Fantasy Works Research Articles

Fantasy and Taoism in <i>The Earthsea Cycle</i>

The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin, regarded as one of the most successful Western fantasy novels worldwide, constructs for the readers a fantasy Earthsea world where the harmonious combination of Oriental philosophy and Western literature lays the pillar. Drawing upon the philosophy of Taoism and Tao Te Ching, and resorting to the analysis of the three most significant elements in the book, true name, this essay conducts a profound and comprehensive exploration of the Taoist wonders in The Earthsea Cycle. This essay illustrates the connections among true name, language creation view and Tao to reveal how true name reflects the nature of life and existence. At last, the essay concludes that The Earthsea Cycle is a literary work of Western fantasy entwined with Oriental Taoist philosophy. True name is the essence of existence in the Earthsea world, while magic originates from the need to develop while following the course of nature. All things in The Earthsea Cycle rely on nature and inaction, and grow within the circle of life.

Socialism and Fantasy: China Miéville's Fables of Race and Class

Among a number of contemporary science and speculative fiction writers who identify as left-wing, China Miéville stands out, not only for the quality of his literary production, but also for the critical character of his political commitment, dedicated equally to socialism and to fantasy. In addition to his fictive works, he has written articles and given lectures on the nature and value of speculative and fantasy fiction; edited a collection of essays on Marxism and fantasy in an issue of the journal <em>Historical Materialism</em>; and, not least, published a list of "Fifty Sci-Fi and Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read." I wish to discuss here the form and thematics of the early novels known (after the alternate world in which they are set) as the Bas-Lag trilogy—which remains, if you take it as a single work, his most ambitious and memorable achievement. But since Miéville is a serious critic and advocate of fantasy fiction, I will approach the books with a brief discussion of his aesthetic positions and program, gathered from essays and talks as well as from his literary works.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-9" title="Vol. 67, No. 9: February 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction by Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn

Reviewed by: Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction by Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn Joli Barham McClelland (bio) Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. By Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction is an immense work in scope and scholarship. As befits its authors, Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn—two prominent figures in the world of children’s literature criticism—this latest work is a far-reaching feat that grasps the tenuous strings of the inception of both fantasy and children’s literature and weaves them from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries into a tremendous narrative tapestry. Employing a myriad of critical lenses including historical, political, ideological, and cultural schools of thought throughout the ages, Levy and Mendlesohn meticulously detail hundreds of works of fantastical children’s literature, many well known and many less so, to offer a nuanced history of the development of children’s fantasy literature that is occasionally dizzying in its detail but will undoubtedly be the unsurpassed reference for the field for years to come. In writing scholarship on children’s literature and fantasy, a crucial component is defining both children’s literature and the fantastic in order to provide boundaries for criticism. Here Levy and Mendlesohn have been highly inclusive, adopting the latter’s belief that it is the “mode of fantasy,” rather than the definition, that advances critical consideration (3). Thus Mendlesohn’s four modes of fantasy—portal-quest, intrusion, immersive, and liminal—are all employed throughout the work to locate stories within the trajectory of the genre. Additionally, other well-accepted delineations come into play, including high, indigenous, urban, and pastoral fantasy. Similarly, the historical and modern tales encapsulated in Mendlesohn and Levy’s definition of “children’s literature” are also far-flung, including works that were appropriated [End Page 458] by children as well as those written specifically for them (5). These broad definitions, coupled with the authors’ declaration that they “began their bibliographies from scratch” (5), serve as defining characteristics of this book, making it perhaps one of the most ambitious and inclusive writings available on the development of the fantastic for children (5). The book opens with an examination of how the fantastic evolved to be considered suitable for and published for children. Noting that the earliest children’s stories were often moral animal tales, Levy and Mendlesohn trace the development of such tales through the fairy tales of Perrault’s French court, into the social narratives of the Grimms’ German stories, through the skepticism of early English critics toward the imaginative in children’s works, and finally to the domestic and mostly enclosed fantasy stories of late nineteenth-century Britain. While much of the thematic and social conclusions about the development of children’s fantasy works throughout these time periods are well established, the diligence with which the authors document lesser-known works that support these trajectories is enlightening. No stone, or perhaps no anthropomorphized animal, is left unexamined. The bulk of Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction runs chronologically, focusing largely on the development of the fantastic and of children’s publishing in England and America from the Victorian period through modern times. As they examine each era in turn, Levy and Mendlesohn lovingly trace not only the defining works and authors of that period, but also the socioeconomic, historical, and cultural trappings that colored the perceptions of both the writers of children’s fantasy and their young readers. Well-versed critics and enthusiasts new to the world of fantasy and children’s fiction alike will find copious detail and insights concerning the movement of the fantastic and children’s literature from their bounded, often trivial, and moralistic roots in Victorian England and the budding United States to the boundless, high-stakes, and frequently dark and bitter flowering that forms much of the fantasy available to children and teens today. Throughout this journey all the usual suspects appear, including such household names in fantasy and children’s writing as George MacDonald, A. A. Milne, Edith Nesbit, J. R. R. Tolkien, Roald Dahl, C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Cooper, Jane Yolen, J...

The Source of Magic

This paper is an attempt to show that a large part of Western society no longer operates on the rationalist principles that most of us thought it did, but that it instead runs by magic more akin to that in fantasy works. The term ‘magic’ is not meant metaphorically or in science fiction author Arthur C Clarke’s sense that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Clarke 1962), but is meant literally in the sense that Frazer (1890, republished 2003) used the term. This means that instead of trying to understand the present and near future by looking at the works of science fiction creators who put forth a rationalist and technological view of the world, we would understand the future better by looking to the fantasy of authors such as Jack Vance, Matthew Hughes, Ursula Le Guin, Piers Anthony and Michael Moorcock. This magic is manifested through magical thinking and irrational behaviour, where the majority of us use literal spells and incantations in our daily interactions with each other in the networked world, and where we worship capricious gods; most importantly, those spells, incantations and worship actually work, and those gods have actually come to exist. This paper will also show just how the spread of the computer technology propounded by scientists, technologists and SF writers has inevitably led to the creation of this irrational and magical world. This is partly because of limitations built-in to the formal systems on which these systems are based, leading to an extreme example of the law of unintended consequences. Finally, the paper will explain the mechanism by which magic is literally becoming real by reference to Frazer’s two laws of magic: the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion.

Devotion, Domination, and the Work of Fantasy in Colonial Peru

Devotion, Domination, and the Work of Fantasy in Colonial Peru

Strangely Interested: The Work of Historical Fantasy

The proliferation of historical commemoration in the United States has led to the willful, overt manipulation of historical facts through imaginative fantasy. This essay argues that a strong literary tradition can help us understand this mode of historical fantasy. The essay surveys contemporary fictions of alternate history, particularly Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004). The essay contends that historical fantasy offers a particular mode of engagement with the past—one that steers a middle course between nationalist chauvinism and revisionist debunking.

Stories about stories: fantasy and the remaking of myth

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Fantasy as a Route to Myth Taxonomic Interlude: A Note on Genres Chapter 2: Make It Old: The Other Mythic Method Chapter 3: Silver Lies and Spinning Wheels: Christian Myth in MacDonald and Lewis Chapter 4: Romance and Formula, Myth and Memorate Chapter 5: Expanding the Territory: Colonial Fantasy Chapter 6: Angels, Fantasy, and Belief Literalist Interlude: Burning Harry Potter Chapter 7: The Postcolonial Fantastic Chapter 8: Coyote's Eyes: Situated Fantasy Works Cited

The desire for fullness. The fantasmatic logic of modernization discourses in the turn of the 19th century in Łódź

The tension inherent in the desire to be modern appeared with all its strength in the discourses surrounding an alien, rapidly developing industrial center in the middle of the rural Kingdom of Poland – the city of Łódź,. In this article, I attempt to reconstruct the logic of press and reportage discourses dealing with this new experience. The press, reportage, and literary discourses concerning the newly established locus of modernity – the city of Łódź – reveal the work of ideological fantasy, a logic of discourse in reportages, essays and novels describing an imaginary diagnosis of reality and a fantasy about its utopian version, as well as the obstacles which always prevent the fulfillment of utopia and even threaten it with a more horrific dystopian vision. Still, the clue lies in the obstacle itself, which is at one and the same time the foundation allowing any utopian project to appear at all, as well a vision of reality.

Evaluation of the Manuscript of the Maitreya Era

You read your manuscript "The Age of Maitreya" and you are impressed with how your fantasy works. You then announce the arrival of some Fire to Earth in its creation "Fire at the threshold". You are now reporting the arrival of people to Shambhala. If all of this is true for you, then please be pleased with it.

A little idea

A little idea

War on the fantasy worlds: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien on art and imagination

This investigation focuses on C.S. Lewis's and J.R.R. Tolkien's contrasting views of art and imagination, which are key to understanding and interpreting their fantasy works, providing insight into their goals, themes, and techniques, as well as an appreciation of the value and impact of their mythologies. Most scholarship about J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis describes their shared faith and academic interests or analyzes each writer's fantasy works. War of the Fantasy Worlds: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on Art and Imagination is the first to focus solely on their contrasting concepts of fantasy. The authors' views of art and imagination, the book shows, are not only central to understanding the themes, value, and relevance of their fantasy fiction, but are also strikingly different. Understanding the authors' thoughts about fantasy helps us better understand and appreciate their works. Yet, this book is not a critical analysis of The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia. Rather, it examines only elements of Tolkien's and Lewis's books that relate to their views about art, fantasy, and creativity, or the implementation of their theories. The result is a unique and altogether fascinating perspective on two of the most revered fantasy authors of all time.

Post-disaster Fiction for Young Adults: Some Trends and Variations

Taking as its central question: 'What narrative functions does the disaster in young adult postdisaster fiction have?', this paper explores how the genre is utilised to make comment on a range of issues, and argues that there are three connected sub-genres within young adult post-disaster fiction, with the disaster having a different function in each, and the nature of the comments made by each of these sub-genres tending also to be different. Stephens considers that: 'The main distinguishing feature of the genre is that its texts are set in a fantasy future which exists some time after the world we know has been destroyed by a cataclysmic disaster, usually caused by human actions' (1992, p.126). This paper broadens this definition to include texts in which the disaster actually happens but in which the focus is on life after the disaster. It understands fantasy to include speculative fiction which seeks to portray pre-disaster life as similar to the implied young adult reader's, as well as works of high fantasy in which the disaster has made Earth into a kind of secondary world (see Sands 1998, p.232), and focuses on novels in which the disaster has clearly been caused by humans in some way.

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd (review)

Reviewed by: Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd Karen Coats Black, Holly, ed. Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd; edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci; illus. by Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O’Malley. Little, 2009 403p. ISBN 978-0-316-00809-9 $16.99 Did you hear the one about the geek who grew up to write young adult fiction? Apparently that particular coming-of-age trajectory has achieved the status of a cultural meme, as Black and Castellucci demonstrate here. They have assembled nineteen of today’s most popular YA authors to tell the stories of role-playing geeks, band geeks, theater geeks, comic-book geeks, cosplay geeks, science geeks, Buffy geeks, Rocky Horror geeks, etc. Given the details included in the author bios and the fluency with [End Page 59] which the characters engage in complex dorkuments (arguments over some finer point of geek culture), it’s clear that these authors, which include M. T. Anderson, John Green, Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Scott Westerfeld, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, Garth Nix, and David Levithan, among others, are speaking in their native tongue. However, for readers who don’t know the difference between, say, a LARP (Live Action Role-Playing Game) and an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) an internet connection will handy, since the authors don’t include a glossary, although interstitial comics by Black and Castellucci and illustrators Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O’Malley go some way toward mapping the geek ’verse. Though not all the stories are independently stellar, the formula of one part irony, one part justification, and two parts wish-fulfillment fantasy works pretty well across the board to highlight the important role a geeky obsession can play in getting teens through tough social and familial situations. Because of this persistent and universalizing theme, even non-geeks will find something to like here, and they may even learn to treat those weirdly dressed, oddly intense kids at the other lunch table with more respect. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

When Worlds Collide: Dismantling the Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John

The Ward Chipman Library on the Saint John campus of the University of New Brunswick is home to a freestanding collection of over 32,000 science fiction and fantasy works, including reference material, primary works, magazines, and mass market/pulp items from most of the 20th century. Some scholars, including Dr. Farah Mendlesohn of Middlesex University, have described it as one of the best in the world. Active development of this collection ceased in 2000 however, and in recent years it has been primarily used as a popular reading collection, with little academic use. A decision to reduce the collection to one designed solely for academic research was met with great protest, and subsequently the collection was weeded and the remainder moved to storage to free up space for other library initiatives. The article describes the collection, the reasons for the proposed and actual reductions, the protests, and the valuable lessons learned from the experience, including the importance of collection development and management policies, the importance of involving the user community to ensure that everyone's needs are met, and the tensions that sometimes arise when intellectual and practical concerns collide.

What is Fantasy?

What is Fantasy? Brian Laetz and Joshua J. Johnston Wizards, elves, dragons, and trolls—this is certainly the stuff of fantasy, populating the fictions of such giants as Tolkien, no less than the juvenilia of many aspiring writers. However, it is much easier to identify typical elements of fantasy, than it is to understand the category of fantasy itself. There can be little doubt that, in practice, the genre is pretty well defined, concretely manifesting itself in the shelves reserved for it in video shops and bookstores. But stating why a work belongs on these shelves, rather than those in the near vicinity, such as horror and science fiction, or those more remote, like plain old fiction, presents a real challenge. Certainly, a mere few feet could separate fantasy from the other shelves, but the conceptual distance those feet represent appears great indeed. What, if anything, distinguishes this genre from other categories of mass art. In other words, what is fantasy? To begin, fantasy is a transmedia genre, since there are fantasy novels and movies, for instance, as is illustrated by J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga and its recent cinematic adaptation. It is interesting to note that fantasy includes works from other media as well, such as paintings, which often accompany fantasy narratives, like Frank Frazetta's recognizable illustrations for Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories. Forms of entertainment are also affiliated with the genre, such as role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, though one might balk at considering such things even forms of mass art? Nonetheless, despite the variety of media and entertainments associated with fantasy, [End Page 161] narratives occupy a fundamental place within the genre. For paintings, drawings, and the like are only recognizably fantastic given some narrative background that tells us what wizards, trolls, and dragons look like.1 Plausibly, it is what allows us to see that a drawing depicts an elf, for example, rather than a child with odd pointy ears. Thus, even if some works of fantasy are, strictly speaking, non-narrative, fantastic narratives remain fundamental, since these other works would not be classified as fantasy without them. This warrants initially setting aside things like fantasy games and paintings to focus on narratives. What, precisely, makes a narrative fantastic? First, fantastic narratives are essentially fictional. For regardless of how one ultimately understands the nature of fiction, the notion of true fantasy seems patently incoherent, quite unlike, say, true crime. And it must be stressed that this point should be compatible with any theory of fiction. Second, the sort of things that can make a work fantastic, like wizards and dragons, must be prominent in the work—they cannot be minor details. For example, had there been a two-minute scene in Spartacus in which someone cast a spell, the scene would have been fantastic, but ultimately the movie would not be classified any differently; you would still find it on the drama shelf. Moreover, this condition is not peculiar to fantasy.2 For instance, no one who has suffered through a Steven Seagal film would seriously classify it as romance or even action-romance, simply because it has a minor romantic subplot. Fantasy is no different from any other genre in this regard: whatever features define a genre must be prominent in a work in order for it to belong to the relevant genre. Third, the sort of content that can make a work fantastic must not solely be viewed as symbols for things that are not fantastic. In other words, these elements cannot just be taken as allegorical.3 This alone would seem to disqualify George Orwell's Animal Farm from the genre, since most read the intelligent animals as merely symbols portraying various factions in communist Russia. It should be noted that the actual intentions of the author probably matter little here. For example, even if scholars discovered that Tolkien merely intended the Middle Earth saga as an elaborate allegory, it would remain fantasy; few would be tempted to move the books to another shelf. Fourth, the relevant content must not solely be mocked or lampooned within the work.4 This is necessary...

Joseph Campbell's 'New Mythology' and the Rise of Mythopoeic Fantasy

If the twentieth century witnessed a "rehabilitation of myth" in literary studies, the upsurge of interest in mythic systems with their ideologies, worldviews, and functional modes is rightly attributed to the work of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, Northrop Frye, and Joseph Campbell. Behind their thousand faces, those thinkers argued, myths carry one message, which reflects the psychic unity of humankind. And because we are becoming more conscious of this unity, we face the need to "tell ourselves" anew and imagine a new mythology apposite to the modern situation. In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell presents this new mythology as one of the whole human race; saying it is relevant to our present knowledge, already implicit among humans as intuitive knowledge, and will be realized in and through art. These postulates are met in and chronologically overlap with the emergence of modern mythopoeic fantasy in Tolkien, Lewis, L'Engle, Le Guin, Alexander, and others. This paper suggests that works of mythopoeic fantasy can be seen as exploring the components of the new story of unifying the human race and play an important role in shaping modern readers' response to contemporary challenges of an increasingly shrinking world.

Calvino's Non-Knowledge

This essay proposes a psychoanalytic reading of several works by Italo Calvino. Indebted to Octave Mannoni and Slavoj Žižek for their theorization of fetishism as a logic that binds together a knowledge and a non-knowledge, and in particular to Mannoni's formulation of that logic in the phrase 'Je sais bien, mais quand même', the essay tracks the theme of the 'void' in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, Le Cosmicomiche, and La strada di San Giovanni, and examines the model of desire as 'universal cannibalism' in 'Sotto il sole giaguaro'. It reads the thematization of the 'void' as an attempt to master the constitutive lack that ideological fantasy works to cover over, and argues that the fantasy of reciprocal cannibalism is an attempt to render transparent an opacity in language that the desiring subject cannot know.

The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction Gary Schmidt (bio) Joanne Brown and Nancy St. Clair . The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow P, 2006. The word Reflections in a title suggests that this will be a book in which the authors will approach their matter ruminatively, having considered issues and ideas, having weighed and assessed those, and then having come to conclusions that grow out of wide and varied reading, as well as wise and considered judgment. This is partially true in this study of historical fiction for young adults; certainly there is wide reading here, and a capacious understanding of the issues in writing historical fiction, particularly for a young adult audience. But "ruminative" is not an adjective that applies here, and, at times, "assessment" is not the right noun. In fact, Presentations might have been more appropriate for the subtitle of this book, for while Brown and St. Clair cover the terrain of the field by focusing on its issues and the way those are represented in selected texts, they seem more interested in pointing out the sights than analyzing their meanings, connections, and complexities. Which is a shame, since the sights they point out are fascinating and important, and the pointing out alone makes this an important book to have on the shelves of undergraduate libraries. But we begin poorly: Their survey of the roots of historical fiction is not especially helpful and rather distorting—we leap from historical writing in the classical period to historical writing in the eighteenth century—which is, admittedly, the century in which history as a science became established, but it's a mighty [End Page 67] long leap. Certainly the medieval period had much to say about the writing of history and narration; one need only read Bede to hear his ruminative voice, or Alcuin, or Geoffrey of Monmouth. And the Renaissance need not be ashamed of its contributions, as Sidney's Apology for Poetry challenged the mutual roles of fiction and non-fiction in ways that would have been helpful for later discussions in this book. Quick tours are never revealing. But the bulk of this book is given over to "historical fiction as social realism," and here the authors do important work in gathering together the confronting issues: How does historical fiction confront racism? How does historical fiction incorporate issues of faith and spirituality? How does it confront issues of class structure and of gender constructions? How does it examine issues such as immigration? How does it handle history's fascination with war and battle? These are good questions to ask, and Brown and St. Clair are strongest when they are asking them in the context of individual texts—although not when they choose texts from a century ago, which are, every time, set up as easy strawmen. Where they are less strong is when they try to handle the How of those questions in a broader sense. For one feels throughout this study a fascination with the primary texts, but an underlying dismissal of a more theoretical engagement. This is not to say that the book is problematic because it does not engage with contemporary theoretical concerns; it is to say that a more insightful and engaged approach, a more nuanced approach to the issues themselves would strengthen the examinations of the texts themselves. For example, the authors never really engage with the issue of definition in this genre, and seem to slide into a sideways glance at definition during the tour when a text calls for it. What specifically is historical fiction? Here the authors include a work in which an author consciously sets his or her plot and characters into an earlier time. Well and good. But how much earlier? Here, the authors might benefit enormously by looking at this through a reader response lens, but their answer is an arbitrary number of years. And what are the boundaries of this genre? Well, this seems rather open. The genre can, in their hands, include works of fantasy, in which a contemporary figure travels back in time to the past. It can include works that consciously change...

‘Quality singles’: internet dating and the work of fantasy

This article builds on a case study of the worldwide online dating site Match.com to develop a theoretical understanding of the place of communication and affect in the information economy. Drawing on theoretical debates, secondary sources, a qualitative survey of dating profiles and an analysis of the features and affordances of the Match.com site, the article argues that internet dating seeks to guide the technologically enhanced communicative and affective capacities of internet users to work in ways so that this produces economically valuable content. This is primarily achieved through branding, which as a technique of governance that seeks to work ‘from below’ and ‘empower’ users to deploy their freedom in certain particular, pre-programmed ways. The argument is that online dating provides a good illustration of how the information economy actively subsumes communicative action as a form of immaterial labour.

Powerful magic: learning from children's responses to fantasy literature

This dynamic book delves deeply into children's responses to literature, and in particular, to works of fantasy. Through close observation over time of children's natural and spontaneous reactions to books they are assigned or choose themselves, Nina Mikkelsen demonstrates how children and adults can engage as equal partners in learning, and also provides important insights into how adults can create settings in which children can experience the joy of literature. Featuring important implications for both literary theory and classroom practice, Powerful Magic: Explores how literature influences children's lives and why children find fantasy so compelling. Focuses on what can be learned from children's responses rather than on what adults might think is important to teach children about literature. Presents rare longitudinal research into children's reading of texts, inside and outside the classroom. Provides an excellent model of the required kind of listening and thinking needed to study children's responses to literature.