The Fantastic in Literature

The Fantastic in Literature PDF Author: Eric S. Rabkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400870798
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
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, from Childhood's End to the novels of Henry James, from Voltaire to Robbe-Grillet to A 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 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.

The Fantastic in Literature

The Fantastic in Literature PDF Author: Eric S. Rabkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400870798
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
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, from Childhood's End to the novels of Henry James, from Voltaire to Robbe-Grillet to A 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 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover 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.

Basic Categories of Fantastic Literature Revisited

Basic Categories of Fantastic Literature Revisited PDF Author: Joanna Matyjaszczyk
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443871435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
A unique collection of essays on selected aspects of science-fiction, fantasy and broadly understood fantastic literature, unified by a highly theoretical focus, this volume offers an overview of the most important theories pertaining to the field of the fantastic, such as Tzvetan Todorov's definition of the term itself, J.R.R. Tolkien's essay 'On Fairy Stories,' and the concept of 'Gothic space'. The composition and order of the chapters provide the reader with a systematic overview of major...

The Fantastic

The Fantastic PDF Author: Tzvetan Todorov
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801491467
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between idea and fact. His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory. As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aurélia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Susan Napier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134803354
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Modern Japan's repressed anxieties, fears and hopes come to the surface in the fantastic. A close analysis of fantasy fiction, film and comics reveals the ambivalence felt by many Japanese towards the success story of the nation in the twentieth century. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature explores the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. It takes in the nightmarish future depicted in the animated film masterpiece, Akira, and the pastoral dream worlds created by Japan's Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo. A wide range of fantasists, many discussed here in English for the first time, form the basis for a ground-breaking analysis of utopias, dystopias, the disturbing relationship between women, sexuality and modernity, and the role of the alien in the fantastic.

The Dark Fantastic

The Dark Fantastic PDF Author: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479806072
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
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.”

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore PDF Author: William Joyce
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442464895
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description
The book that inspired the Academy Award–winning short film, from New York Times bestselling author and beloved visionary William Joyce. Morris Lessmore loved words. He loved stories. He loved books. But every story has its upsets. Everything in Morris Lessmore’s life, including his own story, is scattered to the winds. But the power of story will save the day. Stunningly brought to life by William Joyce, one of the preeminent creators in children’s literature, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a modern masterpiece, showing that in today’s world of traditional books, eBooks, and apps, it’s story that we truly celebrate—and this story, no matter how you tell it, begs to be read again and again.

Evaporating Genres

Evaporating Genres PDF Author: Gary K. Wolfe
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819569372
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A series of provocative essays on how the fantastic genres evolve and grow In this wide-ranging series of essays, an award-winning science fiction critic explores how the related genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror evolve, merge, and finally "evaporate" into new and more dynamic forms. Beginning with a discussion of how literary readers "unlearned" how to read the fantastic during the heyday of realistic fiction, Gary K. Wolfe goes on to show how the fantastic reasserted itself in popular genre literature, and how these genres themselves grew increasingly unstable in terms of both narrative form and the worlds they portray. More detailed discussions of how specific contemporary writers have promoted this evolution are followed by a final essay examining how the competing discourses have led toward an emerging synthesis of critical approaches and vocabularies. The essays cover a vast range of authors and texts, and include substantial discussions of very current fiction published within the last few years.

Fantasy

Fantasy PDF Author: Rosemary Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136493123
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

Reading the Fantastic Imagination

Reading the Fantastic Imagination PDF Author: Dana Percec
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443862975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The purpose of Reading the Fantastic Imagination: The Avatars of a Literary Genre is the observation of the very hybridity of the fantastic genre, as a typical postmodern form. The volume continues an older project of the editor and a large number of the contributors, that of investigating the current status of several popular genres, from historical fiction to romance. The scrutiny continues in this third volume, dedicated to the fantastic imagination and the plethora of themes, moods, media, and formats deriving from it. FanLit is surely trendy, even if it is not highbrow, despite its noble ancestry. This apparent paradox characterizes many of the literary genres en vogue today, from historical fiction to romance. This very contradiction forms part of the basis for this book. After the success of the previous book in the series dedicated to a “borderline” literary genre – Romance: The History of a Genre was declared by Cambridge Scholars Publishing as the Critics’ Choice Book of the Month in January 2013 – this collection of studies about the fantastic imagination takes a further step into completing a larger research project which seeks to investigate the varieties of popular fiction. Although all contributors in the series teach canonical literary texts, they did not hesitate to plunge into the opposite area of fictional work and, moreover, continued doing so even though such a project caused the “raise of a few (high)brows,” (Percec 2012, 232) as argued in the Endnote of Romance: The History of a Genre.

Fantasticism

Fantasticism PDF Author: Fanfan Chen
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Inspired by a universal, cross-cultural vision, this book provides a comparative analysis of the rhetorical and stylistic features in fantastic literature effortlessly crossing the boundaries of cultures, languages and epochs to explore their literary manifestations of the unknown. According to the author, fantastic literature conveys a form of storytelling whose poeticization bridges the known and the unknown realms (in Gilbert Durand's mythocritical, transcendental sense). The author's scope ranges from ancient myths to contemporary literature and addresses developments in Chinese literature and the Greco-Roman fantastic tradition as well as English, French, German and Hispanic literatures. The encyclopaedic breadth and depth of her work responds to the long-felt need for a comparative approach to fantastic literature, bridging Eastern and Western traditions.