Functions of the Fantastic

Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

Joseph L. Sanders

• Publisher: Praeger
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN:
  9780313295218
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780313368448
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Recent Trends in the Contemporary American Fairy Tale
• 2. De-Radicalizing Pinocchio
• 3. Reinscribing Cinderella: Jane Austen and the Fairy Tale
• 4. Shoring Fragments: How CBS's Beauty and the Beast Adapts Consensus Reality to Shape Its Magical World
• 5. The Corpse in the Dung Cart: The Night-Side of Nature and the Victorian Supernatural Tale
• 6. Reader Response and Fantasy Literature: The Uses and Abuses of Interpretation in Queen Victoria's Alice in Wonderland
• 7. Gautier, Freud, and the Fantastic: Psychoanalysis avant la lettre?
• 8. Love and Automata: From Hoffmann to Lem and from Freud to Kristeva
• 9. The Company We Keep: Comic Function in M. G. Lewis's The Monk
• 10. “A World of Glas”: The Heroine’s Quest for Identity in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Mirror of Her Dreams
• 11. What about Bob? Doubles and Demons in Twin Peaks
• 12. Duality, Reality, and Magic in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• 13. Oliphaunts in the Perilous Realm: The Function of Internal Wonder in Fantasy
• 14. Criminal Artists and Artisans in Mysteries by E.T.A. Hoffman, Dorothy Sayers, Ernesto Sábato, Patrick Süskind, and Thomas Harris
• 15. The Craft of the Fantastic in Anatole France’s La Révolte des anges
• 16. Sally Johnson: Paperworks
• 17. Culture as Spiritual Metaphor in Le Guin’s Always Coming Home
• 18. Assuming the Present in SF: Sartre in a New Dimension
• 19. Finding One’s Place in the Fantastic: Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising
• 20. Carter and Blake: The Dangers of Innocence
• 21. Travels in Hyperreality: Jean Baudrillard’s America and J. G. Ballard’s Hello America
• 22. The Men Who Walked on the Moon: Images of America in the “New Wave” Science Fiction of the 1960s and 1970s
• 23. The Closing of the Final Frontier: Science Fiction after 1960
• Index
• About the Editor and Contributors