“Introduction: Fictional Modes and Cultural Energy”
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\n
At any historical moment, certain ways of writing fiction particularly catch people\u2019s attention. While writers might be working with a whole range of plots, themes, or genres, a few of those will seem more interesting, more important, more urgent than all the rest. Two novels may be equal in inventiveness and craft, but one will get the buzz. Sometimes the other will emerge later on, as society discovers its significance: a good example is Kate Chopin\u2019s 1899 The Awakening<\/i>, buried in sales in its day by Edward Noyes Westcott\u2019s horse-trading novel David Harum<\/i>. More often, the more famous work will continue to dominate discussions of its era and will attract more writers to its central problem or vision. Edward Bellamy\u2019s best-selling novel Looking Backward<\/i> (1887) led to a rash of similar utopian romances. Evidently conditions were right at the end of the nineteenth century for questioning economic systems and social norms: the sorts of things that utopian fiction can do. Social anxiety creates social energy, and the stories that best articulate the tension of the moment will create the greatest stir.<\/p>\n
Right now among the many modes of fantastic literature, there is a lot of social energy in the idea of the past as something less than fixed. I have been reading a number of fascinating explorations of time travel and alternate history, stories in which humans find themselves facing an unlivable future and can only go forward by returning to the past to alter it. Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s Galileo<\/i> and Kathleen Ann Goonan\u2019s paired novels In War Times<\/i> and This Shared Dream<\/i> are standout examples. They straddle genres\u2014historical fiction, alternate history, futuristic sf, and utopian fiction\u2014because the thing they seek to do cannot be encompassed within any one of those genres. Underlying their vision is the idea that history is malleable. It is not so much that the events of the past can be changed, though that happens in the novels, but that collective memory is, like individual memory, continually reworked and reinterpreted.<\/p>\n
Historians know this. There is no final word on something like the Industrial Revolution. Every time a historian approaches a topic with new data, a new theoretical perspective, or a new focus on previously unconsidered participants (women, minorities, workers, children, etc.), the past rearranges itself. Nothing is as it seemed; nothing means what we thought it did. And because society, like every member of it, is the product of its memories, the present isn\u2019t what we thought it was either, nor is it headed toward the future that once seemed inevitable. Goonan is especially adept at showing how past and future are interdependent. Both are also necessary fictions; we cannot touch either one directly, but without them both, there is no meaningful present.<\/p>\n
As certain futures promised us by science fiction become increasingly problematic or unreachable, maybe it is necessary to retreat and regroup. To go ahead, we need to go back, as Goonan and Robinson have done. As Karen Hellekson points out, the genre of alternate history can incorporate insights from postmodern philosophers and metahistorians: history is not the past: it is a story we tell about the past, and \u201cthe historian is complicit in this storytelling, not an objective, impartial recorder of events\u201d (25). Thus, our narrowing vision of the future is counterbalanced by an increasingly unstable past. Alternate history seems to be one way to free the imagination. By going back and finding a new past, writers can, as it were, draw the bowstring back and thereby give time\u2019s arrow a new trajectory. No wonder there is energy in such stories.<\/p>\n
With a little stretching, all the articles in this issue might be said to deal with alternative pasts:<\/p>\n
Alf Seegert, in \u201cThe Mistress of Sp[l]ices: Technovirtual Liaisons in Adolfo Bioy Casares\u2019s The Invention of Morel<\/i>,\u201d examines a 1940 novel that not only revises literary history\u2014retelling H. G. Wells\u2019s The Island of Doctor Moreau<\/i>\u2014but also dramatizes the changeability of the historical record. The novel\u2019s protagonist finds himself interacting with images preserved in a substantial, three-dimensional form by an extrapolated successor of the movie camera. In love with one of those recorded phantoms, he can only find happiness by rewriting the recorded past.<\/p>\n
Kate Macdonald\u2019s article, \u201cWitchcraft and Non-conformity in Sylvia Townsend Warner\u2019s Lolly Willows<\/i> and John Buchan\u2019s Witch Wood<\/i>,\u201d reads two novels from the 1920s that use Margaret Murray\u2019s now-discredited history of European witchcraft to challenge contemporary mores. Though Murray was wrong in many of her claims about a widespread witch cult, her version of history proves to be a usable past for both Warner, attempting to construct a new feminist identity for her heroine, and Buchan, investigating contemporary issues of conformity, corruption, and responsibility projected back into the seventeenth century.<\/p>\n
In Paula Brown\u2019s \u201cGnostic Magic in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell<\/i>,\u201d the radically altered, magical past of Susanna Clarke\u2019s novel allows the author to explore a number of still-relevant issues, including the uses and misuses of knowledge. Brown argues that the central philosophy of the novel is a Romantic version of gnosticism, in which knowledge of the universe is intertwined with understanding of the self, and the latter is dependent on giving up a false knowledge of separateness from and superiority to other beings and the universe. The novel\u2019s characters must unlearn many things, including their own history, in order to move forward.<\/p>\n
Finally, in \u201cSpells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself\u201d: The Chaotics of Memory and The Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon\u2019s Falling out of Cars<\/i>,\u201dAndrew Wenaus considers Jeff Noon\u2019s 2002 novel as an experiment in narrative \u201cremixing\u201d: its haunted protagonist learns to sample and rearrange her own troubled and noise-corrupted history in order to move forward. Wenaus argues that Noon is doing the same thing to literary history: transforming narrative into a chaotic but open-ended version of itself in order to move literature into a post-structuralist, post-historical future.<\/p>\n
Work Cited<\/p>\n
Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time<\/i>. Kent: Kent State UP, 2001. Print.<\/p>\nArticles<\/h3>\n
The Mistress of Sp[l]ices: Technovirtual Liaisons in Adolfo Bioy Casares\u2019s The Invention of Morel<\/i>
\nAlf Seegert<\/p>\n
Witchcraft and Non-conformity in Sylvia Townsend Warner\u2019s Lolly Willowes<\/i> (1926) and John Buchan\u2019s Witch Wood<\/i> (1927)
\nKate Macdonald<\/p>\n
Gnostic Magic in\u00a0Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell<\/i>
\nPaula Brown<\/p>\n
\u201cSpells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself\u201d: The Chaotics of Memory and the Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon\u2019s Falling out of Cars <\/i>
\nAndrew Wenaus<\/p>\nReview Essay<\/h3>\n
Whose History?
\nPaul Kincaid<\/p>\n
George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall\u2019s Classics and Comics<\/i>
\nRev. by Claire Burrows<\/p>\n
Mary Y. Hallab\u2019s Vampire God: The Allure of the Undead in Western Culture<\/i>
\nRev. by Patrick R. Casey<\/p>\n
Susannah Clements\u2019s The Vampire Defanged, How the Embodiment of Evil Became a Romantic Hero<\/i>
\nRev. by Catherine Coker<\/p>\n
Seo-Young Chu\u2019s Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation<\/i>
\nRev. by Samuel Gerald Collins<\/p>\n
David R. Castillo\u2019s Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities<\/i>
\nRev. by Cary Elza<\/p>\n
Gregory Waller\u2019s The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires, Exterminating Zombies<\/i>
\nRev. by Adryan Glasgow<\/p>\n
Masood Ashraf Raja, Jason W. Ellis, and Swaralipi Nandi\u2019s The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction<\/i>
\nRev. by Adam Guzkowski<\/p>\n
Regina Hansen\u2019s Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film: Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual and Imagery<\/i>
\nRev. by Kate S. Kelley<\/p>\n
John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan Picart\u2019s Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms: Essays on Gender, Race, and Culture<\/i>
\nRev. by Mark R. McCarthy<\/p>\n
Annette Hill\u2019s Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic in Popular Culture<\/i>
\nRev. by Jules Odendahl-James<\/p>\n
Theresa Bane\u2019s Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology<\/i>
\nRev. by Janice Odom<\/p>\n
Thomas Honegger and Fanfan Chen\u2019s Fastitocalon<\/i>. Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern: Immortals and the Undead<\/i> 1.2
\nRev. by Vibeke R\u00fctzou Petersen<\/p>\n
Daniel Illger, Jacek Rzeszotnik, and Lars Schmeink\u2019s Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Fantastikforschung <\/i>[ZFF<\/i>] 1.
\nRev. by Vibeke R\u00fctzou Petersen<\/p>\n
Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith\u2019s The Female Gothic: New Directions<\/i>
\nRev. by Daryl Ritchot<\/p>\n
Wheeler Winston Dixon\u2019s A History of Horror<\/i>
\nRev. by Kjetil Rodje<\/p>\n
Phyllis M. Betz\u2019s The Lesbian Fantastic: A Critical Study of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal and Gothic Writings<\/i>
\nRev. by Roxanne Samer<\/p>\n
Julian Hanich\u2019s Cinematic Emotions in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear<\/i>
\nRev. by Hans Staats<\/p>\n
Karen Morton\u2019s A Life Marketed as Fiction: An Analysis of the Works of Eliza Parsons<\/i>
\nRev. by Joel T. Terranova<\/p>\n
Kristen Lacefield\u2019s The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in <\/i>The Ring
\nRev. by Emanuelle Wessels<\/p>\n
Juli\u00e1n Daniel Guti\u00e9rrez-Albilla\u2019s Queering Bu\u00f1uel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema<\/i>
\nRev. by Stephenie A. Young<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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