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.

By revealing the facts behind the fiction of some of the finest films in the sci-fi genre, "Fantastic Voyages" offers a novel approach to teaching science: using scenes from science fiction films to illustrate fundamental concepts of physics, astronomy, and biology.

Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.

Winner, 2022 Children's Literature Association Book Award, given by the Children's Literature Association Winner, 2020 World Fantasy Awards Winner, 2020 British Fantasy Awards, Nonfiction Finalist, Creative Nonfiction IGNYTE Award, given by FIYACON for BIPOC+ in Speculative Fiction 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.”

Fantastic fiction is traditionally understood as Western genre literature such as fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Expanding on this understanding, these essays explore how the fantastic has been used in Western societies since the Middle Ages as a tool for organizing and materializing abstractions in order to make sense of the present social order. Disciplines represented here include literature studies, gender studies, biology, ethnology, archeology, history, religion, game studies, cultural sociology, and film studies. Individual essays cover topics such as the fantastic creatures of medieval chronicle, mummy medicine in eighteenth-century Sweden, how fears of disease filtered through the universal and adaptable vampire, the gender aspects of goddess worship in the secular West, ecocentrism in fantasy fiction, how videogames are dealing with the remediation of heritage, and more.

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 Religious Narrative from Exodus to Elisha argues that perspectives drawn from literary-critical theories of the fantastic and fantasy are apt to explore Hebrew Bible religious narratives. The book focuses on the narratives' marvels, monsters, and magic, rather than whether or not the stories depict historical events. The Exodus narrative (Ex 1-18) and a selection of additional Hebrew Bible narratives (Num 11-14, Judg 6-8, 1 Kings 17-19, 2 Kings 4-7) are analysed from a fantasy-theoretical perspective. The 'fantasy perspective' helps to make sense of elements of these narratives that - although prominently featured in the stories - have previously often been explained by being explained away. These case studies can illuminate Hebrew Bible religion and offer wider perspectives on religious narrative generally. In light of the fantasy-theoretical approach, these Hebrew Bible stories - with the Exodus narrative at the centre - read not as foundational stories, affirming triumphantly and unambiguously the bond between the deity, his people, and their territory, but rather as texts that harbour and even actively encourage ambiguity and uncertainty, not necessarily prompting belief, orientation, and a sense of meaningfulness, but also open-ended reflection and doubt. The case studies suggest that other religious narratives, both in and beyond the Judaic tradition, may also be amenable to interpretation in these terms, thus questioning a dominant trend in myth studies. The results of the analyses lead to a discussion of the role of ambiguity, uncertainty, and transformation in religious narrative in broader perspective, and to a questioning of the emphasis in the study of religion on the capacity of religious narrative for founding and maintaining institutions, orienting identity, and defending order over disorder. The book suggests the wider importance of incorporating destabilisation, disorientation, and ambiguity more strongly into theories of what religious narrative is and does.