Contemporary Fantasy Research Articles

The Ugly Duckling's Legacy: Adulteration, Contemporary Fantasy, and the Dark

In the annals of childhood reading Hans Christian Andersen lurks, a latent wound. For many of us he provides the first whisper of pain that will not heal, of quests that fail, of desires that remain unsated. And yet his linger in the imagination, partly because they defy the words of comfort with which parents. teachers, and children's books attempt to blot out the terrors of childhood: terrors of isolation, abandonment, extinction. Ursula K. Le Guin writes that she hated Andersen's as a child, but [t]hat didn't stop me from reading them, and rereading them. Or from remembering (61). Similarly, Rosellen Brown asks herself why 'The Little Mermaid' so fascinated me that I shuddered and read it and again (57), musing that perhaps [she] was a simple child to believe the worst, but she preferred the sad endings and couldn't accept the fake good Andersen occasionally offers (56). Others recall that when they were children Andersen's most virulent females provided them with role models: Maria Flook identified with Inger's macabre sense of humor in Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (127). A. S. Byatt found something secretly good, illicitly desirable, about the ice hills and glass barriers of the Snow Queen's palace (71), which came to signify for her the desirability and the pain of the artist's quest for beauty. These anecdotes by accomplished writers about their childhood reading belie the desire to mute or disguise the presence of pain in human experience by censoring or denying children access to depictions of it - adulteration, if you will. Pain, together with sexuality and other conflicts usually identified as adult pervade Andersen's writings, one reason his are often abridged and altered. Stefan Sullivan assumes in his review of Tiina Nunnally's recent Andersen translation that darkness is, by definition, adult: the review, titled Ugly Duckling Grows Up, opens with the comment that these tales should be marked with a parental advisory sticker (Sullivan). The Disney Corporation's appropriation of The Little (1989) transmutes Andersen's bittersweet ichor into G-rated diet soda, with the ostensible goal of making it child-safe. Whose fears are actually being assuaged? The truism that the or cynical aspects of Andersen's works are directed toward adults rather than to children and that children must be shielded from the representation of things that might make them afraid or sad deserves to be questioned. Dark and painful conflicts are not necessarily and definitively adult; Andersen's stories, which describe broadly human fears, wishes, and nightmares, should not be classified into sunny tales appropriate for children and dark tales for adults. For some child readers, Andersen's depictions of the pain of human existence have inspired new artistic achievement. As Alvin Schwartz has noted, children request scary stories and hand down their own folklore of fear orally from child to child (Marcus 46). Far from being inappropriate for children, Andersen's tales might actually offer children who need it relief from the hearty good cheer that pervades ordinary kiddie-lit and falsifies their experience of the world. In fact, adults writing for other adults are as likely to amend the pain of Andersen's as are children and writers for children; Disney's neutering of Ehe Little Mermaid is no more sentimental or dishonest than many fairy-tale writers' attempts to debunk or deny the pain that Andersen's invoke. For example, Melissa Lee Shaw's Ehe Sea reconfigures Ehe Little Mermaid as a tale in which the Sea Hag is a wronged mother, dispossessed by her power-hungry spouse; in this sisterhood-is-powerful version, the mermaid's desired union with her love is still a possibility at the end of the story, and the mother-Hag makes a glorious sacrifice for her beloved daughter. In contrast to those who wish the to experience conventional happiness, Gwyneth Cravens recalls as a child reading Andersen's story and being both troubled and satisfied and uplifted by the story's conclusion: What of its subtleties I could have articulated to myself back then I don't know, but some part of me readily absorbed them. …

"Bleaching the Ethiopians": Desegregating Race and Technology through Early X-ray Experiments

This essay contributes to recent calls to "desegregate" the subjects of race and technology and interrogate technology as a tool that has historically made racial hierarchies possible. It considers the false reporting of "successful experiments" employing X rays and radium to whiten black skin in 1903 and 1904 as attempts by whites to exorcise the threats that these new technologies posed to established categories of race and racial superiority. It asks not why such experiments occurred, but rather why whites across the country believed they did. By analyzing the rhetorical coverage of these events and placing them in the context of contemporary fantasies about the power of X rays and radium, the piece argues that the degree to which we accept technologies depends, at least in part, on the ability of groups in power to reject the uses or effects of those technologies that might challenge accepted cultural "truths."

Hairy on the Inside: From Cannibals to Paedophiles

Cannibalism and its uses as a trope in colonial literature, contemporary fantasy, colonial writing, horror fiction, and fairy tales are considered. Episodes of cannibalism and metaphorical allusions to perverse forms of ingestion assume different forms and perform functions inflected by historical and cultural contexts, but they are apt to construct distinctions between self and others.

Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror (2nd edition)

Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror (2nd edition)

The Infrastructural-Political

The Infrastructural-Political

Supernatural fiction writers: contemporary fantasy and horror: v.1: Peter Ackroyd to Graham Joyce; v.2: Guy Gavriel Kay to Roger Zelazny

Supernatural fiction writers: contemporary fantasy and horror: v.1: Peter Ackroyd to Graham Joyce; v.2: Guy Gavriel Kay to Roger Zelazny

Little Swans with Luxette and Loved Boy Pudding: Changing Fashions in Cookery Books

Cookery books are far from simple things: alongside the recipes we may find narrative, memoir, science, history, politics, travelogue and anthropology. The cookery book also reveals in a profoundly naked form the anxieties and paranoias of its precise historical moment. So the glamorous cookery books of the years between the wars try to persuade the newly servantless middle-class woman that the cooking she must now do herself is a creative and fashionable activity. And the postwar British, sick of the limited stodge of their still-rationed diet, clutched Elizabeth David to their collective bosom, unable to taste her pungent dishes, but in thrall to the sun-strewn fantasy of the good life her books offered. From Mrs Beeton, offering the mid-Victorian mistress of the house the instructions and routines she needed to hide the mechanisms of the domestic machine, to the potent contemporary fantasy of the Mediterranean peasant and his fabulously healthy lifestyle, Humble interrogates the cookery books of the last 150 years, asking what they can tell us about how changing attitudes to class, gender and domesticity intersect with the culture of food.

Interacting with Babylon 5: fan performances in a media universe

Much of the pleasure of science fiction and fantasy stems from the genres' ability to transport fans into imaginary worlds that often feel more real than ordinary life. This pioneering book uses the insights of performance theory to explore how fans of the television show Babylon 5 actively immerse themselves in its imaginary environment by role-playing games and fan fiction, through which the fans perform-make real-fantasies they previously watched on television. Kurt Lancaster opens with a background analysis of Babylon 5, including creator-producer J. Michael Straczynski's online interaction with fans. Then, he thoroughly examines the performance aspects of all the participatory media surrounding the show - the role-playing game, collectable card game, war game, CD-ROM guidebook, fan fiction, and web pages. His use of performance theory offers a new way of understanding the enormous popularity of imaginary entertainment environments and the fandom surrounding other popular sites of science fiction and fantasy, including Star Trek, Star Wars, and J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Kurt Lancaster has taught at New York University and currently serves as a lecturer on the literature faculty at MIT. He is the author of Warlocks and Warpdrive: Contemporary Fantasy Entertainments with Interactive and Virtual Environments.

Robin McKinley's Deerskin : Challenging Narcissisms

Robin McKinley's Deerskin (1993) is both a reconÞguration of Charles Perrault's Peau d'ane and a powerful contemporary fantasy that makes prominent the flawed family structures, especially the mutual narcissism of the heroine's parents, that underlie the sexual violence of the story. An examination of these destructive relationships in terms of Jacques Lacan's schemata demonstrates the aptness of McKinley's characterizations. This study also considers Deerskin in the context of tales of the Catskin type (AT 510B), as well as some questions of implied audience raised by the novel's fairy-tale background and its other fantastic elements.

A Churlish Hero: Contemporary Fantasies Rewrite Sir Kay

A Churlish Hero: Contemporary Fantasies Rewrite Sir Kay

The image of Muhammad in Latin chronography of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

The foundations of the western image of Islam were laid in the early middle ages, when the Prophet was presented as an instrument of apostates, at whose instigation he created a religion which was the very antithesis of Christianity. However, twelfth- and thirteenth-century writers embellished this picture with tales of an exotic world, drawing upon both motifs from folklore and contemporary fantasies of a Muslim Paradise of sensual delights. The increase in direct contact with Islam seems to have done little to modify either the traditional stereotypes or the newer exotica.

The X-Files and the Aesthetics and Politics of Postmodern Pop

The X-Files is generally acclaimed as the television cult hit of the 1990s. Its excursions into the occult, paranormal, and supernatural have touched a responsive chord in an era when belief in the fantastic, aliens, and government conspiracies is accelerating. Featuring the exploits of two FBI agents, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Armstrong), the series articulates a panorama of contemporary fears, anxieties, and fantasies, drawing on classic figures of the occult, present-day horrors, and political conspiracies as material. It thus uses conventions and iconic figures of media culture and references to contemporary historical individuals and events to comment upon present day issues and to represent salient disturbing aspects of the current era. In so doing, it raises questions concerning dominant institutions, ideologies, and values. In this study, I argue that The X-Files deploys the aesthetics of postmodernism, drawing on its characteristic representational strategies and thematic tropes, and thus can serve as an example of a popular form of postmodernism that engages in pastiche of plot-lines, genre conventions, iconography, folklore, and bits of history found in the forms of previous media culture. Further, in my reading, its implosion of generic boundaries enacts a postmodern subversion of the categories and aesthetic forms of modern media culture; it mixes a heavy style and high seriousness with irony and parody, and its combination of the standard postmodem aesthetic strategies and themes of postmodern culture produces a pop postmodernism that enables us to interrogate both the aesthetics of television and postmodernism. ' I. TELEVISION AESTHETICS

Robert Bly Does Peter Pan: The Inner Child as Father to the Man in Spielberg's Hook

Robert Bly Does Peter Pan: The Inner Child as Father to the Man in Steven Spielberg’s Hook Patricia Pace (bio) As early as 1984, critics and media-watchers dubbed Steven Spielberg “the perennial Peter Pan,” cinema’s ur-child who will not grow up, gifted with a child’s eye and child-like wonder, or, alternately, the worldly movie mogul driven to reproduce, compulsively, in film after film, an unresolved Oedipal conflict. 1 There is reason to believe that Spielberg consciously manipulates these opposing images, recognizing himself in the protean boy-child as well as in Pan’s wily alter-ego, Captain Hook: the pirate/businessman, the counterfeit father, distinguished by his sinister signature, his iron claw. I agree with Marjorie Garber that the story of Hook is “the dark dream narrative” (179) behind Barrie’s fairy story, and Captain Hook is also a version of the shadowy father who has had such significance in Spielberg’s enormously popular films, and thus, in our own cultural Imaginary. 2 Drawing on the works of Freud, Lacan, and others, this essay reads Spielberg’s imitation of Peter Pan as a contemporary fantasy which pretends to celebrate childhood, but instead, uses the image of the child to recuperate a longed-for, if mythic, masculine authority. It is not far-fetched to say that Lucas/Spielberg films of the Seventies (the Star Wars trilogy and the Raiders series 3 initiate a deluge of boy-films culminating in the early 1990’s with the elaborate masculine psychodramas Dick Tracy, Batman, Robin Hood, and even the blockbuster, Dances With Wolves. Each, of course, features a male hero, and works to construct a vision of social reality in which “males appropriately dominate[] the public sphere” (Ryan and Kellner 77). Not only are these films nostalgic for genres gone-by (the western or the cliff-hanger); most of them are [End Page 113] literally remakes, situated in some anxious proximity to an “original” text, director, or leading man. In their masculine role-playing (cowboy soldier or Robin Hood), and in their derivative commodity form, these films implicate masculinity as perpetual adolescence—that liminal zone first described by G. Stanley Hall as “the passionate stage of life,” a time of “moral idealism” and “intense emotionally.” 4 Note that the qualities of idealism and emotion are traditionally assigned to women; the psychological or cultural “work” these films do is to attempt to reconcile the childishness and effeminacy of the idealistic son, with the virility and power of the father. For Spielberg in particular, the conflict between emotionality, empathy, idealism (associated with the feminine and the private sphere), and the mythic individualism central to patriarchal public man, finds its imaginative locus in the contemporary family. Distinct from those filmmakers who project masculine fantasies of aggression and violence, Spielberg’s particular vision, as Ryan and Kellner note, emphasizes “the family as an embattled sphere . . . threatened by . . . the state, bureaucracy, science, rationalism, and capitalist greed” (259). The recurrent theme of “the child searching for his parents” (Gordon 211), replicated in various “origin” stories from E.T. to Close Encounters to Empire of the Sun, can be read as a liberal allegory, the quest for the good father, “indicative of the extent to which the public world [has] been purged of empathy, feeling, and community” (Ryan and Kellner 262). His is a narrative of transcendence, which moves to bind the public and the private worlds, the life of the individual to the larger mystery and meaning of the cosmos. However, in his evocation of the self as a metaphoric child and his reification of the lost but exalted father, Spielberg participates in and perpetuates ideological moves which privilege myth over history and personal liberation over social transformation, resulting in the contemporary consciousness Robert Bellah has explored in his work, Habits of the Heart. Indeed, Spielberg’s Hook follows a chronology of events not unlike the series of “awakenings” detailed in the books of the Jungian men’s movement, and most often associated with Robert Bly, James Hillman, and John Rowan. This branch of the men’s movement may be distinguished from academic feminist and gender studies by its similarities to the growing self...

Harps and Harpers in Contemporary Fantasy

Harps and Harpers in Contemporary Fantasy

The Ambivalent Hero of Contemporary Fantasy and Science Fiction

The Ambivalent Hero of Contemporary Fantasy and Science Fiction

The Blank Mirror of Death: Protest as Self-Creation in Contemporary Fantasy

The Blank Mirror of Death:Protest as Self-Creation in Contemporary Fantasy Nancy Huse (bio) Attention to language usually shapes any discussion of fantasy as a literary genre. The parallel worlds and impossible creatures always carry new names; the animals talk in order to signal a transformation of reality; labels combine to produce new categories: a Cucumber King, a Moominmamma somehow bizarre and yet familiar. Recent understandings of language are reflected in contemporary fantasy, particularly in fantasy written in post-war Europe, where the study and writing of children's books have often reflected self-consciously a philosophical and pedagogical climate in which issues of freedom and control are debated. In Sweden, for instance, prominent critics of children's literature such as Sonja Svensson, director of the Swedish Institute for Children's Books, and Vivi Edström, professor of children's literature at the University of Stockholm, commonly incorporate social criteria into their evaluation of children's books,1 while in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Institute for Children's Literature Research at the University of Frankfurt encourages political analyses of children's literature (Fetz 41). The idea of language as a potentially freeing power that can be stifled in a society that does not allow real human community provides a thematic and structural focus for describing four disparate yet contemporaneous writers—Tove Jansson, Astrid Lindgren, Christine Nöstlinger, and Michael Ende. While all four writers clearly reflect twentieth-century concerns, their visions derive from the ancient fantasy tradition involving the dream of an ordered world and meaningful life. All four exploit fantasy both as escapism and as a vehicle for social messages by developing individualistic word play that is rooted in a social identity. Escapism becomes the means to erase false distinctions between the self and others; the retreat into private worlds by means of unique language actually ends in placing emphasis on the world of human relatedness and the desirability and possibility of its transformation. These four writers are linked by their achievements as authors of contemporary fantasy for children who recognize that language can be tautological and that that is ultimately unacceptable to socially conscious human beings. Together they span the past-war years, Jansson and Lindgren as relatively acclaimed Swedish-language writers and Nöstlinger and Ende as more recent popular authors who do not always satisfy literary [End Page 28] critics' aesthetic or political criteria in Germany. While in some ways they comprise a group partly because they are available in English translation, their very diversity illustrates the point that contemporary fantasy is participating in a quest for meaning occasioned by postmodern tolerance of ambiguity and contradiction. As Kathryn Hume remarks about such writers, "They work with full awareness of the void, and do not fall back on old answers or faith" (49). In so doing, these writers offer children the multiple perspectives needed for development. Each writer's canon centers on issues of freedom: Lindgren wrote the Pippi Longstocking books, for example, in a pedagogical context advocating children's liberation, Jansson examines the threat to both freedom and stability posed by forces out of our control, Nöstlinger responds to memories of the Hitler era, and Ende's stories involve the need for creative play as a basis for human community. Thus, it is clear that they deal with philosophical themes and historical events which define personhood in our century. Such writers pose interesting problems for Anglo-American critics, since our critical discourse (e.g., the work of Northrop Frye often applied to children's books) helps to support the notion that the world is orderly and unthreatening to the thinking individual. "That the structure of the psyche is historical . . . is as difficult for us to grasp as that the senses are not themselves natural organs but rather the results of a long process of differentiation within human history" (Jameson 62). Literary theory, including Marxism, feminism, and structuralism, drives home the point that the self is a social construct. As much as we might struggle to separate "the self" from others, and to emphasize its uniqueness, we must confront the fact that our very perceptions of reality are affected by our history, our...

Multiple Personality and Personal Identity

I Bizarre situations often help us to discover the range of a concept; by pushing it to or beyond its limits, they thereby display more clearly where those limits lie. In particular, investigations into the concept of a person use this technique regularly-one need only think of Locke's fiction of the prince and the cobbler swapping bodies, or of our contemporary fantasies of brain and hemisphere transplants, of robots virtually indistinguishable from people, and so forth. Occasionally, too, we can resort to science fact rather than science fantasy; consider the spate of recent work on commissurotomy patients (Nagel [I97I], Puccetti [1973], Wilkes [1978], Marks [1980], Puccetti [1981i]), where some, notably Puccetti, have argued that we have unearthed two persons in each body. The phenomenon of multiple personality has received little explicit attention from philosophers, although it sometimes rates a mention in parentheses or footnotes. One reason for this neglect is that it is something of a scientific embarrassment, seeming to offer an unfortunate illustration of how nature may follow art. Certainly in the late-nineteenth century, when multiple personality was taken as a genuine diagnostic category and philosophers and scientists were fascinated by it, there was a wave of reported cases; then the increasing scepticism of the mid-twentieth century seemed virtually to abolish the condition. (Of 63 patients admitted to Bellevue hospital in 1933-4 suffering from loss of identity, not one was declared to be a case of multiple personality; schizophrenia, manic depression, psychosis, aphasia, amnesia, cerebral arteriosclerosis, presenile dementia, cerebral trauma, epilepsy and carbon monoxide poisoning sufficed as diagnostic tools (Sutcliffe and Jones [1962]).) Second, there are sound methodological reasons for dropping or at least suspending belief in multiple personality as a discrete and identifiable phenomenon: the condition is an unusual and an intriguing one, so doctors greet potential cases with keen interest and attention--thereby providing strong positive reinforcement to the patient to develop distinct and distinguishable alternate personalities. It is highly likely that role playing, whether conscious or unconscious, is an essential element in the aetiology of the condition (see Taylor and Martin [1944], Orzech, McGuire and Longnecker [1958], and Congdon, Haig and Stevenson [1961]). Finally, contemporary psychiatry has largely abandoned the almost automatic resort