nature have unfolded. Westfahl shows that hard science fiction is generally characterized by the author's extreme concern for scientific accuracy and logic. Identifying two characteristic forms of hard science fiction, Westfahl closely examines several representative works: Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, and Charles Sheffield's Between the Strokes of Midnight. This book offers new insights into hard science fiction and provides a wealth of information about what members of the science fiction community have said about this relatively recent genre.

Unlike many classic works of fiction, literature of the fantastic enjoys mass popularity. Because the fantastic is so much a part of popular culture, fantasy literature can represent or address the racial attitudes of its audience. Representations of race in the fantastic provide a measure of the concern the culture has for racial matters. If a work is racist, whether consciously or not, it may perpetuate racist attitudes unless it is carefully examined. At the same time, literature of the fantastic is able to present possible worlds rather than real ones. It is thus a literature of possibility, in which racial matters may be addressed and exposed, so that readers may become more conscious of the evils of racist attitudes. This volume explores the significance of race and color in the works of a wide range of authors, including Octavia Butler, Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, and Robert Silverberg.This volume explores the significance of race and color in the works of a wide range of authors, including Octavia Butler, Joseph Conrad, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, and Robert Silverberg. The chapters are written by expert contributors who approach their topics as both products of a particular cultural moment and as imagined alternatives. While most of the works examined are science fiction, the book also looks at horror and fantasy writing. Topics discussed include colonialism and empire, Creole identity politics, race in cyberspace, and witchcraft in Salem.

As a scholar of medieval languages and literature, J.R.R. Tolkien brought to his fiction an intense interest in myth and legend. When he died in 1973, he left behind a vast body of unpublished material related to his fictive mythology. Now edited and published as The History of Middle-earth by his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, these 12 volumes provide a record of the growth of J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology from its beginnings in 1917 to the time of his death more than 50 years later. The material in these volumes offers an unparalleled insight into Tolkien's process of myth-making and is a guide to the world of his literary works. This book is the first comprehensive critical examination of Christopher Tolkien's compilation of his father's Middle-earth legends.An opening essay by Rayner Unwin, Tolkien's publisher for many years, surveys the publication history of the collection. The essays that follow, each written by an expert contributor, explore a wide range of topics related to The History of Middle-earth. Included are discussions of Tolkien's languages, the evolution of his vision over time, the shifting importance of central characters, and the effect of his mythology on The Lord of the Rings. By exploring this mythological compendium, the volume sheds further light on the entire body of J.R.R. Tolkien's works and is a valuable resource for all readers interested in his writings.

Myth, legend, and folklore have been entrenched in children's literature for several centuries and continue to be popular. Some of the most ancient traditional tales still extant come from the Celtic cultures of France and the British Isles, whose languages are among the oldest in Europe. Among these tales are four native Welsh legends collectively known as the Mabinogi, which were first translated into English in 1845 by Lady Charlotte Guest. Numerous children's books have been based on the Mabinogi since then, and many have received awards and critical acclaim. Because these books are written for children, they are not necessarily faithful retellings of the original tales. Instead, authors have had to select certain elements to include and others to exclude. This book examines how authors of children's fantasy literature from the 19th century to the present have adapted Welsh myth to meet the perceived needs of their young audience.The volume begins with a summary of the four principle tales of the Mabinogi: Pwyll Prince of Dyfed, Branwen Daughter of Llyr, Manawydan Son of Llyr, and Math Son of Mathonwy. Books based on the Mabinogi generally fall into two categories: retellings of the myths, and original works of fantasy partially inspired by the Welsh tales. Beginning with Sidney Lanier's The Boy's Mabinogion, the first part of this book examines versions of the myths published for children between 1881 and 1988. The second part discusses imaginative literature that borrows elements from the Mabinogi, including Alan Garner's The Owl Service, which won a Carnegie medal, and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, the final volume of which received the ALA Newbery Award for outstanding children's book.

Although Tolkien's literary works have, over the past few decades, attracted a considerable and varied body of criticism, much of this material is inaccessible, unreflective, and repetitive. Most criticism has concentrated on his sources and biographical influences, but such studies generally do not look beyond his interest in medieval literature. Nonetheless, Tolkien's writings have links and resonances with the whole of English literature from Old Norse traditions to contemporary literary thought. This book corrects a striking imbalance in Tolkien scholarship by placing his works within a larger literary context.The volume ranges over the entire history of English literature, including oral narrative tradition, Anglo-Saxon poetry, medieval romance, Renaissance poetics, 19th-century adventure stories, modern art, and contemporary fantasy. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor who demonstrates Tolkien's relation to an earlier literary movement and examines the literary resonances of his works from a variety of informed perspectives. By grounding Tolkien's writings within the larger canon of literature, the book argues that his works actually fall within the mainstream literary tradition.