American Fantasy Research Articles

The End of Ends

This paper assesses the conceptual and technological negotiation of an absolute end. The idea of a total ending is sublime: it is located outside of language and powerful precisely because of its sheer incomprehensibility. Yet, through the 20th century the United States built large-scale technological systems capable of achieving an absolute end to civilization. This paper engages both the idea of an end, and the means to an end, informing US nuclear strategy. It begins with an assessment of Cold War nuclear war plans that, if enacted, would certainly have eliminated most, if not all, life on Earth. I then examine how this expert fixation on nuclear crisis was itself circumscribed by new technological systems—notably secret space satellites that provided images of Earth in its totality as well as a vital check on the American projections of Soviet power. The exploration of outer space was thus a crucial means of checking American fantasies of an imminent and total danger, establishing a new limit on thought while opening up the possibility of an “end of ends” in the nuclear age.

Claiming the Passion: American Fantasies of the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1923–1947

In 1934 the third centennial celebration of Oberammergau's famous passion play coincided with Adolph Hitler's rise to power. For American Jews, the Oberammergau Passion Play had long symbolized the Christian roots of Anti-Semitism. Ironically, American Jews' liberal Protestant allies viewed Oberammergau as a symbol of Christian ecumenism, capable of uniting Protestants, Catholics, and even Jews. “Claiming the Passion” traces Oberammergau in the rhetoric of American liberals from the American tour of Anton Lang, who portrayed the Christus in 1923, to his successor's trial for Nazi sympathies in 1947. It places the conflicting Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant views of Oberammergau in the context of the early goodwill or interfaith movement. It argues that liberal Protestants' enthusiasm for Oberammergau arose from their effort to articulate a more inclusive national identity, in opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and other nativists. But the conflicts over Oberammergau also suggest that liberal Protestants had not yet come to terms with Jewish critiques of Christian Anti-Judaism.

Review: Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema, by José B. Capino

Book Review| May 01 2011 Review: Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema, by José B. Capino DREAM FACTORIES OF A FORMER COLONY: AMERICAN FANTASIES, PHILIPPINE CINEMA BY JOSÉ B. CAPINO. UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2010/320pp./$25.00 (SB) Catherine E. Bailey Catherine E. Bailey CATHERINE E. BAILEY is a graduate student at the University of Rochester. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2011) 38 (6): 40–41. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2011.38.6.40 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Catherine E. Bailey; Review: Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema, by José B. Capino. Afterimage 1 May 2011; 38 (6): 40–41. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2011.38.6.40 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Material women, 1750-1950: consuming desires and collecting practices

Contents: Introduction: consumption as a gendered social practice, Beth Fowkes Tobin Consuming Desires: 'The things I so indispensably needed': material objects as a reflection of Mary Shelley's life, Pamela Siska Material women: the department-store fashion poster in Paris, 1880-1900, Ruth E. Iskin Nostalgic appetites: female desire and wartime rationing in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts and Noel Streatfield's Saplings, Andrea Adolph. Home and Consumption: A touch of distinction: furnishing French aristocratic homes in the 19th and 20th centuries, Elizabeth C. Macknight 'Novel and ingenious': innovative graphic arts in the women's magazines of the 1840s and the construction of middle-class taste, Cynthia Patterson The woman's paradise: the American fantasy, home appliances, and consumer demand in liberation France, Rebecca J. Pulju Talking points: advertising female telephone identity, Emily Bills. Dress: Gendered and Political Identities: Trans-coding nationalism: subjectivity and military themes in Regency women's dress, Ellen Kennedy Johnson 'The beauty of her hands': the glove and the making of middle-class body, Ariel Beaujot Made for maharanis: aesthetics of courtly women in colonial princely India, Angma D. Jhala Harmony and concealment: how Chinese women fashioned the qipao in 1930s China, Wessie Ling Women, clothing and politics in Senegal in the 1940s-1950s, Dior Konate. Collecting, Displaying, and Creating Value: The duchess's shells: natural history collecting, gender, and scientific practice, Beth Fowkes Tobin Woman of letters: Elizabeth Gaskell's autograph collection and Victorian celebrity, Pamela Corpron Parker The women of Liulichang: female collectors and bibliophiles in the late Qing, Shana J. Brown Japanese objects in Impressionist women's art: collecting culture and creating identity, Jennifer T. Criss The female past and modernity: displaying women and things in New Zealand department stores, expositions, and museums, 192

“As the Fashion in Books Shifted”: The Beautiful and Damned as Arc-Light Fiction

Those who acknowledge any relationship between Hollywood film and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction generally confine themselves to claiming either that Hollywood’s demands and seductions interfered with Fitzgerald’s already strained efforts to write “serious” fiction or that Hollywood studios have mostly botched their adaptations of his work.1 However, The Beautiful and Damned (1922) shows that the relationship between film and Fitzgerald’s fiction is more complicated and more important than generally acknowledged both for his work and, more broadly, for fiction written during the cultural ascendancy of Hollywood film. Although in recent decades scholars have generally seen The Beautiful and Damned as a tonally incoherent, failed novel and therefore have given it relatively little attention, I would argue that its very tonal incoherence actually makes it worth studying.2 Once one understands film’s previously unacknowledged but crucial role in provoking and conditioning that incoherence, one can recognize the unappreciated extent to which Hollywood film shaped Fitzgerald’s “serious” fiction beginning quite early in his career. Indeed, as a hyper-precise representational medium, as a purveyor of American fantasies, as a codified array of formal devices, and as a growing cultural power, Hollywood film not only structures the thematic and diegetic registers of The Beautiful and Damned but also significantly shapes its literary techniques. Though this article focuses on The Beautiful and Damned, film’s influence both on Fitzgerald’s technique and on the habits of vision shaping his technique have much broader implications for the study of American fiction. If indeed film did open up new modernism / modernity

Toward a Poetics of Asian American Fantasy: Laurence Yep's Construction of a Bicultural Mythology

This article reads the fantasy work of Laurence Yep as initiating a new genre, Asian American fantasy, which draws upon the beauties of each separate generic tradition while broadening their boundaries. Yep's fantasies unite the concerns and characteristics of Asian American literature with those of fantasy. He posits a way in which fantasy, a white-dominant genre, may move toward greater multiculturalism, even while he infuses elements of magic into Asian American literature. By so doing, he continues and melds the dynamic evolution of each genre.

Consuming Desires: Melancholia and Consumption in Blu's Hanging

The controversy surrounding the Association for Asian American Studies' decision to award its 1998 fiction prize to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging was a watershed moment in the field of Asian American studies. At issue was Yamanaka's depiction of the novel's libidinous villain, the Filipino American Uncle Paolo, since several members of the Asian American community criticized Yamanaka--and AAAS--for reproducing, rewarding, and thereby reaffirming a stereotypical portrait of a sexually-charged Filipino American predator. Following several protests, AAAS rescinded the prize, a decision that attracted publicity to the dispute and added to the growing debate within the field. In the aftermath of the controversy, however, Yamanaka's novel came to occupy a curious position in Asian American studies. While still criticized for its questionable politics, Blu's Hanging continues to be taught in Asian American studies classes, and both the novel and the dissent it provoked among critics have been discussed in several recent articles and monographs on Asian American literature. (1) Most recently, Crystal Parikh has proposed that alternative readings of the novel might be explored through the idea of racial a concept that focuses on the complex and circular task of negotiating grief; yet she argues that the characters' seemingly uncontrollable of various alimentary and cultural products can only fail to compensate (202) for loss. The relationship between consumption and melancholia, however, is not solely negative, as demonstrated by the divergent ways that the characters' melancholia is informed by consumption and the manner in which this consumption lends itself to a melancholia that can be both socially productive and politically reactionary, or socially conservative but politically subversive. A reading of consumption into Blu's Hanging is particularly salient because the continued consumption and reinterpretation of the novel in Asian American criticism suggests that Blu's Hanging has come to manifest or exemplify an alternately idealized and demonized narrative of a particular image of Asian America--a circular, self-reflexive process that might itself be considered melancholic. Just as the novel contains characters who try to get over their losses and those who cling adamantly to the painful past, its readers (and the Asian American community in general) may be divided between those who consume the book and eagerly celebrate its teleological resolution, and those who remember the pain--whether depicted in the novel or elicited by it--viscerally, and refuse to forget. From the opening lines of the first chapter, Blu's Hanging asserts an explicit link between acts of consumption and the process of mourning. Images of food and eating are juxtaposed with descriptions of the Ogata family's grief at the recent death of wife and mother Eleanor, whose absence causes the bottomless hunger and cravings (12) in her only son, Blu. Although his older sister Ivah unsuccessfully attempts to serve as her mother's surrogate by providing meals for the family, neither the extravagance of Blu's eating nor the resourcefulness exhibited by Ivah's poor cooking can adequately ease the pain caused by Eleanor's death. This pattern of melancholic consumption, repeated throughout the novel, traces the characters' attempts to deal with the inconsolable psychic loss made manifest in both the private dysfunction of the Ogata household and the social breakdown of the larger Kaunakakai community. Yamanaka's depiction of the violence, poverty, and cruelty of this local society works to contradict the myth of the idyllic island paradise and multiculturalist utopia of mainland American (and Asian American) fantasies; (2) in this context, the constant and repetitive consumption of food, medicines, and cultural products reveals the way that the novel's protagonists become consumers as a means of negotiating subjectivity within the boundaries of a society defined by the prior loss of an idealized past. …

Against France: An American Novelistic Fantasy

There is a geography of the American Jewish novel that takes one farther afield from New York City than might have been intuitively expected. Consider the two writers who will be the focus of these pages. From the time of The Ghost Writer (1979), Philip Roth has been pre-eminently a novelist of the western Massachusetts region known as the Berkshires. His most recent major work, The Human Stain, is set in an imaginary campus in the Berkshires, stages a memorable visit to the nearby summer home of the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, and comes to something of a tragic climax in one of the area's principal towns, Pittsfield. Somewhat further north, Saul Bellow has never concealed his pleasure in repairing to ‘the good place’, Vermont. Ravelstein, Bellow's most recent novel, features a few scenes in neighboring New Hampshire, but the Bellow afficionado immediately recognizes in that venue a transposition of the author's cherished ‘good place’, where the ‘dew takes up every particle of light, Vermont. Our point of departure will be equidistant between the two, between the Berkshires and the Green Mountains, in the sleepy town just over the Massachusetts border into Vermont, Bennington. It is a writerly community: W. H. Auden taught at the local college; Robert Frost is buried there. Yet it is an improbable work of visual art, the allegorical sculpture standing before the local art museum, and more particularly the allegory unwittingly staged by its effort at allegory, along with its heuristic value for a reading of both The Human Stain and Ravelstein, that will be the focus of these comments.

Kiddie lit: the cultural construction of children's literature in America

Contents: 1. Kids and Kiddie Lit 2. What Fauntleroy Knew 3. Kiddie Lit in the Academy 4. The Case of the Boy's Book: Whitewashing Huck 5. The Case of the Girl's Book: Jo's Girls 6. The Case of American Fantasy: There's No Place Like Oz 7. The Case of British Fantasy Imports: Alice and Harry in America 8. The Case of the Disney Version

Vietnam and other American fantasies

This work is a cultural history of the Vietnam War and its continuing impact upon contemporary American society. The author presents an investigation of how myths about the war evolved and why people depend on them to answer the confusing questions that have become the legacy of the war. Memories change and reconstruct the past, and in this text, the author argues that the American memory of Vietnam has left fact and experience behind so that what remains is myth and denial.

Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

Poor dear. There's nothing between his ears.. So Margaret Thatcher described Ronald Reagan. But the Iron Lady, when in the poor dear's presence, giggled like a schoolgirl. One could not talk to him for more than a few minutes without being aware of the ordinariness of his mind, says Helmut Schmidt. And Mikhail Gorbachev, deconstructor of communism, is now despised by his people, while the most popular new boys' name in the former USSR is Ronald. Indisputably Ronald Reagan the everyday person was opaque, pedestrian, ignorant, a hollow man now he is incapacitated by Alzheimers. Yet, as President, Governor, Actor, Announcer, and Lifeguard Ronald Reagan became a creature of the American folk imagination with the power to tap into vast resources of nostalgia in the American people. He is a myth; the sum total of all American fantasies. It is this Reagan that is the subject of this text.

Gender-Deviancy and Crime: An American Fantasy

The political usefulness of such terms as “domesticity” has changed since the 1950s. Nonetheless, some elements have remained stable over the decades. Of particular interest is the continued use of fear in public representations to create and to stabilize the domestic space. This essay considers several crime narratives of domestic intrusion, written at successive points in this period, and concludes with the Andrew Cunanan coverage, examining how different narratives of criminal intimacy exploit similar codes of failed gender. The essay argues that the crisis announced by the serial killer is less about killing than about the perceived disarray of cultural intimacies and the collapse of the public/private binary that these govern.

The Silent Man's Voice in "The Statue of Liberty"

The Silent Man’s Voice in “The Statue of Liberty” Claude Julien (bio) “Stories are like onions. You peel one skin and another grins up at you.” John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong (61) “The Statue of Liberty” is a programmatic title. Give the reader only that to go by and an icon of America’s self-congratulation may offer itself. Add the author’s name or, if you are first approaching his work, his picture on the back cover and that initial program may be redirected into the consciousness that the statue’s torch also casts shadows onto this ideal world, perhaps, to some extent, points them out. But such a program is only in the mind, and a different strain rises from the page as the story creates its own path away from prefabricated guesses. Put in a few words, “The Statue of Liberty” deals with American fantasies of interracial sex. John Wideman does not treat this theme in the hilarious manner of Cecil D. Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. Nor is there any sardonic signifying such as in Hal Bennett’s Lord of the Dark Places or Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Those fictions bear the stamp of the Blaxploitation era. “The Statue of Liberty” is more intemporal. There is humor in it but contained by the grave and sedate tone it assumes to present its concern for the black man’s status. This essay will try to delve into the textual strategy of a story that opens like a bland narration and builds its way to an unwritten question, yet one repeated three times (perhaps once for each shadow of a character) in the shape of the “Y” pattern the three chairs have been disposed in on the unfinished patio. The Statue of Liberty is an infrequent visitor in John Wideman’s fiction. However, it does come up in Philadelphia Fire as “the bitch wit the torch” (80) and much more signally in a passage of Hurry Home 1 that must be brought up here if only because it happens to associate the statue with sex. Cecil Braithwaite’s departure for Europe tests the reader’s need to cast anchor in the referential world while a merciless poetic logic sweeps his mind out to sea, the way Cecil is put afloat when the land leaves the ship. The young traveler’s qualms (“do all journeys commence with such questioning, such tumult and confusion”), the text’s teeming “formless profusion” and the taunting “significance to be deciphered” come together in a passage that globally offers itself as a trope for Cecil’s existential anguish. The text erases punctuation, plays upon the signified and the signifier, jumbles the metaphorical and the metonymic, blurs the [End Page 740] realistic bearings that stabilize reading such as when “Handle with care, with fragility. Made in Japan. Maid in Germany. Union maid” leads, through an allusion to Wallace Stevens twenty lines or so further down, to “the tall lady with an upraised ice cream cone toasting the emperor.” Hurry Home’s derision of the symbolic torch lighting the way to the gate of freedom happens to be ushered in by the embrace, the passionate-sex-on-the-deck-before-departure (but who knows, as the liner already is on its way to the open sea?) of an anonymous couple. Cecil is confused, out of place, whatever he may think to the contrary. He is an educated young man whose head has been crammed full of literary knowledge (even some Old English) not necessarily relevant to the life opening before him as a black lawyer. T.S. Eliot’s foggy dangerous world of “The Dry Salvages” is present through the tolling harbor buoys defining the navigable channel. But so is Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” through the allusion to geological times. As Jacqueline Berben suggests in her unpublished dissertation (221–23), there are other leads to grasp at to reconstruct the racial overtones Cecil’s existential anguish carries. The rusty knell of the buoys doubles into bell boys, and the horn’s shriek “Bee Ohh” suggests B.O., the 1950s body odor advertisement for...

Somewhat Like Us

For two different sorts of tourists there are two dramatically different nightmares about Europe. The first is ages old and teeming with surly French waiters, incomprehensible languages, uncomfortable and cold hotels, bizarre plumbing, crowded trains, and unrecognizable food. To others there is the frightening vision of a Europe lying supine before an American invasion of vulgarity: marauding legions of hamburger patties and tidal waves of CocaCola. For those Americans and Europeans who want Europe to be different, the seductions of American mass culture, from action films to Baywatch, fast food to rock 'n roll, are a grand and bitter disappointment. Richard Pells understands these reactions well, although it is the latter that he finds most interesting and important. In assessing what Americanization means and how it has affected various European societies, he has written a superbly sensible and intelligent essay. And his conclusion is a surprise: despite the amazing changes in European society since 1945, it has not become just like us-the Golden Arches and Euro Disney to the contrary notwithstanding. Who has a stake in this debate about difference; where does the concern come from; and why is it so powerful and persistent? There are, first of all, tourists who voyage to Europe in search of difference and quaintness-for the experience of being not-American. This is a complicated gesture based as much on American fantasies, popular culture, and nostalgia as anything else. As with tourists everywhere the differences are often planned, stereotyped, and controlled. Too much difference would be incomprehensible and frightening; too little would make Europe appear too American. For very different reasons, there are other groups that wish to make Europe more American. On occasion, as after World War II in Germany, American policy was designed to transform German values and political institutions into practice derived from the American experience. This democratic instruction was sometimes even projected into relations with other European countries during the Cold War years. Still other groups, particularly in the business community, hoped to

The Wiseacres shall like it as well as the children

The Wiseacres Shall Like It as Well as the Children Anne K. Phillips Greta D. Little and Joel Myerson, eds. Three Children’s Novels by Christopher Pearse Cranch. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993. As the 1989 publication of Mark West’s Before Oz: Juvenile Fantasy Stories from Nineteenth-Century America would indicate, scholars of American children’s literature are currently engaged in the task of identifying American fantasy prior to L. Frank Baum’s landmark The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). However, West’s anthology contains only an excerpt from Christopher Pearse Cranch’s The Last of the Huggermuggers (1856). Happily, in Three Children’s Novels by Christopher Pearse Cranch, editors Greta D. Little and Joel Myerson have reproduced its complete text, as well as Kobboltozo: A Sequel to the Last of the Huggermuggers (1857), and a previously unpublished fantasy, The Legend of Dr. Theophilus; or, The Enchanted Clothes. These three stories affirm the very American quality of Cranch’s work and demonstrate his striking improvement as a writer of children’s fantasy. Though noteworthy for their humorous depictions of Americans and American culture, Cranch’s first two stories clearly derive from such classic sources as the early English “Jack tales,” Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. In contrast, The Legend of Dr. Theophilus is surprisingly original, well-written, and entertaining. Of all Cranch’s stories, it most clearly demonstrates his flair for literary caricature. Cranch is, as the editors note, most well known today for his humorous sketches based on the works of the Transcendentalists (especially the cartoon of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” passage in Nature). Though educated to be a Unitarian minister, Cranch was never ordained. Instead, [End Page 272] he dabbled in a number of areas: in the later 1830s, he served on the staff of the Western Messenger, a journal dedicated to promoting Transcendentalism in Ohio, Kentucky, and other “western” states; in the early 1840s, he contributed several poems to the Transcendentalists’ magazine The Dial; after his marriage to Elizabeth de Windt in 1843 he associated with the painters in the Hudson River School; in the 1850s he served as a correspondent from abroad for the New York Evening Post. But his aptitude for humor—evident as early as 1835, when he completed a parody of “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” titled “Childe Christopher”—is the greatest asset of his juvenile fantasy stories. His droll commentary on American character considerably enlivens his prose. Cranch composed and illustrated The Last of the Huggermuggers in the winter of 1854–55. After testing it on his children, he sent it to George William Curtis, whom he met in Europe. Curtis, author of the “Editor’s Easy Chair” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine from 1854–1892, found a publisher for Cranch’s fantasy at Phillips, Sampson. The book appeared in late December 1856, too close to Christmas to capitalize on its success. According to Little and Myerson, by April 1856, Cranch was at work on the sequel; he felt that Kobboltozo was “much better in subject, style, and in the designs” (xviii). It was published on 10 December, 1857, to brief but favorable reviews. Though Phillips, Sampson went out of business in 1859, both The Last of the Huggermuggers and Kobboltozo were reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. Cranch alluded to his third work, The Legend of Dr. Theophilus, in a letter to a friend in March 1857, describing it as “a tale with an amusing shell and spiritual kernel with the motto ‘For the young a story, for the old an allegory’” (qtd. in Little and Myerson xx). However, Phillips, Sampson were retrenching, and the story was not published. Though Curtis claimed to have recovered the manuscripts and blocks at that time, they later disappeared. Cranch retained a rough copy of the story, but after 1870 there are no references to it in his papers. Little and Myerson note that a manuscript of Dr. Theophilus surfaced at a book sale in the 1980s. Whether it was the missing, finished copy or the rough version is unclear, but the editors have assembled a “conservatively emended edition” (xxxviii) for...

The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films

(1992). The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films. Journal of Popular Film and Television: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 1-8.

Racism, Nationalism, and Nostalgia in Cowboy Art

This essay is concerned with an American fantasy of history that first emerged in the late-nineteenth century and is perpetuated by an association of contemporary painters known as the Cowboy Artists of America, the CAA. It is a regional art form unique to the western United States. Cowboy art, both of the historical and contemporary type, is premised on nationalistic and conservative values. The ideology embedded in this art still commands powerful allegiances capable of prohibiting the publication of an earlier version of this paper, and of censoring my interpretations of some of the works of art discussed here.

Life at The Squirrel Inn: Rediscovering Frank Stockton

Life at The Squirrel Inn:Rediscovering Frank Stockton Suzanne Rahn (bio) He is not only the first but the greatest American master of the original fairy tale for children.1 Yet today he seems to be known, if at all, only by "The Lady, or the Tiger?" (a story for adults), "The Griffin and the Minor Canon," and "The Bee-Man of Orn"—and by the latter two only because Maurice Sendak turned them into picture books. Sendak himself confessed that Stockton "had always been, quite honestly, 'The Lady or the Tiger?' man. I had never read anything else. Reading 'The Griffin and the Minor Canon' was very much like opening a treasure chest."2 There are, as I shall show here, good literary-historical reasons for remembering Frank Stockton's role in the development of American fantasy for children, but the treasure chest of his stories deserves reopening for its own sake. His blending of traditional folktale motifs and characters with his own common-sense logic, quirky humor, sardonic satire, and pervasive personal philosophy is mellow and distinctive. Stories like "The Griffin," "The Bee-Man," "The Floating Prince," "The Magician's Daughter," and "Prince Hassak's March" are fun for children and worth investigating for adults. This brief survey of Stockton's fairy tales will look first at their nineteenth-century American context; second, at their formal characteristics, both traditional and original; and finally, at the view of life they reveal—a view far from orthodox for children's literature. Born in 1834, the son and younger brother of well-known crusading Methodists, Frank Stockton was not encouraged to become a fiction writer; after graduating from high school, he trained as a wood engraver, a "practical" trade at which he was no more than competent and which was, ironically, soon to be technologically obsolete. In his spare time, however, he wrote stories and began to publish them, and by the 1870s was making a living as a free-lance writer and journalist. In 1873 he became assistant editor to Mary Mapes Dodge, founding editor of a new children's magazine, St. Nicholas. Stockton helped see St. Nicholas through its first five formative years, before ill health forced him to take a less strenuous position with Scribner 's Monthly. Most of his writing for children was first published in St. Nicholas, over a period of about 20 years.3 Besides fairy tales, he churned [End Page 224] out nonfiction articles on science, travel, and history, translations of French and German stories and poems, a book of real-life pirate tales, realistic stories, and a historical novel with a medieval setting called The Story of Viteau.4 Much of this was hack-work—Stockton even had two pseudonyms to fall back on when his name seemed to be appearing too often in St. Nicholas—but nice, readable hack-work, in Stockton's clear and easy-going style and with that characteristic air of good-humored rationality that he maintains through his wildest imagining. Click for larger view View full resolution Frank Stockton, The Floating Prince and other Fairy Tales. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881. Illustrator unknown. Stockton's fairy tales began appearing at a time when little fantasy of any kind, and less of any quality, had been written in America for children, other than Hawthorne's retellings of Greek myths in A Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales. (The climate in England, where Andersen had been published in translation in 1846, and both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Water-Babies were out by 1865, was far more encouraging.) One may read one's dismal way through the chapter on nineteenth-century "Fantasy for American Children" in Brian Attebery's The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (1980), or simply browse the issues of St. Nicholas of the 1870s and 1880s, to see that even so late in the century only a small percentage of stories are original fantasy or folktales retold or myths adapted for children. We have come to assume the pre-eminence of fantasy in children's literature, but the typical children's story in the [End Page 225] world of William Dean Howells and Henry...

Landscapes and Journeys, Metaphors and Maps: The Distinctive Feature of English Fantasy

Landscapes and Journeys, Metaphors and Maps:The Distinctive Feature of English Fantasy Peter Hunt (bio) The author should know his countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand. . . . It is my contention. . . that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. —(Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in Salway 418-9) . . . creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, not a slavery to it. —J.R.R. Tolkien (72) The journey is a central, vital element of children's literature. In texts for "younger" readers, it is often a metaphor for exploration and education; readers go, like Tolkien's Hobbit, "there and back again" in a circle that enables them to gain knowledge—possibly to be stabbed by experience—and to return to home and security, and to a satisfying psychological "closure". As the readers grow, so the journeys become longer, and the circles are broken: the text become bildungsroman. The elements of quest and rites of passage lead to new levels of physical and psychological development. The journey is specifically characteristic of fantasy literature for children. Whatever your definition, fantasy needs a backbone, some shape or principle which it relates to or reacts against. If magic "simply is" and does not need to be explained in its context (Mobley 2), then there must be rules—about what you can do with it, where you can go with it. Like irony, it only works by reference to an understood norm. As Irwin says, in a fantasy, the reader "is persuaded to play the new system of 'facts', which he has wilfully and speculatively accepted, against the established facts, which he only pretends to reject" (67). So, however fantastic the world, we depend, for our understanding, at least in part, on the metaphors for human behaviour contained in the narrative—the quests, the strategies for battle, the chases and flights. As LeGuin has noted, 'fantasy is a journey. . . a journey into the subconscious mind' (Lynn 5), and the journey itself is a powerful organizing factor. Perhaps because of these basic metaphors, children's literature has tended to be based in, indeed, to be about narrative, about the business of getting on with the story; and it has taken over the basic drives of the folk tale, search and pursuit, and moved them into fantasy. The sequential "chaining" of primitive narrative, to which children may respond because it is close to their natural idiom, lends itself to the picaresque; the elemental thrust of storytelling in an oral culture—to which children belong, at least residually—resists complexity (Ong 139ff). In short, the journey has become the paradigm of the children's fantasy story. But in English children's fantasy, there is often an extra dimension, an added depth to the metaphoric structure. Not only do the complex layers of history embedded (as it were) in the landscape enrich the texture of the stories, but the meanings of the landscapes themselves provide a subtext for the journeys: places mean. The American tradition of fantasy journey seems to be—at least to an Englishman like myself—one reaching outwards and westwards; it is a linear matter. Because there is little to dig down into, American fantasy tends to be set in secondary worlds, and to rely for its success on more abstract structural metaphors (good/evil, east/west—for example, LeGuin, Norton, Hoban—even Lloyd Alexander). The English, in contrast, are re-treading ancestral ground. Their reference points are more concrete, deep-rooted cultural symbols which seem to lie, sometimes literally, underfoot. Garner, Mayne, Aiken, Gordon, and earlier, Grahame and Milne root themselves firmly in English soil. Neil Philip notes of Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen that it "was not conjured from some airy inspiration, but drawn from the rock, soil and sky of Cheshire" (A Fine Anger 12), whereas of Susan Cooper, who does not...

Owen Wister by John L. Cobbs

Reviews 153 Owen Wister. By John L. Cobbs. (Boston, Massachusetts: G. K. Hall/ Twayne, 1984. 140 pages, $15.95.) John L. Cobbs’sbook on Owen Wister, an excellent addition to Twayne’s United States Authors Series, provides a clear exposition of Wister’s life and career, an interesting and perceptive analysis of his major works, and a judi­ cious evaluation of his achievements. Perhaps the evaluation is a bit too “judicious”—too rigidly legalistic in application of critical statutes to do jus­ tice to The Virginian and to Wister’s bittersweet cowboy myth. But Cobbs succeeds admirably in interpreting the underlying contradictions of Wister’s life and work. Like his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister actually lived one of the most cherished of American fantasies, to be revitalized and transformed by “primitive” experience in the West. Yet though his western experience restored his health and gave him purpose, he judged its value finally by eastern standards: “He had a vision of the American West as the last fair field upon which could be judged the morality and culture of Western civilization” (p. 114), concludes Cobbs, but “he could not bring himself to turn his back on his class, and so he carried its prejudices and its fundamental shallowness into his fiction” (p. 115). Through dramatizing the cowboy hero’s ascent to social position Wister sought to integrate his aristocratic code with the invigorating spirit of a West he perceived as both nobly free and insolently barbaric. But he could only reconcile these contradictory perceptions by showing his “gentleman” cowboy ultimately affirming aristocratic values. Cobbs illuminates how Wister inte­ grated his passion for western experience with the elitist and racist convictions that became overt in Lady Baltimore (1906), which celebrates the doomed aristocracy in the Old South. Though this elitist aspect of Wister’s thought has been explored in G. Edward White’s The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister, Cobbs perceptively extends such insight, illustrating how Wister’s political thinking and prejudices structure both his observation and his symbolism. Though Wister dutifully portrayed his major cowboy heroes “growing up,” Cobbs accurately notes the predominant tone of elegy in this fiction, heightened in his last short story collection, When the West Was Won (1928). Cobbs’s basic intent is to highlight Wister’s difficulty in reconciling the oppos­ ing values his gentleman cowboy represents. Perhaps this useful study will focus renewed attention on the impressive achievement of this displaced aristocrat who deeply loved what he could never entirely accept, who more than any other writer made the cowboy a paradoxical symbol of conflicting American values. DAVID MÖGEN Colorado State University ...