Space(s) of the Fantastic

In this book, we provide a a number of accounts, with examples, of how we might consider the Fantastic as a mode of writing with both historical depth and immediate contemporary relevance.

This book provides a series of new addresses to the enduring problem of how to categorize the Fantastic. The approach taken is through the lens of spatiality; the Fantastic gives us new worlds, although of course these are refractions of worlds already in being. In place of 'real' spaces (whatever they might be), the Fantastic gives us imaginary spaces, although within those spaces historical and cultural conflicts are played out, albeit in forms that stretch our understanding of everyday location, and our usual interpretations of cause and effect. Many authors are addressed here, from a variety of different geographical and national traditions, thus demonstrating how the Fantastic - as a mode, a genre, a way of thinking, imagining and writing - continually traverses borders and boundaries. We hope to move the ongoing debate about the Fantastic forward in a scholarly as well as an engaging way.

Autorentext

David Punter is Professor of Poetry Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.

C. Bruna Mancini is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Calabria.

Inhalt

1 Magissatopia: The Place of the Witch

DAVID PUNTER

2 Spaces of the Fantastic, the Fantastic of Spaces: (Psycho) Wandering the Urban Texture of London

C. BRUNA MANCINI

3 The Literary Motif of the Devil Architect: Where Built Space Meets the Fantastic

PATRICIA GARCÍA

4 Time and Space in Fantastic Theory and Fiction of Charles Nodier s Trilby

MATTHEW GIBSON

5 Border Imagery in Victorian `Supernatural Short Stories: The Portrait

MARIA TERESA CHIALANT

6 Rambles in the Fantastic: Digital Mapping Mary Shelley s Last Man

DAVID SANDNER

7 Home Is Where the Dark Is: A Literary Geography of Daphne du Maurier s Disturbing Genres

DAVID IAN PADDY

8 Place and Space in the Literary Utopia

PATRICK PARRINDER

9 Seeing Things: Competing Worlds in Octavia Butler s Kindred and China Miéville s The City and the City

LUCIE ARMITT

10 Of Borders and (W)holes: Porous Geographies of the Fantastic in China Miéville and Nora K. Jemisin

NICOLETTA VALLORANI