The Shape of Fantasy is an in-depth look at Heroic Epic Fantasy. It depicts structural and narrative patterns with models stemming from science and philosophy. Although Fantasy Fiction is generally defined by its impossibility, Fantasy Fiction not an illogical form. It is, in fact, governed by a sense of rules and structure, one that reflects our current understanding of space-time and cosmology. These models are an integral part of the structure of Heroic Epic Fantasy itself. Thus, this book introduces new ways of perceiving current productions of the Fantasy genre. In doing so, it also explores how Fantasy Fiction exhibits a conscious awareness of its own form.

Fiction. Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Film. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Part exegesis on Nobuhiko Obayashi's film HOUSE and part meditation on the ineffable specters that inhabit homes and ancestral histories, FANTASY is a daughter's story of her Vietnamese mother and their twin journeys towards belonging with one another and in the world. Where exilic, inherited memory encounters its limits, FANTASY reaches towards cult cinematic atmospheres, irreverent flowers, pop culture, and photographs with no images, making for a reading experience like no other. "Schreiber uses the fabric of cinema and horror to quasi-measure the length and width of her pre-adolescent and adolescent consciousness. It's a GORGEOUS dress that the ghost in her psyche demands that it wears before falling into ash. Here, in these immolatable, scriptive dialogues with all of her consanguineous, anecdotal, exegetical selves ('who become shoes without feet that walk back and forth' in a house that eats like hungry ghosts), her psyche is cut, recut, uncut, though not forgotten, un-linearly and nonchalantly and numerously, by her relationship to film and her relationship with her Vietnamese mother, surrogated mother in grandmother(s) and auntie(s). ... As Kim-Anh Schreiber seeks closure with the uncloseable, we see an acutely talented scholar and inventive memoirist." --Vi Khi Nao. "'Schreiber, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee and a German immigrant, combines recognizable modes--memoir, criticism, dramatic play script--into something as uncategorizable as the film she deploys throughout the book as muse and foil: Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 post-Hiroshima 'horror-comedy' HOUSE, in which generations of women are trapped together in a haunted house. Beginning with extended considerations of the instability of memory ('an evocative curator'), of the 'impossible problem of drawing a picture,' and of the pull to use projection and doubling as bridges across gaps in experience and understanding, FANTASY finally resolves into a flickering, unstable but vivid portrait of a mother and daughter both separated and bonded by history, violence, human fallibility, and love." --Anna Moschovakis

From the national bestselling author of The Samaria Trilogy...this is the novel that launched Sharon Shinn's career and inspired Peter S. Beagle to call her "the most original writer of fantasy since Robin McKinley." Aubrey was a student of the fine art of wizardry. But the more knowledge he acquired, the more he wanted to learn. He traveled in search of the greatest master of all, the gifted shape-changer Glyrenden. From him, Aubrey expected to discover the secret of long-lost spells and the mysteries of arcane magic. But there was one discovery he never expected, a mystery he risked every thing to solve. Her name was Lilith...

Grotesques, angels, Beast-Man, and the Medusa are among the marvelous cast of characters analyzed in this volume. Originally presented at the 7th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts held in 1986, these essays are stimulating responses by scholars to a range of creative works by Mark Strand, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kafka, Tolkein, Henry James, Julio Cortazar, Sherwood Anderson, Ursula Le Guin, I.B. Singer, Joyce, and others. Examining both mainstream and fantasy literature from many nations, the authors zero-in on the myriad shapes of the fantastic and study the world of SF and film. Five sections treat the fantastic from various enlightening perspectives and seven figures illustrate the essays' provocative theses. In Part I, Discovery and Interpretation, five authors sleuth out surprising elements of fantasy in poetry, short fiction, and a neo-Romantic fairy tale. Also in Part I, an inquiry is made of fantasy in the post-modernist movement. The Inexplicable Reality of Part II refers to deaths that are anything but terminal and four essays chronicle fantastic occurrences whose scientific rationale is tenuous at best. The fifth article traces the elusiveness of fantasy in a number of authors and works. Beast-Man, angels, the Medusa, and other Marvelous Beings are the subject of six essays in Part III. In Part IV, Fantasy in Symbiosis with other Forms, six essays consider the combination of fantasy with murder mystery, with taoism, with the symbolism of the tarot, with Freudian dreams, and with other genres. In the final section, From Fantasy to Science Fiction: Critical Considerations, essays address fantasy and Science Fiction in film, present a discussion between 2 critics of science fiction, and view the history and development of the contemporary SF novel. Series Editor Marshall B. Tymn's selected bibliography of criticism on the fantastic supplements the bibliographies that follow each essay and completes this remarkable work: fascinating reading for generalists; a necessity for students and scholars, aestheticians and critics of the fantasy and SF genres in literature, film, and art.

Prompting is the thematic thread that pervades the pages of this book. Its primary connotation is that of the prompter who is urgently called into action, at moments of anxiety, when narrative begins to fail. The central dynamic issue concerns the amending imagination as a prompting resource which, through creativity and the aesthetic imperative, can be invoked in this therapeutic space when the patient - through fear, resistance or distraction - is unable to continue with his story. Psychotherapy can be regarded as a process in which the patient is enabled to do for himself what he cannot do on his own. Shakespeare - as the spokesman for all other poets and dramatists - prompts the therapist in the incessant search for those resonant rhythms and mutative metaphors which augment empathy and make for deeper communication and which also facilitates transference interpretation and resolution. The cadence of the spoken word and the different laminations of silence always call for more finely tuned attentiveness than the therapist, unprompted, can offer. The authors show how Shakespeare can prompt therapeutic engagement with "inaccessible" patients who might otherwise be out of therapeutic reach. At the same time, they demonstrate that the clinical, off-stage world of therapy can also prompt the work of the actor in his on-stage search for representational precision.

An exciting and accessible study of the genre of fantasy. One of the dominant modes of storytelling in the twenty-first century, fantasy can mirror contemporary experiences and convey our anxieties and longings better than any representation of the merely real. It is the lie that speaks truth. This book addresses two central questions about fantastic storytelling: first, how can it be meaningful if it doesn't claim to represent things as they are, and second, what kind of change can it make in the world? How can a form of storytelling that alters physical laws and denies facts about the past be at the same time a source of insight into human nature and the workings of the world? What kind of social, political, cultural, intellectual work does fantasy perform in the world—the world of the reader, that is, not that of the characters? Focusing on various aspects of fantastic world-building and story creation in classic and contemporary fantasy, from the use of symbolic structures to the way new stories incorporate bits of significance from earlier texts, this book shows how fantasy allows writers such as Michael Cunningham, Hans Christian Anderson, Helene Wecker, C. S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, George MacDonald, Aliette deBodard, and Patricia Wrightson to test new modes of understanding and interaction and thus to rethink political institutions, social practices, and models of reality.

Studies of genocide and mass atrocity most often focus on their causes and consequences, their aims and effects, and the number of people killed. But if the main goal is death, why is torture necessary? By understanding how and why mass violence occurs and the reasons for its variations, The Macabresque aims to explain why so many seemingly normal or "ordinary" people participate in mass atrocity across cultures and why such egregious violence occurs repeatedly through history.