The Celebration of the Fantastic

by Morse, Donald E.; Tymn, Marshall B.; Bertha, Csilla

• ISBN13: 9780313278143
• ISBN10: 0313278148
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-09-01
• Publisher: Praeger Pub Text

Summary

The Celebration of the Fantastic reaffirms the wide range and validity of the subject, treatment, and approach that the fantastic demands. Twenty-five essays, selected from among the more than 230 presented at the Tenth Anniversary Conference of the IAFA, consider writers as diverse as Stephen King, Doris Lessing, Rudyard Kipling, Loren Eiseley, Mary Stewart, Bernard Malamud, Orson Scott Card, Toni Morrison, Henry James, and Ray Bradbury as well as television personalities, film directors, and German and Hungarian visual artists. Also included are essays on science fiction writers Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, and Greg Bear. Some of the more provocative work is on "Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure," "The Greatest Fantasy on Earth: The Superweapon in Fiction and Fact," "Virtual Space and Its Boundaries in Science Fiction Film and Television," "The Fantastic in German Democratic Republic Literature," "Csontvary: The Painter of the Sun's Path," and "The Shaman in Modern Fantasy." The essays illustrate the essential theme of the fantastic: the testing of the limits of civilization and the questioning of commonly accepted values and ideas as writers and artists explore the hidden and the repressed.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction--Celebrating the Fantastic: This "Enormous and Seductive Subject" by Donald E. Morse

Theory

Victorian and Modern Fantasy: Some Contrasts by Colin Manlove (The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholar Address of 1989)

The Greatest Fantasy on Earth: The Superweapon in Fiction and Fact by H. Bruce Franklin

Pagan Survival: Why the Shaman in Modern Fantasy? by Roger C. Schlobin

Some Thoughts on Modernism and Science Fiction (Suggested by Robert Silverberg's DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH) by Robert Latham

Godmaking in the Heartland: Cultural Texts in the Tales of Alvin Maker by Brian Attebery

Myth and Legend

"What Dreams May Come?" Relativity of Perception in Doris Lessing's BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL by Peter Malekin

Kipling's Myth of Making: Creation and Contradiction in PUCK OF POOK'S HILL by Jack G. Voller

Mithraic Aspects of Merlin in Mary Stewart's THE CRYSTAL CAVE by Marilyn Jurich

Dolorous Strokes, Or, Balin at the Bat: Malamud, Malory and Chretien by John Kimsey

Autobiography as Science Fiction: The Strange Case of Loren Eiseley by Gale E. Christianson

The Supernatural

THE FIFTH CHILD: Lessing's Subversion of the Pastoral by Ellen Pifer

The Ghost and the Self: The Supernatural Fiction of Henry James by Leonard Heldreth

Toni Morrison's BELOVED: Rememory, History, and the Fantastic by Gary W. Daily

Visual Arts: Painting, Film, and Television

Csontvary: The Painter of the "Sun's Path" by Csilla Bertha

Eros and Thanatos: The Art of Alfred Kubin on the Edge of the Other Side by Barbara Alexander-Schaechtelin

Fantasy According to MISTER ROGER'S NEIGHBORHOOD and IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN by C.W. Sullivan III

Virtual Space and Its Boundaries in Science Fiction Film and Television: TRON, MAX HEADROOM, and WARGAMES by Judith B. Kerman

Giving the Devil More than His Due: THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK as Fiction and Film by Kenneth Jurkiewicz

The Monomyth in Time Travel Films by Donald Palumbo

Science Fiction

Astronauts, Angels, and Time Machines: The Fantastic in German Democratic Republic Literature by Barbara Mabee

Legitimate Sequels: Character Structures and the Subject in Greg Bear's Sequel Novels by Len Hatfield

Joe Haldeman: Cyberpunk Before Cyberpunk Was Cool? by Joan Gordon

Fantasy and Horror

Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure in Monique Wittig's LES GUERILLERES by Laurence M. Porter

Art Versus Madness in Stephen King's MISERY by Tony Magistrale

Ray Bradbury, Herman Melville, and Nineteenth-Century American Romance by Steven E. Kagle

Bibliography

Index