The Fantastic Sublime

The Fantastic Sublime PDF Author: David Sandner
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
This study begins with a look at works by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focusing on the 18th-century view of childhood and fantasy. It expands on the notion that English Romanticism played a significant role in preparing adults to accept fantasy literature for children.

The Fantastic Sublime

The Fantastic Sublime PDF Author: David Sandner
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
This study begins with a look at works by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focusing on the 18th-century view of childhood and fantasy. It expands on the notion that English Romanticism played a significant role in preparing adults to accept fantasy literature for children.

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831 PDF Author: David Sandner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317157427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Challenging literary histories that locate the emergence of fantastic literature in the Romantic period, David Sandner shows that tales of wonder and imagination were extremely popular throughout the eighteenth century. Sandner engages contemporary critical definitions and defenses of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fantastic literature, demonstrating that a century of debate and experimentation preceded the Romantic's interest in the creative imagination. In 'The Fairy Way of Writing,' Joseph Addison first defines the literary use of the supernatural in a 'modern' and 'rational' age. Other writers like Richard Hurd, James Beattie, Samuel Johnson, James Percy, and Walter Scott influence the shape of the fantastic by defining and describing the modern fantastic in relation to a fabulous and primitive past. As the genre of the 'purely imaginary,' Sandner argues, the fantastic functions as a discourse of the sublime imagination, albeit a contested discourse that threatens to disrupt any attempt to ground the sublime in the realistic or sympathetic imagination. His readings of works by authors such as Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, and James Hogg not only redefine the antecedents of the fantastic but also offer a convincing account of how and why the fantastic came to be marginalized in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines PDF Author: Minsoo Kang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674059417
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.

The Sublime in Everyday Life

The Sublime in Everyday Life PDF Author: Anastasios Gaitanidis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000317552
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian. Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us. Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.

Mountains So Sublime

Mountains So Sublime PDF Author: Terry P. Abraham
Publisher: Calgary : University of Calgary Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Features description of the Rocky Mountain West by British adventurers, poets, and journalists.

The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock

The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock PDF Author: Donald E. Morse
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786485213
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Robert Holdstock was a prolific writer whose oeuvre included horror, fantasy, mystery and the novelization of films, often published under pseudonyms. These twelve critical essays explore Holdstock's varied output by displaying his works against the backdrop of folk and fairy tales, dissecting their spatiotemporal order, and examining them as psychic fantasies of our unconscious life or as exempla of the sublime. The individual novels of the Mythago Wood sequence are explored, as is Holdstock's early science fiction and the Merlin Codex series.

Fantastic Literature

Fantastic Literature PDF Author: David Sandner
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Culls together important criticism of fantastic literature from Plato and Aristotle to present critics.

Transitions and Dissolving Boundaries in the Fantastic

Transitions and Dissolving Boundaries in the Fantastic PDF Author: Christine Lötscher
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643801858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
By creating hybrid zones of autonomy, the 'fantastic' - a subgenre of literary works - provides alternatives to conventional understandings of the world, knowledge, or identity. The fantastic raises a number of significant questions about cultural and social developments, and challenges existing boundaries. With regard to fantastic fiction in literature and different media representations, the articles in this volume explore: crossings into other worlds, time travel, metamorphoses, hybrid creatures, and a variety of other transitions and transgressions. The book analyzes hybrid genres, inter-media adaptations, transpositions into new media, as well as various forms of crossover as exemplified in the increasing trend of generation-spanning all-age literature. (Series: Research in the Fantastic / Fantastikforschung - Vol. 2)

The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature

The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature PDF Author: Patricia García
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030837769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature explores transnational perspectives of modern city life in Europe by engaging with the fantastic tropes and metaphors used by writers of short fiction. Focusing on the literary city and literary representations of urban experience throughout the nineteenth century, the works discussed incorporate supernatural occurrences in a European city and the supernatural of these stories stems from and belongs to the city. The argument is structured around three primary themes. “Architectures”, “Encounters” and “Rhythms” make reference to three axes of city life: material space, human encounters, and movement. This thematic approach highlights cultural continuities and thus supports the use of the label of “urban fantastic” within and across the European traditions studied here.

Space(s) of the Fantastic

Space(s) of the Fantastic PDF Author: David Punter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000299724
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This book provides a series of new addresses to the enduring problem of how to categorize the Fantastic. The approach taken is through the lens of spatiality; the Fantastic gives us new worlds, although of course these are refractions of worlds already in being. In place of ‘real’ spaces (whatever they might be), the Fantastic gives us imaginary spaces, although within those spaces historical and cultural conflicts are played out, albeit in forms that stretch our understanding of everyday location, and our usual interpretations of cause and effect. Many authors are addressed here, from a variety of different geographical and national traditions, thus demonstrating how the Fantastic - as a mode, a genre, a way of thinking, imagining and writing - continually traverses borders and boundaries. We hope to move the ongoing debate about the Fantastic forward in a scholarly as well as an engaging way.