Contours of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the ArtsMichele Langford Addressing the world of the imaginary, the dream, the uncanny, the paranormal, and all forms of speculative fiction, Contours of the Fantastic is a collection of twenty-two essays that were originally presented at the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts at Houston in 1987. The volume gives valuable perspectives on the territory covered by the fantastic, showing the diversity of the field and the variety of approaches used to survey and comprehend it. Each essay brings its own method of investigation--phenomenological, theoretical, historical, sociological, psychological, textual--in an effort to situate the border between reality and fantasy and the passage from one to the other. Authors and works discussed in the volume include Balzac, Dickens, Poe, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley, Albee's The Zoo Story, Pynchon, Coleridge's Christabel, Le Fanu's Carmilla, and Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant trilogies. Following the editor's introductory essay, the work is divided into 7 sections: Fantasy and Discontinuity, Theory of National Fantasy--Tradition and Invention, Fantastic Vision in Children's Literature, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, Fusion, Transfusion, and Transgression in the Fantastic, The Fantastic and Science, and The Fantastic World--Space and Time. Individual essays within these major divisions zero in on specific works of fantasy; offer a psychology of fantasy writers; analyze language; assess fantasy from a national perspective; and investigate Christian horror in fiction. The final two sections delineate the border between fantasy and reality--in science and in relation to space and time. |
