The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

by Csilla Bertha, Donald Morse, Marshall B. Tymn

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313278143
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/30/1992
Series:	Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy , #49
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.75(d)
Lexile:	1430L (what's this?)

About the Author

DONALD E. MORSE is Professor of English and Rhetoric at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan. He is co-editor (with Csilla Bertha) of More Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts (Greenwood Press, 1991) and editor of The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts (Greenwood, 1987). He has contributed numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett, Auden, Vonnegut, American drama, adult development, and cognitive psychology to various jourbanals.

MARSHALL B. TYMN is Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. He is past President of The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, an internationally recognized scholar in science fiction and the fantastic, and he received the Pilgrim Award of the Science Fiction Research Association in 1990. The author of numerous books and dozens of articles, he is the series editor of Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy for Greenwood and The Year's Work in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

CSILLA BERTHA is Associate Professor of English and Irish at Lajos Kossuth University, Debrecen, Hungary. Her publications include: two books in Hungary: Yeats the Playwright and English Literature in the 19th and the First Half of the 20th Centuries well as More Real Than Reality (Greenwood, 1991). She has also authored numerous articles in Hungary, Ireland, and the United States on Irish drama, Yeats, J.B. Keane, B. Friel, T. Murphy, the fantastic in Irish literature, and parallels between Irish and Hungarian literature.

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
CsontVÁry: 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