<\/p>\n
One of the core facts about fantasy as a genre is that it takes up older story elements and reshapes them, as Tolkien did with Beowulf and George MacDonald did with the Medieval stories about Lilith. Somewhere in the background of virtually every classic fantasy text is an oral traditional one: a fairy tale, sacred hymn, legend, ballad, or epic. And since these sorts of folk texts define cultures and help us find our identities within those cultures, fantasy matters in ways that are not obvious to readers who can\u2019t see beyond the surface of glittering spells and furry feet and outdated social systems. These once-oral texts are master narratives: stories within which we inscribe our own life stories.<\/p>\n
But there are other sorts of cultural narratives as well, other masterplots of the sort that cultural commentators tend to call myths. America has a number of these: the myth of the self-made individual, the myth of the empty and endless frontier, the myth of racial superiority, the myth of manifest destiny. One of the tasks of artists is to examine such myths, to test them against history and to conduct thought-experiments with them to see where they might be leading or misleading us.<\/p>\n
An interesting development in fantastic art is a turn toward treating prior works of the imagination the same way those works treated traditional tales and legends. Rather than going back to European M\u00e4rchen or classical fable, a number of writers are drawing on Gothic tales or classic fantasies, not so much as raw material but as objects of interrogation. One of the earliest and still one of the finest of these is Geoff Ryman\u2019s Was<\/em>, from 1992. Was<\/em> is about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz<\/em> by L. Frank Baum and about the 1939 musical adaptation of Baum\u2019s book and about its star Judy Garland, but mostly about America itself as a place of cruelty and despair and hope and magic. Ryman treats Oz as the cultural myth that it has become.<\/p>\n I have recently been reading a number of worthy successors to Was<\/em>. These are stories that go beyond parody or pastiche or homage to become both metafiction and cultural commentary. Nisi Shawl\u2019s Everfair<\/em>, for instance, not only interrogates colonial adventure stories such as H. Rider Haggard\u2019s but also sneaks in a nod to pioneering fantasist Edith Nesbit, author of The Enchanted Castle<\/em> and other subversive children\u2019s books. John Kessel\u2019s Pride and Prometheus<\/em> juxtaposes two cultural myths or story tropes, the Jane Austenesque romance and the Mary Shelleyan Gothic. Theodora Goss also explores the borderline between the Gothic and an adjacent story territory, in this case the detective story, in The Strange Case of the Alchemist\u2019s Daughter<\/em>. And Kij Johnson recently won a World Fantasy Award for her novella The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe<\/em>, which places a sensible academic heroine reminiscent of Dorothy Sayers\u2019s Harriet Vane in a world created by H. P. Lovecraft. Matt Ruff\u2019s Lovecraft Country<\/em> goes further in taking on the horror writer\u2019s problematic political and abysmal racial views. In a lighter vein (but still with a social point) Johnson has followed up The Dream-Quest<\/em> with the delightful The River Bank<\/em>, in which the world of Kenneth Grahame\u2019s The Wind in the Willows<\/em> is enriched and critiqued by the intrusion of two determined females.<\/p>\n Perhaps it is not by coincidence, then, that all the articles in this issue of JFA<\/em> have to do with new ways of looking at classic fantasy, often through the lens of other, more recent texts. Kathryn Walls, in \u201cAn Analogous Adversary: The Old Dispensation in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe<\/em>,\u201d reexamines a classic fantasy text by C. S. Lewis in light of his use of Biblical typology. That is the practice of reading the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New, which is itself a kind of metanarrative doubling, or, if we add in Medieval applications of such typology to contemporary experience, a tripling.<\/p>\n Sean Ferrier-Watson looks at a more obvious example of revision of a classic text, Gregory Maguire\u2019s Wicked<\/em>, which reimagines L. Frank Baum\u2019s Oz but in a very different way from Ryman\u2019s. Ferrier-Watson performs what he calls an \u201cexistential reading\u201d of Maguire\u2019s novel and its green antiheroine Elphaba. He looks in particular at the way time, prophecy, and choice are intertwined for Elphaba and for the reader.<\/p>\n The ur-text in Clotilde Landais\u2019s contribution is Alice in Wonderland<\/em> and the filtering metafictional text is Aliss<\/em> by Patrick Sen\u00e9cal, using G\u00e9rard Genette\u2019s concept of the metalepsis, which is parallel with his time-jumping concepts of prolepsis and analepsis but involves not merely shifting the narrative backward or forward but out of the narrative timeline entirely. Metalepsis is usually considered to be a postmodern and metafictional technique, which it is in this case, but Landais suggests that it is also a way of enhancing the uncanny properties of Sen\u00e9cal\u2019s novel.<\/p>\n Mariano Mart\u00edn Rodr\u00edguez\u2019s \u201cThe Literary Spoof Paper\u201d is less obviously about metafictions but it does explore a form of intertextuality. The mock scientific paper is a genre that has received little attention in spite of the fact that it perfectly performs the sort of cognitive estrangement that critic Darko Suvin says is central to the genre of science fiction. Looking at examples by Isaac Asimov and others, Mart\u00edn Rodr\u00edguez suggests that the use of scientific discourse in a text that is profoundly counterfactual not only serves as a way to critique science but also generates the sort of textual complexity that marks literary, rather than merely parodic, play.<\/p>\n Finally, in \u201cThe Lost Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s Professor Challenger Series,\u201d Conor Reid surveys Doyle\u2019s most extended non-Sherlock-Holmes creation. Taking up the idea of the \u201clost world\u201d as not merely a plot device and a way to exploit interest in various 19th<\/sup>-century expeditions into previously uncharted places, Reid connects Doyle\u2019s interest in geographical exploration with his flirtation with spirituality Most explicitly in The Land of Mist<\/em>, Doyle has his scientific stand-in, Professor Challenger, turn to, as the novel says, \u201cfresh worlds to conquer. Having exhausted the sporting adventures of this terrestrial globe, he is now turning to those of the dim, dark and dubious regions of psychic research.\u201d We can read these texts, which depict the use of scientific methods to explore\u2014and potentially colonize\u2014the world of the spirit as well as physical globe, as examples of intertextuality and what we might call intergenrefication. Like some of the recent examples mentioned above, these novels jam together seemingly incompatible textual varieties, in this case the scientific romance and the spiritualist tract, as a way to test both against one another and perhaps to encourage them to hybridize. Doyle\u2019s hope seems to be that the genres thus mated together might produce new narrative models, new myths to live in.<\/p>\n An Analogous Adversary: The Old Dispensation in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe The Many Roads of Oz: An Existential Reading of Maguire\u2019s \u201cWicked Witch of the West\u201d Aliss<\/em> by Patrick Sen\u00e9cal: The Narrative Metalepsis as an Instrument of the Uncanny in Contemporary Fantastic Fiction The Literary Spoof Paper: An Overview The Lost Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s Professor Challenger Series Hrsg von Sonja Klimek, Tobias Lamprecht, and Tom Kindt\u2019s Funktionen der Fantastik. <\/em>Neue Formen des Weltbezugs von Literatur und Film nach 1945<\/em>. [Functions of the Fantastic. New Forms of World Reference in Literature and Film after 1945.] Dessy, Cl\u00e9ment, and Val\u00e9rie Sti\u00e9non, editors. (B\u00e9)vues du futur. Les imaginaires visuels de la dystopie (1840-1940) <\/em>[Blunder\/Views of the Future. Visual Imagination of Dystopia (1840-1940)]. Roas, David, ed. El monstruo fant\u00e1stico: Visiones y perspectivas<\/em> [The Fantastic Monster: Visions and Perspectives]. Nakamura, Miri. Monstrous Bodies: The Rise of the Uncanny in Modern Japan<\/em>. Papieau, Isabelle.\u00a0Il y avait des fois,\u00a0La Belle et la B\u00eate : r\u00e9alit\u00e9 et magie \u00e0 l\u2019italienne<\/em>. [Once Upon a Time, \u201cBeauty and the Beast\u201d: Reality and Italian Magic]. Melbye, David. Irony in <\/em>The Twilight Zone: How the Series Critiqued Postwar American Culture<\/em>. Elliott-Smith, Darren. Queer Horror: Film and Television \u2013 Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins Miller, Cynthia J. and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, editors. The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from <\/em>Bride of Frankenstein to<\/em> Zombieland. Koch, Sebastian. Der Kampf des Helden gegen den \u2018egesl\u00eechen trachen<\/em>.\u2019 Zur narrative Funktion des Topos vom Drachenkampf in vergleichender Perspektive<\/em> [The Heroic Struggle Against the Terrible Dragons: The Narrative Function of the Dragon Fight in Comparative Perspectives] Guay, Patrick. Jacques Spitz, Le myth de l\u2019humain<\/em> [Jacques Spitz, The Human Myth]. Alonso-Collada, In\u00e9s Ordiz and Rosa Mar\u00eda D\u00edez Cobo eds. La (ir)realidad imaginada: Aproximaciones a lo ins\u00f3lito en la ficci\u00f3n hispanoamericana<\/em> [Imagined (Un)reality: Approaches to Strangeness in Latin American Fiction].<\/p>\n \u00c1lvarez M\u00e9ndez, Natalia and Ana Abello Verano eds. Espejismos de la realidad: Percepciones de lo ins\u00f3lito en la literatura espa\u00f1ola (siglos XIX-XXI) <\/em>[Mirages of Reality: Perceptions of Strangeness in Spanish Literature (Nineteenth – Twenty-First Centuries)] Jad Smith\u2019s Alfred Bester Introduction: Everything Old Is New Again One of the core facts about fantasy as a genre is that it takes up older story elements and reshapes them, as Tolkien did with Beowulf and George MacDonald did with the Medieval stories about Lilith. Somewhere in the background of virtually every classic fantasy text is an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-617","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":618,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/617\/revisions\/618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Articles<\/h3>\n
\n<\/em>Kathryn Walls<\/p>\n
\nSean Ferrier-Watson<\/p>\n
\nClotilde Landais<\/p>\n
\nMariano Mart\u00edn Rodr\u00edguez<\/p>\n
\nConor Reid<\/p>\nReviews<\/h3>\n
\nRev. by Bruce A Beatie<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Sophie Beaule<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Andrea Bell<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Kay K. Clopton<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Adrion Dula<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Annmarie Guzy<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Robert Lipscomb<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Tommy Mayberry<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Vibeke Rutzou Petersen<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Tessa Sermet<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Adam Spires<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Dennis Wilson Wise
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"