{"id":2279,"date":"2026-03-27T12:25:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T18:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/?page_id=2279"},"modified":"2026-04-10T10:39:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T16:39:50","slug":"37-1","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/37-1\/","title":{"rendered":"37.1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Cover image of Volume 37 Issue Number 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Become a Member of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Purchase from Favian Press<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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JFA 37.1 – Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Across the Sally-verse: Reading William Wells Brown\u2019s Clotel<\/em> as Multiversal Speculative Fiction                                             <\/strong>                <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Roshaunda Cade<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI Was Grendel\u201d: Myth, Monstrosity, and the Fantasies of Belonging                      <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        John Irish<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mimesis and Epistemology of the Fantastic                                           <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Yandrey Lay<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walking Away from Omelas: How BTS Used Genre Fiction to Escape the Basement of the K-Pop Archetype                                       <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Jessica Kormos<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe wonder of the World, the admiration of all ages\u201d: Merpeople and Wonder from the Early Modern<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wunderkammer<\/em> to Post-Truth Media Culture                                      <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Alice Marinelli<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Be Fully Seen:  Unmasking, Survival, and Authenticity in African and Diaspora Literature                                                                 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Britney Rossman<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Posthuman Gothic Networks and Psychic Connections in Sense8   <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Zita Husing<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Narrativizing Memory in Prayaag Akbar\u2019s Leila                    <\/strong><\/em>                <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Sreelakshmy Mohan<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uses of The Somatics of Media, Corporeal-Affective Nostalgia, and Experiencing Horror                                                                               <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        John Glover<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative Think Piece: Fragmonious: Freedom for a Genomically Created Human   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        James H. Ford, Jr.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

REVIEWS<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Goudsward\u2019sAdventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft<\/em> in Florida<\/em>                   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Rev. by Katherine Kerestman<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stefan Ekman\u2019s Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity Through<\/em> Magic<\/em>                 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

        Rev. by Timothy S. Miller<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Abstracts<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Roshaunda Cade<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across the Sally-verse: Reading William Wells Brown\u2019s Clotel <\/em>as Multiversal Speculative Fiction<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Wells Brown\u2019s 1853 novel Clotel<\/em> can be read as a multiverse investigating the possible life outcomes of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman owned by Thomas Jefferson. Anachronisms and problematic linear progressions could suggest Clotel<\/em> is an alternative history, but Brown\u2019s novel is not one of a singular alternative history with a specific moment of departure, nor does the novel answer a singular meaningful What If question possible outside of a multiverse. By subverting the generic conventions of romance and sentimentalism, Brown creates space to propose alternative histories of Sally Hemings. Brown highlights canon events for the characters who serve as avatars of Sally Hemings\u2019s experience. By demonstrating why Brown\u2019s Clotel<\/em> does not neatly fit the generic expectations of romance and sentimentalism, that it does not follow a linear chronology, and that it instead adheres to possibilities inherent in a multiverse, reading Clotel<\/em> as a multiverse becomes a possibility. This essay demonstrates that it is possible to read Brown\u2019s timeline slippages as indicative of Clotel<\/em> as a work of speculative fiction highlighting a multiverse created to explore alternative histories and futures for Sally Hemings, the real-life enslaved concubine of Thomas Jefferson. However, it is the aspects Brown uses to build his multiverse that are seen as the flaws in his work.  In this essay, Brown\u2019s ostensible inconsistencies in genre and chronology coalesce to reveal the building blocks of a multiverse:  something that is everywhere and in all times, all at the same time.  This essay\u2019s close reading of Brown\u2019s text establishes that Brown\u2019s novel should be considered a piece of speculative fiction beyond an alternative history; this essay demonstrates that Clotel<\/em> constructs a multiverse. Brown uses slippery timelines to create a Sally Hemings-centric multiverse, the Sally-verse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Irish<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI Was Grendel\u201d: Myth, Monstrosity, and the Fantasies of Belonging<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This essay explores John Gardner\u2019s Grendel<\/em> as a philosophical meditation on identity, ideology, and exclusion, reframing the monster\u2019s narrative as a failed search for community. Through Grendel\u2019s encounters with Hrothgar\u2019s nationalist order and the dragon\u2019s anarchistic individualism, the novel stages a dialectic between two competing worldviews:  each of which ultimately defines Grendel not as a subject, but as a symbolic necessity. This essay argues that Grendel\u2019s identity is forged not through freedom, but through rejection and ontological Othering. Grendel\u2019s longing to belong is mirrored by his realization that he is the thing against which belonging is defined. Not just excluded, Grendel becomes the symbolic boundary of the human. In this duality\u2014drawn to meaning but cast out from it\u2014Grendel discovers the root of his coming crisis.  His final self-declaration, \u201cI was Grendel,\u201d is not a moment of self-actualization, but a bitter concession to the role assigned to him by myth and ideology. Grendel<\/em> dramatizes the existential tension between myth and nihilism, belonging and solitude, order and chaos. Gardner constructs Grendel\u2019s arc as a philosophical test case: a character caught between the seductions of communal myth and the isolating clarity of radical egoism, asking whether meaning is discovered or imposed, and whether any system\u2014political, religious, or existential\u2014can accommodate the outcast without first defining him as monstrous.  Grendel\u2019s journey is a philosophical tragedy in which both nationalism and anarchism prove inadequate for those outside their boundaries as the necessary Other; the dragon\u2019s nihilism denies him value. His transformation is not the triumph of autonomy, but the resignation of a being with no place left to go.  Grendel<\/em> becomes a haunting realization that some identities are not chosen, but imposed\u2014and that exile, once understood, may be final.  By tracing Grendel\u2019s emotional and philosophical arc from longing and disillusionment to reluctant resignation, this essay interprets Gardner\u2019s novel as a critique of the structural limits of belonging and the existential isolation faced by those who haunt the edges of meaning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yandrey Lay<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mimesis and Epistemology of the Fantastic<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the concept of phantasie, which phenomenology enunciates, and Tom\u00e1s Albaladejo Mayordomo’s Typology of Worlds, this essay proves that any object, phenomenon, and process considered fantastic or belonging to fantasy should satisfy two conditions: its existence is thinkable or discursive, and its behavior should be incompatible with the laws of the real world. According to this theory, it is possible to affirm that, remembering Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, fantasy does not reproduce objective reality, but fantasy is its own reality.  This essay argues that there are four types of relationships between real and fantastic worlds: separation, incursion, invasion, and standardization. These arguments explain theoretical problems enunciated by Tzvetan Todorov, Ana Maria Barrenechea, and Jaime Alazraki about the inclusion or exclusion of fairy tales from fantastic literature, the hypothetical exhaustion of the fantastic genre in the face of reality’s encroachments, and the notable discontinuity between the canonical fantastic texts of the nineteenth century and those written in the second half of the twentieth century.  This essay affirms that the fantastic does not imitate what nature is not but rather that the fantastic is what nature is not. Fantasy creates new relationships between objects, processes, and phenomena that differ from those established by sensory perception and scientific discourse.  Fantastic literature does not imitate reality but is its own reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Kormos<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walking Away from Omelas: How BTS Used Genre Fiction to Escape the Basement of the K-Pop Archetype<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article draws on Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s \u201cThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas\u201d to examine how the K-pop group BTS leverages genre fiction to critique the idol industry and transcend traditional K-pop storytelling archetypes. Through analysis of their songs, music videos, and public personas, it explores how genre elements deepen global fan connection while challenging industry norms. The article positions the male K-pop idol as a genre fiction construct and examines how BTS deconstructs\u2014and ultimately walks away from\u2014that archetype. In doing so, the group reclaims narrative agency. Here, genre fiction becomes not just an artistic framework but a resistance strategy within contemporary K-pop. BTS does not merely walk away from Omelas\u2014they build another world entirely, inviting ARMY and the global community to help shape it alongside them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alice Marinelli<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe wonder of the World, the admiration of all ages\u201d: Merpeople and Wonder from the Early Modern Wunderkammer<\/em> to Post-Truth Media Culture<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article traces the history of the grotesque and taxonomically ambiguous mermaid\/merman figure first popularized in the early modern Wunderkammer<\/em>, and examines its reemergence in twenty-first-century Euro-American media, particularly in formats such as tabloids and hoax documentaries that deliberately blur the boundaries between truth and fiction. While existing scholarship has often seen the legacy of the Wunderkammer<\/em> in the development of the modern museum, less attention has been paid to how its aesthetics of hybridity, exoticism, and epistemic instability, which aimed at provoking the viewers\u2019 suspension of disbelief and at constructing Eurocentric worldviews, persist in digital and post-truth culture. In the media discussed here, the Wunderkammer<\/em> mermaid-type continues to function as a fantastical figure of wonder. However, as this article argues, both the notion of wonder and that of the fantastic that these creatures embody remain deeply entangled with their colonial histories of spectacle, appropriation, and epistemic control. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the article demonstrates how contemporary representations of merpeople reactivate visual and narrative strategies rooted in colonial systems of classification and othering, now repackaged as entertainment. Today\u2019s representations of these creatures and the fascination they activate in their audiences reveal how the contemporary media discussed not only evoke, but also risk amplifying, colonial logics under the aesthetic of mystery, emotional appeal, and wonder, thus underscoring the pressing need for decolonial critique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Britney Rossman<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Be Fully Seen:  Unmasking, Survival, and Authenticity in African and Diaspora Literature<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analyzing African and Diaspora literature suggests that survival comes with fully unmasking and facing the difficulty behind self-acceptance. This concept has opened a perspective that challenges the misconception that power is a display of strength. The analyzed texts in this essay demonstrate that, throughout Africa and the African Diaspora, literary tradition offers a power, verging on a superpower, that can be accessed from within.  By focusing on power, self-awareness, and self-confidence as core ideals, this essay explores ways in which authenticity may be demonstrated to be the key element of survival. The texts explored here include examples of how people facing adversity manage to find a sense of control; using Afropantheology and Reader Response, womanist, feminist, and de-colonialist analytical lenses to understand myth, literature, and documentary, these texts reflect the concept that the path to freedom frequently begins with the bravery to unmask. This essay argues that survival can feel impossible if one is not allowed the freedom to live in one’s truth; literature and theory from Africa and its Diaspora by writers such as Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, and Sofia Samatar provide an opportunity to understand this dynamic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zita Husing<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Posthuman Gothic Networks and Psychic Connections in Sense8<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This essay examines the Netflix series Sense8<\/em> through the intersecting lenses of posthuman theory and the Gothic mode to argue that the show envisions an empathic, networked form of subjectivity that challenges humanist notions of autonomy and embodiment of the human in one body. The Sensates\u2014psychically connected individuals who transcend spatial, linguistic, and bodily boundaries\u2014serve as posthuman figures who reframe monstrosity, otherness, and identity through affective interdependence. While Sense8<\/em> is grounded in science fiction tropes of genetic mutation and global technology, its emotional and aesthetic atmosphere is shaped by the Gothic. Gothic elements in Sense8<\/em> appear through affectively charged spaces and spectral figures that destabilize the boundaries between life and death, past and present, self and other. Drawing on science fiction traditions of collective consciousness and the Gothic\u2019s history of boundary transgression, conjuring the Gothic sublime in its juxtaposition of dread and grandeur (Botting 4), Sense8<\/em> constructs a narrative of the fantastic in which affective labor, shared trauma, and erotic utopia generate a radical politics of empathy and care. In the end, the most Gothic element of Sense8<\/em> may not be its scenes of death, decay, or monstrosity, but its insistence that love, empathy, and shared suffering remain radical choices in a fractured world. This vision makes Sense8<\/em> a valuable text for examining the intersections of posthumanism, the Gothic, and networked digital life in contemporary science fiction. While existing scholarship has examined Sense8<\/em>\u2019s queer politics and posthuman imaginaries, this article argues that Sense8 <\/em>allows examination of the networked intersections of the Posthuman Gothic to demonstrate redefinition of digital networks as embodied, affective, and erotic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sreelakshmy Mohan<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Narrativizing Memory in Prayaag Akbar\u2019s Leila<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set in a segregated dystopic world ruled by absolute order and the mythical element of purity, Prayaag Akbar\u2019s Leila<\/em> is a novel with an unreliable narrative because of the delusional episodes of the first-person narrator, Shalini. I study Leila<\/em> as an attempt at narrativizing the protagonist Shalini\u2019s seemingly unnarratable past. Shalini\u2019s memory is culture-specific, recounting the truths and lies of a dystopia bent on the idea of corporeal purity. Much like the world-building of high fantasy, Leila<\/em>\u2019s world is governed by a definitive set of laws around purity and caste that are enforced with magical reverence. Memory, which usually serves as a tool to remember, assess, and reclaim one\u2019s past, is cryptic and misleading in the novel, often acting as a deterrent, leading both the narrator and reader astray. The trauma that is brought upon Shalini aggravates the untrustworthiness of her story. Even though Shalini\u2019s experiences revolve around Leila, they are shaped by the regressive community that structurally dictates the lives of its citizens. Akbar rewrites the idea of community as a place of refuge in Leila, <\/em>instead locating it as a nexus of servitude and surveillance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Glover<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uses of The Somatics of Media, Corporeal-Affective Nostalgia, and Experiencing Horror<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The presence of media in works of Horror may serve multiple purposes, sometimes heightening dread and sometimes creating unease. Films and novels created after the digital turn use analogue media and associated equipment differently than their predecessors, often to ends other than building the emotion most commonly identified as the core justification for Horror\u2019s existence as a genre. The corporeal-affective nostalgia that media evoke in these works is absent from some works where media is used primarily as plot device, not aimed at evoking historicized sensations. The affective roles played by media in some horror films provide a useful counter to ubiquitous claims that works of Horror exist solely or primarily to evoke horror and related feelings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James H. Ford, Jr.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative Think Piece: Fragmonious: Freedom for a Genomically Created Human<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fragmonious\u2019s discovery of a hidden letter reveals a history of his ancestors, setting the stage for a dystopian beginning that ultimately unfolds into Fragmonious\u2019s present life, controlled by artificial intelligence and the era of human chipping.  The letter, written by a great ancestor and co-protagonist, reveals his life and the lives of his ancestors, forgotten and relegated to the trash files of history.  Mosesemic could be offered answers to his questions concerning whether life has changed or if the people have overcome.  Fragmonious and Vazenion’s journey deep into the future, as genomically created humans who are mentally chipped by the controlling power, follows a path similar to that of older cultures Mosesemic describes, which employed tattoos, branding, and physical whipping for control.   The chips, of course, imply that the Government now enslaves Fragmonious and Vazenion, along with the other denizens of this new culture.   For Fragmonious and Vazenion, genomic human-ware, removing the chips from their bodies means that the Governmental control established over them is gone.   But now the bigger and more immediate question is where will Fragmonious and Vazenion go?  After they remove the chips, they immediately set out to dominate their new world while subduing the old world of mental owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cover image of Volume 37 Issue Number 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts Become a Member of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Purchase from Favian Press JFA 37.1 – Table of Contents Across the Sally-verse: Reading William Wells Brown\u2019s Clotel as Multiversal Speculative Fiction                                                                     Roshaunda […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2279","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2279"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2300,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2279\/revisions\/2300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}