Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

by Joseph L. Sanders

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313295218
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/14/1995
Series:	Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy , #65
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

JOE SANDERS is Professor of English at Lakeland Community College, Mentor, Ohio. He is author of Roger Zelazny: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography and E.E. (Doc) Smith, and editor of Science Fiction Fandom (Greenwood, 1994). He is president of the Science Fiction Research Association.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Joe Sanders
Recent Trends in the Contemporary American Fairy Tale by Jack Zipes
De-Radicalizing Pinocchio by Richard Wunderlich
Reinscribing Cinderella: Jane Austen and the Fairy Tale by Norma Rowen
Shoring Fragments: How Beauty and the Beast Adapts Consensus Reality to Shape Its Magical World by Dennis O'Brien
The Corpse in the Dung Cart: The Night-Side of Nature and the Victorian Supernatural Tale by Robert F. Geary
Reader Response and Fantasy Literature: The Uses and Abuses of Interpretation in Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland by John Pennington
Gautier, Freud, and the Fantastic: Psychoanalysis avant la lettre? by Nigel E. Smith
Love and Automata: From Hoffman to Lem and From Freud to Kristeva by Miglena Nikolchina
The Company We Keep: Comic Function in M. G. Lewis' The Monk by Gareth M. Euridge
"Worlds of glass": The Heroine's Quest for Identity in Spenser's Fairie Queene and Stephen R. Donaldson's Mirror of Her Dreams by Laurel L. Hendrix
What About Bob? Doubles and Demons in Twin Peaks by Nancy Buffington
The Silent Audience "al stounded" in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Elements of the Fantastic in Medieval Romance by Barbara Kline
Oliphaunts in the Perilous Realm: The Function of Internal Wonder in Fantasy by William Senior
Criminal Artists and Artisans in Mysteries by E. T. A. Hoffman, Dorothy Sayers, Ernesto Sábato, Patrick Suskind, and Thomas Harris by Edith Borchardt
The Craft of the Fantastic in Anatole France's La Révolte des anges by Juliette Gilman
Sally Johnson: Paperworks by Dorothy Joiner
Culture as Spiritual Metaphor in Le Guin's Always Going Home by Sarah Webb
Assuming the Present in SF: Sartre in a New Dimension by Bud Foote
Finding One's Place in the Fantastic: Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising by Valerie Krips
Carter and Blake: The Dangers of Innocence by Mary Y. Hallab
Travels in Hyperreality: Jean Baudrillard's America and J. G. Ballard's Hello America by Veronica Hollinger
The Men Who Walked on the Moon: Images of America in "New Wave" Science Fiction of the 1960s and 1970s by Rob Latham
The Closing of the Final Frontier: Science Fiction after 1960 by Brian Attebery