Fantastic Elements Research Articles

ALTERNATIVE AND NON-OBJECTIVE MUSLIM MALAY WORLDVIEWS IN DINA ZAMAN’S “KING OF THE SEA”: THROUGH THE LENS OF MAGICAL REALISM

Literary reviews on King of the Sea (2012), a collection of nine short stories, by the Malaysian author Dina Zaman (b. 1969), have highlighted the theme of the supernatural through issues on the diversity of the Muslim Malay way of life. The text is a fictional narrative on the Muslim Malay beliefs and practices in the phenomenon of supernatural existence and how the influence of beliefs in the supernatural is inherent in the Malay culture. While literary critics agree that the stories are weaved with aspects of the magical to make it more culturally acceptable as a social reality, Bradley (2012: 206), however, contests this view by describing it as Dina’s transient and elusive attempt at magical realism although he concedes that there exist some vague impressions of it. Here, magical realism is understood to be fantastical elements which are miraculous, yet seen as ordinary, and ordinary as miraculous where the reality is not abandoned but is extended. Focussing on Dina’s depictions of supernatural beliefs among the Muslim Malay characters, this paper aims to discover how the alternative and non-objective Muslim Malay worldviews are demonstrated by the author in King of the Sea using the understanding of magical realism as conceptualised by Maggie Ann Bowers (2004). The findings show that Dina depicts the alternative and non-objective Muslim Malay worldviews of the Muslim Malay characters as grounded in their beliefs in the local Malay superstitions, myths and legends reflected through literary elements which are indeed characteristics of magical realism.

Melodramatic Tactics for Survival in the Neoliberal Era: Excess and Justice in The Heirs and My Love from the Star

AbstractThis article examines two 2013 TV miniseries, The Heirs and My Love from the Star, by relating their melodramatic aesthetics to the survivalist imperative under neoliberal governance. From the colonial sinp’a theater to Golden Age films, melodrama has operated as a popular mode of imagination that expresses inarticulate experiences generated over the course of Korea’s modernization. To extend and complicate existing scholarship on modern melodrama, this study approaches recent K-dramas’ melodramatic modes as both an affective response to and an everyday tactic for coping with failing economic democracy in contemporary Korea. In this light, the intensifying fantastic elements of the genre are deemed not so much anachronistic as tactical, as they are deployed to reclaim the justice and equality that are felt to be hopelessly disappearing in daily lives. As I look at their excessive aesthetics within the context of diminishing social mobility in the neoliberal era, my analysis of the two miniseries further notes the gendered structure of these melodramatic fantasies in which the survival of women, who have fewer privileges, is achieved through the reform of male elites.

Death Note: Shinigami and the Concept of Capital Punishment in Japan

The Japanese comic known as manga is on many occasions a faithful reflection of Japanese society, a country with ancient traditions and mores, which still employs the capital punishment. One of these mangas is Death Note(Ohba and Obata, 2013), which has a multitude of readings and points of view that make us question moral approaches to life and death. It is through these that reality and comics show a society through the fantastic elements that make up the work.

Study of the Effect of Imaginary Imagery (Imaginary Color, Imaginary Figure, Imaginary Space Building and Fantasy in Characterization) on the Characterization of Children

Provided introduction is related to imagination in children’s story books. Reviewing the books of this course, in addition to introducing the author’s styles, leads to more knowledge about the content of these books. The imaginary imagery as the main gem of these books is considered as one of the most important artistic criteria. Types of colors, shapes and characteristics are the most striking forms of imagination in this work. Applying live metaphors and exquisite combinations which appear on the vapor of imagery and the remarkable frequency of ecosystemism can be seen in these works. Children build the foundations of the future civilization; therefore, in order to understand and promote the culture of our country, the study of the effect of imagery in the works of Iranian illustrators associated with the stories of Iranian writers is considered as the research goal. Another goal of this study was to identify the elements that illustrators have been inclined to use to make more visual imagery over the past decade. The methodology of this research is historical and descriptive-analytical, and the collection of materials has been done through library and internet studies. The results of the review of books and images and examples from the age group “B and C” books by the Children’s and Adolescent Intellectual Development Center indicate that the use of fictional imagery in the illustrations of the last decade has been growing and more illustrators have taken fantastic elements in creating the story space. The most commonly used fictional imagery is imaginary space, and the smallest is imaginative characters.

Artfulness and Style

Artfulness and Style J. Drake Portillo-Swails (bio) An Orchard in the Street Reginald Gibbons BOA Editions www.boaesitions.org/products 152 Pages; Print, $16.95 Reginald Gibbons explores the form of brief fiction with his latest book, An Orchard in the Street, and he does so with paintbrush in hand rather than pen. He captures his reader in each story with vivid descriptions and attention to detail. This collection appears to be an eclectic bunch of flash fiction upon first glance; however, every story functions as a still life, all forming a mosaic of human experience with one another. At the end of each story should be a long, quiet moment—just a moment—before the reader turns the page. It is in that instant that Gibbons's prose can be most appreciated. The first entry in An Orchard in the Street is "River." This story introduces the rest of the collection by providing a metaphorical tool to assist the reader in interpretation of the collection itself. The narrator of this story is told, "Stay in the river, don't be afraid of where it's going to carry you, that's where you're meant to be." This piece of advice serves as a sly just go with the flow from the author himself. Not only that, it warns the reader not to get caught up in what we find on the sides of the river, meaning the narrative this book captures is not found in any one story, but is instead a singular body formed by all. "River" also happens to be a single page; the reader knows, from the first page, exactly what this collection entails. Gibbons plays the role of writer and instructor early on in his book, and he does not let up after the first page. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this collection, carrying through the book's entirety, is its prose. Gibbons plants a rhythmic heartbeat into each of his sentences. In the story, "No Matter What Has Happened This May," the author smoothly carries the reader through each line. Each word leads into the next. "I love the little row of life along the low rusted garden-wire fence," is how this story starts. The rest of the story follows the narrator's thoughts as he appreciates every detail of the world surrounding him. Gibbons utilizes sounds, both in imagery and in word choice, efficiently and effectively. Following through the rest of the story is a similar sound, which leads us to the last line, "with the sound of that laughter and whispering in the last light of a day we had lived." The first and last lines, or more specifically the alliteration and consonance within these lines, tie this brief story together elegantly and neatly. Without his poetic style, these stories could not be told as powerfully, and it is not the action within this book that keeps you reading—it is the prose. The myriad of images that Gibbons evokes are unique in their simplicity. He takes the ordinary and shows it to you in ways you cannot see on your own. How could one, for instance, see their home when everyone is away for school or work? He takes the reader into the mind of narrator after narrator, most contemplating what most would call the mundane, and crafts an intimate portrait of words. Each moment shared with the reader is given an appropriate and deserved emotional depth. It is almost unfortunate that Gibbons creates this intimacy; as quickly as the bond between character and reader is formed, it is broken. Left behind as we continue down the river. One story in particular that takes the reader by surprise is the book's longest story, "A Man in a Suit." This is the first piece that deviates from more traditional and realistic imagery. Here we are shown, in the format of an official letter, a man (in a suit) that oozes to life from a pool of ectoplasm. After, the reader is again greeted with Gibbons's familiar and calm tone. Most stories stay away from such fantastical elements, but this story is still...

Charming Masks of Evil. The “ Oligarch” between Aestheticization and Demonization (towards a Literary History of the Character)

If, following Max Weber (1917), we describe our reality of modernized, bu- reaucratic and secularized society as disenchanted (in German: entzaubert), then a number of literary genres, ranging from magical realism to fantasy, aim at playful, literary re-enchantment of the world and therefore represent a strong anti-modernist gesture in the midst of contemporary culture. While pointing to “natural” restrictions of the objective, rational perception of the world and often questioning rationality as such, fantastic elements of literary texts normally aim at sharpening the reader’s awareness of the limitations of the customary approach towards reality, thus potentially enabling a new look at social, political and cul- tural problems of the “real” world. Therefore, both the fictions that realistically “describe” or “reflect” the world, and those texts that transfer social and political phenomena to the realms of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the (post)modern mythology, are of importance. The novels “Twelve Circles” (2003-04) and “Voroshilovgrad” (2010) obviously belong to the latter category. These texts are not stereotypical, naturalistic stories about the life of the post-Soviet elite; instead, they offer a postmodern anthology of types, motives, and plots, which, among other elements, also include the de- monic figures of the oligarchs. Despite their structural significance, these figures, however, are not real “characters” of the story, but appear in the form of phan- tasmagoric images, whose agency manifests itself only through the discourses of “money,” “power,” and “violence:” discourses the oligarchs control and use against the protagonists of the novels.

The Fantastic Prose of Ksaver Šandor Đalski and Dragutin Ilić (the Novels “Janko Borisavljević” and “Sekund večnosti”)

The subject of this research are the two fantastic novels Janko Borisavljevic and Sekund vecnosti . Considering that Ksaver Sandor Đalski and Dragutin Ilic lived and wrote at the same time, this paper explores the similarities and differences between them. We have noticed that these writers used the same motif of the idealised world and that their heroes have similar characteristics and paths. Also, both writers used the same or similar symbols – symbols of eyes, flowers, water and dreams and a certain philosophical literature as a background of their prose. The similarities among these authors represent the frame of fantasy in the novels and provide a step forward into modern literature. The most obvious difference between them is in the construction of an alternative reality. While Ilic stepped entirely into fantasy, Đalski very often rationalises the fantastic elements used in the novel.

Jacinto Octavio Picón y el reto de la verosimilitud

La temprana adscripción al naturalismo del narrador madrileño Jacinto Octavio Picón (1852- 1923) deja en sus novelas y cuentos una extraordinaria preocupación por la verosimilitud, condición primera y principal de la narrativa según los planteamientos de Émile Zola, y ello no obstante el influjo que sobre el autor ejerce la nueva novela novelesca, también de procedencia francesa, a partir de los primeros años noventa. A lo largo de toda su producción, Picón presentará un cuidado extremo en no sucumbir a la inverosimilitud o a aquello que aun basándose en lo real pudiera parecer inverosímil: la advertencia de la aparición de personajes idealistas o soñadores y de otros aspectos novelescos del relato, la justificación de lo casual o azaroso, el rigor absoluto en el punto de vista…, constituyen algunas de las facetas que fundamentan la práctica narrativa del autor madrileño.

Facets of Eleanor

‘Facets of Eleanor’ belongs to an increasingly popular and prevalent sub-genre of fantasy, the New Weird (or New Fabulist), that blurs the lines between the fantastic, genre fantasy, mythology, fairy tale, science fiction, and horror. Epitomised by the work of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Jeff VanderMeer (among others), it ‘demonstrate[s] the contemporary urge to pluralize our critical perspectives, questioning the possibilities of an objective vision and a universal language’ (Klapcsik 2009: 193), geared towards destabilising hegemonic ideological and narrative practices.Stemming from research exploring fantasy’s progressive potential, this creative practice encapsulates the desire to defamilarise the familiar through perspectival shifts and a liminal hesitation consistent with the fantastic element underpinning fairy tale. Fundamentally, it addresses Mieville’s hypothesis that Weird Fiction’s ‘focus is on awe, and its undermining of the quotidian’ (2009: 510) within an Australian context. Combining fiction and criticism, ‘Facets of Eleanor’ emphasises this theoretical focus, suggesting that its scope reaches past reality and into the narratives that mediate its perception. ‘Facets of Eleanor’ not only opens up a space to conceptualise a modern, Australian ‘flavoured’ fairy tale, but does so while foregrounding the historical, social, and discursive forces embedded in the form. Significantly, it sits within the author’s academic and creative oeuvre, acting as both a conduit and foil between the disciplines, at once filling gaps and poking holes.

Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature. Aisling Byrne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xi+212.

<i>Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature</i>. Aisling Byrne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xi+212.

To a God Unknown: Drought, Climate, and Race in the West

AbstractTo a God Unknown (1933) has typically been viewed as one of John Steinbeck's most problematic works, not least because of the novel's apparently jarring mixture of realistic and fantastic elements. This article reevaluates Steinbeck's early novel by placing it in the context of emergent ideas about race and about climate—and indeed, about the links between race and climate—in the American West. To a God Unknown is best understood not as a failed early novel but as an experimental work that attempts to fuse realist and symbolic modes in ways parallel to the genre of magical realism, which first developed in post-Expressionist art from the 1920s, and flowered in Latin American writing from the 1960s. By exploring Steinbeck's thinking during his composition of the novel, particularly his interest in “race psychopathology” and his reading of Ellsworth Huntington's Civilization and Climate (1915), we discover how To a God Unknown's magical realism marks a pioneering attempt to understand and represent the aridity and drought that define the climate of the West and have profound implications for the kind of “civilization” it can sustain. Through formal analysis in historical context, the essay attempts to lay the groundwork for further considerations of Steinbeck as a writer of the Anthropocene whose works are continuous with the environmental and racial critique associated with later writers of the Global South.

Fantastyka i temat Holokaustu. Między wątpliwościami a funkcjonalnością konwencji fantastycznych

Starting with Jerzy Jarzębski’s opinion that the fantastic convention in contemporary literature fulfills the role of “artificial sense”, the Author analyzes selected works related to the subject of the Holocaust in order to check the functionality and artistic value of fantastic elements used there. She notes that fantasy helps writers express the experience of emptiness following a loss, strengthens the trauma related to the past, and emphasizes the literariness of the text, fulfilling the role of metafiction.

Entre humanos e bestas: o insólito ficcional em The Great God Pan e Shame

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p91O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar duas obras ficcionais, a novela The Great God Pan, de Arthur Machen, e o romance Shame, de Salman Rushdie, que contêm situações e eventos insólitos, examinando-as de modo a discutir como os elementos fantásticos presentes em ambos os textos relacionam-se ao contexto de produção das obras, ou seja, respectivamente, o século XIX e a segunda metade do século XX. Machen promoveu uma ruptura em relação à tradição das histórias de horror, então em voga, e Rushdie introduziu na literatura pós-colonial indiana características do Realismo Mágico. Temporalmente distantes, as duas obras recorrem a um mesmo artifício, típico da ficção fantástica, a metamorfose de personagens, e, por meio dela, os autores constroem uma crítica subliminar ao sistema político e social dominante em seu tempo.

The New Voices of Fantasy by Peter S. Beagle &amp; Jacob Weisman

narrative, Šindelka decides to take a tenpage detour into the boredom and stress of waiting for a train to leave a station. As a character study it also falls flat, as Andrei and Nina and Kryštof are prone to either long, unnatural diatribes on the nature of plants or over-the-top displays of emotion and grief (disappearing into the woods for days at a time, stripping naked, rubbing mud all over their bodies). This is, I suppose , a novel that really does seem to understand its immediate outer world better than anything interior. The journey through a flooded Prague, through fields of poisonous hogweed, through back alleys littered with cigarette butts is one worth taking, if you’re patient and willing to take it. J. David Osborne Tigard, Oregon The New Voices of Fantasy. Ed. Peter S. Beagle & Jacob Weisman. San Francisco. Tachyon. 2017. 336 pages. The New Voices of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, promises the reader exposure to the next generation of fantasy writers. These eighteen stories and one novella feature writers already known for being strong new voices of fantasy, like Sofia Samatar, and others, like Brooke Bolander, who’ve only published a handful of stories. Each is a shining example of the genre, featuring gorgeous sentences, images that stick in the mind, and heartbreaking loss. Readers of both fantasy and literary fabulism will appreciate this anthology. These new voices deal just as easily with contemporary times, worlds similar to our own, modern sensibilities, and futuristic details like space suits and real estate guides as with the folktale roots of fantasy. Technology, capitalism, and fantasy can comfortably coexist. One of my favorites, “The Husband Stitch,” by Carmen Maria Machado, harks back to the gender horror of old fairy tales while set in contemporary times. “The Pauper and the Eucalyptus Jinn,” by Usman T. Malik, the most stellar work in the anthology, follows an immigrant’s return home to Pakistan to investigate a mystery of family lore, uncovering a secret guarded by a jinn. In “A Kiss with Teeth,” by Max Gladstone, Vlad the Impaler gets a suburban dad update. Any anthology, especially one trying to predict the future, is bound to fail. There are always deserving authors left out, like Sabrina Vourvoulias and Seth Dickinson, authors who’ve written excellent and leading books of the genre, to name just a few, and writers on the literary side who might also come to define the future of fantasy. As the boundaries of fantasy have shifted and blurred, many of the stories included here could easily be included in an anthology of fabulism or magical realism. As a predictive text for who will write the blockbuster fantasies of the next decade, only time will tell. As a survey of the field of what new fantasy looks like now, this collection shows an excellent range of emerging writers, sure to be complemented by anthologies like The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Brenda Peynado University of Central Florida Ray Loriga. Rendición. Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 216 pages. Ray Loriga, born Jorge Loriga Torrenova in Madrid in 1967, has garnered the 2017 Alfaguara Novel Prize for Rendición (Surrender ), an engaging, thought-provoking dystopian novel with absurdist and fantastical elements. An experienced writer of ten novels, Loriga has also been active in filmmaking, collaborating as a scriptwriter with, among others, film directors Carlos Saura and Pedro Almodóvar. He also brought one of his novels, Caídos del cielo (1995), to the big screen as La pistola de mi hermano (My brother’s gun, 1997). Loriga has been characterized as an underground writer associated with Spanish dirty realism . Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs are often mentioned as writers who have had an impact on his work, and readers will note the influence of Kafka and Orwell in his most recent novel. In Rendición, an anonymous narratorprotagonist tells how he, his wife, and a child they have taken in are forcibly removed from their rural estate and relocated to the “transparent city.” War has been raging for a decade, and the couple’s two children have gone off to fight for their country. The...

The Hearts We Sold by Emily Lloyd-Jones

Reviewed by: The Hearts We Sold by Emily Lloyd-Jones Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Lloyd-Jones, Emily The Hearts We Sold. Little, 2017[400p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-316-31459-6 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-316-31463-3 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8–12 When seventeen-year-old Dee loses her scholarship to her prestigious boarding school, she’s so desperate to avoid going home to her alcoholic parents that she makes a deal with a demon, giving up her heart for two years in return for tuition money. The catch—besides the whole not having a heart thing—is that she is required to, with three other heartless teens, destroy what seem to be wormholes or “voids” in the space-time continuum. Bargaining with demons and charging into unknown spaces have a way of bringing people together, and Dee quickly finds herself attached to fellow bargain-maker James, even though she’s beginning to wonder if she’ll get out of this deal alive, let alone with her heart. There’s an interesting mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and supernatural all swimming around here, with an emphasis on the idea that demons, wormholes, and magic might simply be aspects of sciences humans have yet to understand. For all its fantastical elements, though, the story is grounded in realism, focusing especially on Dee’s paralyzing anxiety and deep-seated trust issues as a result of a lifetime in an abusive household. Her relationship with James skates near saccharine but her practicality gives it balance, and the tentative shaping of her confidence, both as a romantic partner and a world-saver, rings with authenticity. Readers’ hearts will lurch at the unexpected ending, but they’ll be glad to have known Dee and James, despite the bittersweet payoff. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Rendición

narrative, Šindelka decides to take a tenpage detour into the boredom and stress of waiting for a train to leave a station. As a character study it also falls flat, as Andrei and Nina and Kryštof are prone to either long, unnatural diatribes on the nature of plants or over-the-top displays of emotion and grief (disappearing into the woods for days at a time, stripping naked, rubbing mud all over their bodies). This is, I suppose , a novel that really does seem to understand its immediate outer world better than anything interior. The journey through a flooded Prague, through fields of poisonous hogweed, through back alleys littered with cigarette butts is one worth taking, if you’re patient and willing to take it. J. David Osborne Tigard, Oregon The New Voices of Fantasy. Ed. Peter S. Beagle & Jacob Weisman. San Francisco. Tachyon. 2017. 336 pages. The New Voices of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, promises the reader exposure to the next generation of fantasy writers. These eighteen stories and one novella feature writers already known for being strong new voices of fantasy, like Sofia Samatar, and others, like Brooke Bolander, who’ve only published a handful of stories. Each is a shining example of the genre, featuring gorgeous sentences, images that stick in the mind, and heartbreaking loss. Readers of both fantasy and literary fabulism will appreciate this anthology. These new voices deal just as easily with contemporary times, worlds similar to our own, modern sensibilities, and futuristic details like space suits and real estate guides as with the folktale roots of fantasy. Technology, capitalism, and fantasy can comfortably coexist. One of my favorites, “The Husband Stitch,” by Carmen Maria Machado, harks back to the gender horror of old fairy tales while set in contemporary times. “The Pauper and the Eucalyptus Jinn,” by Usman T. Malik, the most stellar work in the anthology, follows an immigrant’s return home to Pakistan to investigate a mystery of family lore, uncovering a secret guarded by a jinn. In “A Kiss with Teeth,” by Max Gladstone, Vlad the Impaler gets a suburban dad update. Any anthology, especially one trying to predict the future, is bound to fail. There are always deserving authors left out, like Sabrina Vourvoulias and Seth Dickinson, authors who’ve written excellent and leading books of the genre, to name just a few, and writers on the literary side who might also come to define the future of fantasy. As the boundaries of fantasy have shifted and blurred, many of the stories included here could easily be included in an anthology of fabulism or magical realism. As a predictive text for who will write the blockbuster fantasies of the next decade, only time will tell. As a survey of the field of what new fantasy looks like now, this collection shows an excellent range of emerging writers, sure to be complemented by anthologies like The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Brenda Peynado University of Central Florida Ray Loriga. Rendición. Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 216 pages. Ray Loriga, born Jorge Loriga Torrenova in Madrid in 1967, has garnered the 2017 Alfaguara Novel Prize for Rendición (Surrender ), an engaging, thought-provoking dystopian novel with absurdist and fantastical elements. An experienced writer of ten novels, Loriga has also been active in filmmaking, collaborating as a scriptwriter with, among others, film directors Carlos Saura and Pedro Almodóvar. He also brought one of his novels, Caídos del cielo (1995), to the big screen as La pistola de mi hermano (My brother’s gun, 1997). Loriga has been characterized as an underground writer associated with Spanish dirty realism . Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs are often mentioned as writers who have had an impact on his work, and readers will note the influence of Kafka and Orwell in his most recent novel. In Rendición, an anonymous narratorprotagonist tells how he, his wife, and a child they have taken in are forcibly removed from their rural estate and relocated to the “transparent city.” War has been raging for a decade, and the couple’s two children have gone off to fight for their country. The...

Analysing Thought Experiments

Philosophers such as Gettier, Frankfurt, and Thomson are famous for their thought experiments. This makes one wonder: how did they invent their cases? Were they just lucky to devise a good case, or did they follow some basic rules that are available to all of us? In this paper, we argue for the latter answer by presenting a guidebook for analysing thought experiments. Our guidebook clearly specifies which factors should be included in a thought experiment, and which factors should be left out. This will help students to see through the fantastical elements of TEs, to learn the practice, and to check whether philosophers are doing things right. We illustrate our account in some detail using examples from Thomson’s thought experiments.

Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature by Lee Manion

Reviewed by: Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature by Lee Manion Mimi Ensley Lee Manion. Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 306; $98.00. In his 1395 Epistre au Roi Richart, Philippe de Mézières urges the English and the French to cooperate in order to recover the Holy Land and spread the teachings of Christianity in the East. In making his appeal, Philippe turns to figures made famous by romance, telling Richard II and Charles VI "one of you [will] be the noble Roland and the other the [End Page 363] very perfect Oliver … one of you may imitate the very valiant … Charlemagne and the other that very bold … King Arthur, when you fight against the enemies of the Faith" (116). In Philippe's letter, the discourses of chivalric fiction bleed into the political and religious concerns of the contemporary world. Throughout Narrating the Crusades, Lee Manion traces similar interactions between romance narratives and the historical contexts in which they were read and purposed to ideological ends. Manion uncovers the topical resonances of a group of texts that he labels "crusading romances," a genre whose contours coalesce over the course of his book. Certainly, the problem of genre is not an unusual concern for a scholar of medieval romance, but Manion's focus on a subcategory of romance, rather than on the genre as a whole, opens up new associations among texts not often read in conjunction with one another. Of obvious interest to historians and literary scholars, medievalists and early modernists, Manion's book demonstrates the value of using literary texts, and especially romance, in the study of the crusades, and of viewing the crusades as a fruitful context for cultural production. While scholars have previously recognized that military-focused romances such as The Siege of Jerusalem are relevant to crusading history, Manion extends the definition of the "crusading romance" to include texts that exhibit one or more of the features that he argues are central to "crusading discourse"—including less-than-obvious documents such as Philippe's Epistre. The defining tropes of crusading discourse include: imagery of the cross, military campaigns against non-Christians, and pilgrimages undertaken in conjunction with combat. These features need not all appear in a given text for it to be considered a "crusading romance," a subgenre that Manion argues is unified by a rhetorical emphasis on "loss and recovery"—both territorial and salvational. In the crusading romances, Manion claims, the conflict of the narrative focuses on "reconquest," a trope encompassing both "the recovery of legitimate possessions for Christendom as well as the individual's 'recovery' of a state free from sin" (9). Thus, Sir Isumbras, with its story of one knight's penitential pilgrimage, and The Sowdone of Babylone, with its Christian military campaigns, can be understood as part of the same tradition. Narrating the Crusades proceeds chronologically, tracing the development of the "crusading romance" alongside the equally active evolution of crusading from the early fourteenth century through the post-Reformation period. Although much of his study focuses on romances [End Page 364] heretofore not understood within a crusading context, Manion begins with Richard Coeur de Lion, a military-focused account of Richard I's participation in the Third Crusade. Manion's intervention lies in his reading of Richard as an "anti-nationalist" text. While the trend in Richard scholarship—evident in the work of Thorlac Turville-Petre, Geraldine Heng, and others—has been to see the romance as an early attempt to craft an English national identity, Manion highlights Richard's interest in cross-cultural alliances. Additionally, his reading of Richard is distinguished from recent analyses that have foregrounded the more fantastic elements of the narrative, such as Richard's cannibalism or his demonic mother's inability to receive the Eucharist. Instead, Manion traces a lexicon of "associational forms" in the poem—words such as "frend" or "felawrade"—which, he argues, serve to highlight the "diverse, non-nationalistic" army privileged in the romance (21, 41). Throughout, Manion questions a teleological perspective...

Estanislao del Campo’s Fausto: a Reading From the Perspective of the Fantastic

Early on, Estanislao del Campo’s Faust (1866) already incorporates fantastic elements anticipating the two sources from which nineteenth-century Argentine literature will nurture: first, the beliefs and superstitions of the people of the region and, secondly, the importation of fantastic foreign imagery from abroad. In the first part of this work, I will study the poem within the context of gaucho literature and, in the second one, I will analyze the artifices of the fantastic literature detected, both in the story as told by Anastasio el Pollo about his vision of the devil in the city, and in the reception of the story as heard by Don Laguna.

The role of fantasy–reality distinctions in preschoolers' learning from educational video

AbstractThe current study examined if preschoolers' understanding of fantasy and reality are related to their learning from educational videos. Forty‐nine 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children watched short clips of popular educational programs in which animated characters solved problems. Following video viewing, children attempted to solve real‐world problems analogous to the problems in the videos and were asked to describe similarities between the video problems and the problems they solved in the lab. Additionally, children were tested for their understanding of which aspects of the clips and characters were realistic and possible and which were fantastical and impossible in the real world. Children were most likely to transfer solutions from clips that had moderate elements of fantasy or incorporated fantastical elements at moments that were relevant to solving the problem. Additionally, children's understanding of which elements of the clips were fantastical was related to their transfer. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the role of the fantasy understanding in children's learning from media.Highlights Over the preschool years, children come to understand what aspects of animated programs are and are not possible in the real world. Preschoolers learn problem-solving skills from animated shows when they have a clear boundary between fantasy and reality. Engaging with moderate fantastical content in animated programs can support abstract thinking.