Contemporary Fantasy Research Articles

The Bridge That Binds Us: Exploring How Self-Forgiveness Can Help People Live a Content Life

This article aims at exploring the importance self-forgiveness to help people live a content life. Self-forgiveness is a willingness to abandon self-resentment in the face of one’s own mistake while fostering compassion, generosity, and love toward one-self. Self-forgiveness itself is still an underrated topic because there has not been a lot of research into it. This article explores the reason behind the difficulty of self-forgiveness and ways that someone can take to self-forgive. Moreover, we use Conceptual Analysis of Self-Forgiveness, a psychological approach. The finding of this article is in the form of a novella. The novella tells a story using a contemporary fantasy genre, about a girl and a boy, Luci and Von, who are struggling with their past guilt. After spending time together, Luci is able to muster up the courage to apologize which helps her forgive herself and Von also learns the truth about the accident that happened in the past then visits his dead parents’ grave which also helps him forgive himself and move on.Keywords: self-forgiveness, novella, contemporary fantasy

New Histories of the World: Spenglerian Optimism

The apparently pessimistic implications of Spenglerian analysis have often appealed to others who foresaw the end of Western civilization, but Spengler himself was less discouraged. Even if no great art, music or literature could be expected in these latter days, great engineering projects were possible, and to be admired. Nor was Western (“Faustian”) Culture and Civilization the only game in town: other Cultures, like the “Magian,” had been embedded and distorted by the dominant regimes, both Classical and Western, and could still be an inspiring presence. A similarly distorted Culture might still be growing in Russia. And even when all present Cultures were exhausted there would be hope of some new, unpredictable, emergence, for which I offer some imaginable examples drawn from contemporary fantasy, as well as the abiding presence of what Spengler usually thought “pre-cultural,” or “primitive” societies.

A EVOLUÇÃO DA LITERATURA FANTÁSTICA DE "AS ROSAS”, DE JÚLIA LOPES DE ALMEIDA A “AS FLORES”, DE AUGUSTA FARO

Este artigo pretende discutir a construção do fantástico clássico e do fantástico contemporâneo nos contos As rosas, de Júlia Lopes de Almeida, integrante da obra Ânsia eterna (2019) e As flores, de Augusta Faro, da obra A friagem (1999). A pesquisa será de cunho bibliográfico e realizará um breve percurso pelos teóricos do fantástico clássico, como Todorov (2017) e Bessière (2012) e do fantástico contemporâneo, também chamado de neofantástico, como Alazraki (1990) e Roas (2014). Objetiva-se analisar a presença do fantástico na obra de Júlia Lopes de Almeida e a evolução do gênero na narrativa de Augusta Faro. Além disso, é de fundamental importância trazer à tona os escritos de Almeida, importante escritora do século XIX, esquecida pela historiografia literária brasileira. Isso também aconteceu com Faro, que tem sua prosa alegórica pouco mencionada no cenário atual.

Magical Mothers: The Representation of Witches and Motherhood in Contemporary Fantasy Cinema

Over the past decade, powerful mothers in cinema have reappeared in the fantasy genre in the form of “witches”. Some witches’ stories, such as that of Maleficent (the wicked witch from the classic fairy tale Sleeping Beauty), have even been rewritten to place greater emphasis on maternal values, while simultaneously having feminist undertones and subverting the ways in which witches’ stories have been told previously. In contrast to the widely regarded belief that only evil witches (who are often also read as femme fatales) are considered to be “feminist”, the author argues that recently, witches that are both good and feminist have started to come to the fore. Significantly, the source of these witches’ power is their display of motherhood, which is an issue that many feminists (especially those who deny gender difference) have been grappling with for some time, as motherhood and feminism seem to be on two opposite ends of the spectrum. Thus, the author argues that, as is displayed in science fiction heroines from the 1980s and 1990s who are often discussed in feminist circles, these witches’ maternal values do not undermine their transgressive potential, as it is conventionally assumed, but rather become the source of their empowerment.

Plastic Flowers: Overlooking Resource Scarcity in Postwar America

This essay historicizes cultural and psychic economies in the postwar United States under the sign of material scarcity. It situates the proliferation of plastic flowers in domestic space within a context of bureaucratic anxieties surrounding natural resource scarcity, and trends toward ‘outdoor living’ that were an offshoot of the ideology of economic growth. Interrogating repeated, if relatively unexamined, invocations of ‘anxious’ suburban subjects in descriptions of postwar society, the essay suggests that plastic flowers shored up a sense of stability and permanence at a time when nuclear annihilation, Cold War paranoia, and population growth combined to render life uncertain and potentially unsustainable. The essay concludes by reflecting on how legacies of that epoch – and the fiction of permanence offered by plastic flowers – endure in contemporary fantasies of limitless progress.

Edmund Spenser on the Elfin Race: Some Renaissance Sources of Contemporary Fantasy

Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene (1590/1596) is generally mentioned among the sources of contemporary fantasy fiction. However, scholarly publications, including works in Russian, rarely spell out the particularities of that connection. This article seeks to demonstrate the thoroughness, with which Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, worked out some patterns and techniques of description of the Elfin ‘nation’, deliberating on its particular place on the chain of being. The poet delineated various social and cultural groups of fairies by considering their habits, strengths and shortcomings, their natural localities, their love of magic and poetry, and their extreme or muted (compared to humans) susceptibility to certain moral virtues. More than that, Spenser invented a history of Elfinkind and dwelled extensively on two contrasting chronicles – one featuring the great events of human (specifically British) history; the other, of the elfin history. Hence, the Renaissance allegorical poem contains a set of artistic components similar to those (other-than-human ethnography), which today are constituent for fantasy fiction. The article regards some alterations, which J.R.R. Tolkien introduced into elfin ethnography. The work also comments upon mannerist echoes in contemporary fantasy and upon mutual continuities between literary canon and popular fiction.

“How Lucky You Are Never to Know What It Is to Grow Old”—Witch as Fourth-Wave Feminist Monster in Contemporary Fantasy Film

This article focuses on the figure of an aging and powerful witch pitted against younger women in three contemporary fairy-tale movie adaptations: Snow White and the Huntsman (dir. Rupert Sanders, 2012), Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (dir. Tommy Wirkola, 2013), and Maleficent (dir. Robert Stromberg, 2014). Each film transforms the aging witch from stock villain to a more nuanced character. This revision is intriguing for its concern with power and gender and for a reflection of contemporary debates about age and power within so-called wave feminism. The article uses two frames. The first is feminism and ageism, focusing on wave feminism and aging, and the second is the trope of the witch, drawing from fairy-tale studies, social history, and social anthropology. The article reads conflict between an aging witch and a young woman as a clash of feminist waves, and the witch’s ‘monstrosity’ as her refusal to be sidelined in a world obsessed with youth.

Religious Aspects of the Contemporary Fantasy Fiction

The article discusses how the topic of religion is represented in contemporary fantasy fiction, specifically in a series such as Andrzej Sapkowski’s “The Witcher Saga”, George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire”, and Dara Kornii’s “The Opposite Side”. ...

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About the Contributors

Re-visioning Negative Archetypes of Disability and Deformity in Fantasy: Wicked, Maleficent, and Game of Thrones

Fantasy and horror often exploit disabled people, presenting them as embodiments of terror and evil. In contemporary fantasy, we sometimes see archetypically evil characters redefined primarily by the telling of their backstories to provide rationale for their behavior and to evoke sympathy or pity from the audience. Pity often places the viewer in the position to seem benevolent while masking the ways that disabled people are often treated as inferior, different, and are isolated from the rest of society. In Wicked, Maleficent, and Game of Thrones, we are asked to confront the judgments and behaviors in which spectators and society engage. Instead of reaffirming the views and values of society, these works question and denounce our consumption of the stereotypes we have learned and our often unexamined behaviors towards those who are often treated as "others."

Children of the Light: Gnostic Fiction and Gnostic Practice in Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy

This paper offers a close reading of the contemporary Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice trilogy and explores its deep roots in early gnostic spiritual movements of late antiquity, Russian esoteric philosophy and literature, and Western popular culture. Reflecting sources as varied as the Apocryphon of John, the Disney movie Escape to Witch Mountain, Russian New Age paganism, and esoteric Soviet science, these three interconnected novellas are based on the real-life “Tunguska event,” the great fireball that appeared over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908, flattening more than 800 square miles of forest. Famous in ufo circles as the “Russian Roswell” and long a magnet for esoteric speculation, in Sorokin’s hands this probable meteor strike becomes the springboard for a contemporary gnostic fantasy in which a giant chunk of ice carries the spirits of 23,000 gnostic demiurges to earth, where they inhabit human bodies that they despise and seek only to reunite and return to their source. More than a simple postmodern parable of the seventy-year Soviet regime and post-Soviet societal excesses, Sorokin’s damning portrait of his “children of the Light” illuminates the deeper and darker currents of human nature, ethics, and spirituality.

Cutting off the King's Head: The Self Disciplining Fantasy of Neoliberal Sovereignty

This paper aims to reconsider the relationship and importance of sovereign power for neoliberalism. At the broader theoretical level, this analysis hopes to illuminate the dynamic and mutually reinforcing relation of subjection and subjectivation, as proposed by Foucault, through a psychoanalytic, particularly Lacanian, perspective. It proposes that the identification with a powerful sovereign provides individuals with ontological security in the face of rather complex micro-processes of power and broader depersonalised forms of subjection associated with neoliberalism. In this respect, individuals are affectively ‘gripped’ by sovereignty to account for the complexity and incoherence associated with the concrete and discursive operation of disciplinary power. The appeal of a sovereign fantasy lies in its promise of granting individuals a sense of ‘sovereign’ agency perceived to be lacking in their existence as ‘agency-less’ disciplinary subjects of neoliberalism. This desire produces diverse but complementary contemporary fantasies of sovereignty for producing and reinforcing the ‘self-disciplined’ neoliberal subject. Thus, paradoxically disciplinary power relies on an identification with and desire for sovereign control. To truly move beyond neoliberalism it is necessary therefore to not only challenge its disciplinary body but also cut off its sovereign head.

Medievalism in contemporary Fantasy: a new Species of Romance

Contemporary fantasists are often inspired by the texts from and with medieval context. This paper taps into Horace Walpole’s principles revealed in the preface to The Castle of Otranto to show that the works of medieval fantasy and contemporary fantasy subgenres written in 20th and 21st centuries have a lot in common with Walpole’s recipe for creating ‘a new species of romance’. When considered from the present time, the Medieval period can be seen as being halfway between fantasy and reality, in a blurry area where the two overlap, and contemporary fantasists use this trait to build their fictional worlds as effective reverberators of universal themes that remain interesting, appealing and worth repeating.

Medievalism in contemporary Fantasy: a new Species of Romance

Contemporary fantasists are often inspired by the texts from and with medieval context. This paper taps into Horace Walpole’s principles revealed in the preface to The Castle of Otranto to show that the works of medieval fantasy and contemporary fantasy subgenres written in 20th and 21st centuries have a lot in common with Walpole’s recipe for creating ‘a new species of romance’. When considered from the present time, the Medieval period can be seen as being halfway between fantasy and reality, in a blurry area where the two overlap, and contemporary fantasists use this trait to build their fictional worlds as effective reverberators of universal themes that remain interesting, appealing and worth repeating.

Paranormal Politics and the Romance of Urban Subcultures: Youth Mobility in Cassandra Clare’s and Melissa Marr’s Fantasy Texts

This essay examines the political and social significance of the intrusion of the supernatural into youth subcultures in two urban fantasy series: Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments and Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely. Both series represent the idea of human youth mobility and social affiliation based on volition. The tolerant urban spaces through which their girl protagonists initially move accommodate a diversity of subcultural aesthetics. By contrast, the supernatural subcultures with which these girls become involved are fraught with conflict, and the mobility of their members is limited. Drawing on post-subcultural theory, we identify a tension between late modern and premodern social organization and political values in contemporary urban fantasy for young adults and compare how it is resolved in Clare’s and Marr’s texts.

From “Somatic Scandals” to “a Constant Potential for Violence”? The Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Rewriting/Rewiring of “the Child”

Within educational research across Europe and the US, one of the most rapidly traveling discourses and highly funded pursuits of the moment is brain-based learning (BBL). BBL is an approach to curriculum and pedagogical decision-making that is located within the new field of educational neuroscience. In some strands of BBL research the structure and function of the brain is located causally, as providing the sole and/or most important basis for making decisions about what and how to teach children. This article analyzes the “messy and numberless beginnings” of the hope placed upon neurological foundationalism to provide a solution to the “problem” of differences between students and to the achievement of educational goals. Rather than arguing for or against educational neuroscience, the article moves through five levels to examine the conditions of possibility for subscribing to the brain as a causal organological locus of learning. It maps pertinent historical conditions, including the relationship between technologies of self, histories and cultures of dissection, and arcs of discourse from soul-body to mind-body relations, as well as surveys more recent and pivotal examples of the movement from squeezing to scanning in modern mind-brain relation debates that have redefined “the ideal child.” A range of contemporary fantasies, projections, and contestations of some of the central assumptions within “Western” conceptions of Being that sustain the conditions of possibility for BBL research are outlined. This includes the thorny problem of human-centrism even in those accounts that claim to question scientific materialist approaches to the nature of reality.

Morgan le Fay, Shapeshifter by Jill M. Hebert (review)

Reviewed by: Morgan le Fay, Shapeshifter by Jill M. Hebert Marylynn Saul Jill M. Hebert, Morgan le Fay, Shapeshifter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. vii, 230. isbn: 978–1–137–02264–6. $85. Jill M. Hebert presents a comprehensive study of the character of Morgan le Fay from the earliest texts in the Middle Ages through the meaning of her absence in the Victorian era to her incarnations in contemporary fantasy. Hebert emphasizes the variability of Morgan, arguing that ‘She is not the “Eve” side of the Ave/Eve opposition; rather she embodies characteristics and behaviors that cannot be classified by simple-minded dichotomies’ (p. 3). In Chapter One, Hebert examines Morgan’s role in the Latin sources including Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini and Gerald of Wales’ Speculum Ecclesiae and De Principis. Generally, in these sources Hebert sees, in contrast to earlier scholars, a more sinister role for Morgan than simply a benign healer. For example, she argues that in Geoffrey’s Vita there is at least a hint that Morgan is taking Arthur away and her powers can be used to heal or to harm. In Chapter Two Hebert discusses Morgan’s (or a Morgan-like character’s) actions in romances including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Hebert argues that the fairy and loathly lady figures share the common features of ‘healing, sexuality, a connection with the forest, shapechanging and magic’ (p. 42). While the fairy in Sir Launfal is named Tryamour, not Morgan, Hebert argues they have several connections, the most important being that they share the characteristics of educating knights and commenting on the values of the court. In this romance, the knight rejects the values of the court and chooses the values of the fairy. In Hebert’s interpretation of Sir Gawain, Morgan’s lesson concerns the ambiguity of life. ‘Being courteous is all very well, but how does a knight hold to [End Page 159] the truly important values such as truth when the situation is ambiguous and the consequences are dire—the loss of life, of comrades, of an entire kingdom?’ (p. 55), Hebert asks in reference to the challenges in the future of the court. In linking the loathly lady tales, such as ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale,’ to Morgan, Hebert relies on similar characteristics as well as previous critics’ work starting with Lucy Paton. Chapter Three is devoted to Morgan le Fay in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and her varied roles in this text. The main thrust of Hebert’s argument is that Morgan is a tester of knights and is able to reveal the shortcomings of the court and of Arthur as a ruler. Hebert argues that Morgan is in a position to do this because she is able to avoid categorization and is not beholden to the code of chivalry. Hebert portrays this testing of Morgan positively, in that Morgan’s efforts to get Arthur to deal with the treason of Lancelot and Guenevere before it is exposed to the court by Mordred ‘are attempts to heal the wound before it destroys Camelot’ (p. 89). A reader may wonder why the time periods of Renaissance, Romantic, and Victorian times, the subject of Chapter Four, are even included in a book on Morgan le Fay since those works typically do not include a character named Morgan le Fay. However, Hebert makes a persuasive argument that the characteristics of Morgan are separated and portrayed by other characters (often superficially) with each character frequently representing a single character trait of the earlier Morgan. The best known works, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King, are covered, but also discussed are some lesser known works, including some in which Morgan does appear, such as Benedict Naubert’s ‘The Mantle.’ Finally, in Chapter Five, Hebert ends with examining contemporary fiction in which Morgan is a major character, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Mists of Avalon, I Am Morgan le Fay, and Le Morte D’Avalon. While some critics have seen The Mists of Avalon as a feminist...

A Paradigm of the Tropical: Brazil in Contemporary Anglo-American Science Fiction and Fantasy

A Paradigm of the Tropical: Brazil in Contemporary Anglo-American Science Fiction and Fantasy

Facing the death of the Author. Cultural professional’s identity work and the fantasies of control

This article takes Barthes’ concept of the death of the Author as a starting point to organize a reflection on the role of Author-related discursive structures (termed subject positions here) in participatory processes within cultural institutions, focusing on cultural professional and audience subject positions. The theoretical assumption in this text is that identities (and subject positions) are not stable or homogenous, but contingent and diverse, and fed by social fantasies. This assumption (supported by culturalist identity theory and psychoanalytic theory) allows analyzing how the subject position of the cultural professional has been articulated through a series of contemporary fantasies. This article will first focus on two fantasies: The resistant modernist fantasy of the cultural professional as Author, and its still modernist counterweight, the democratic-populist fantasy of the death of the Author. The strong disconnection of both these fantasies with the present-day culturaldemocratic configuration, characterized by a more post/late/liquid-modernist logic, allows for the articulation of a third fantasy, which foregrounds the notion of participation. At the same time the notion on participation is reframed by articulating it within an agonist framework, in order to increase its alignment with this post/late/liquid-modernist culture through the recognition of difference and conflict. This third fantasy attempts to offer a way out of the deadlock created by the still strong presence of modernist fantasies about cultural professional – audience relationships.

Between International and Local: Lene Kaaberbøl's Fantasy Literature

Anna Karlskov Skyggebjerg introduces the work of a Danish writer of fantasy for children, some of whose books are also available in English. She locates Kaaberbøl in the tradition of contemporary Anglophone fantasies but also identifies the influence of classic Nordic children's literature on this popular and prolific writer