An exciting and accessible study of the genre of fantasy. One of the dominant modes of storytelling in the twenty-first century, fantasy can mirror contemporary experiences and convey our anxieties and longings better than any representation of the merely real. It is the lie that speaks truth. This book addresses two central questions about fantastic storytelling: first, how can it be meaningful if it doesn't claim to represent things as they are, and second, what kind of change can it make in the world? How can a form of storytelling that alters physical laws and denies facts about the past be at the same time a source of insight into human nature and the workings of the world? What kind of social, political, cultural, intellectual work does fantasy perform in the world-the world of the reader, that is, not that of the characters? Focusing on various aspects of fantastic world-building and story creation in classic and contemporary fantasy, from the use of symbolic structures to the way new stories incorporate bits of significance from earlier texts, this book shows how fantasy allows writers such as Michael Cunningham, Hans Christian Anderson, Helene Wecker, C. S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, George MacDonald, Aliette deBodard, and Patricia Wrightson to test new modes of understanding and interaction and thus to rethink political institutions, social practices, and models of reality.

Grounded in narrative theory, this book offers a case study of a liberal arts college's use of narrative to help build identity, community, and collaboration within the college faculty across a range of disciplines, including history, psychology, sociology, theatre and dance, literature, anthropology, and communication. Exploring issues of methodology and their practical application, this narrative project speaks to the construction of identity for the liberal arts in today's higher education climate. Narrative, Identity, and Academic Community focuses on the ways a cross-disciplinary emphasis on narrative can impact institutions in North America and contribute to the discussion of strategies to foster bottom-up, faculty-driven collaboration and innovation.

Grounded in narrative theory, this book offers a case study of a liberal arts college's use of narrative to help build identity, community, and collaboration within the college faculty across a range of disciplines, including history, psychology, sociology, theatre and dance, literature, anthropology, and communication. Exploring issues of methodology and their practical application, this narrative project speaks to the construction of identity for the liberal arts in today's higher education climate. Narrative, Identity, and Academic Community focuses on the ways a cross-disciplinary emphasis on narrative can impact institutions in North America and contribute to the discussion of strategies to foster bottom-up, faculty-driven collaboration and innovation.

Brian Attebery's "strategy of fantasy" include not only the writer's strategies for inventing believable impossibiltes, but also the reader s strategies for enjoying, challenging, and conspiring with the text. Drawing on a number of current literary theories (but avoiding most of their jargon), Attebery makes a case for fantasy as a significant movement within postmodern literature rather than as a simple exercise of nostalgia. Attebury examines recent and classic fantasies by Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, and Gene Wolfe, among others. In both its popular and postmodern incarnations, fantasic fiction exhibits a remarkable capacity for reinventing narrative concentions. Attebery shows how plots, characters, settings, storytelling frameworks, gender divisions, and references to cultural texts such as history and science are all called into question the moment the marvelous is admited into a story."

Decoding Gender looks at the ways science fiction writers have incorporated, explored and revised conventional notions of gender. Although the study draws on feminist insights, it is not exclusively devoted to women writers or the treatment of women characters. Instead it examines both men's and women's writing and the question of sexual difference. Begins with science fiction's origins (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) and follows to the present day, suggesting new perspectives on the field's best known writers.

Decoding Gender looks at the ways science fiction writers have incorporated, explored and revised conventional notions of gender. Although the study draws on feminist insights, it is not exclusively devoted to women writers or the treatment of women characters. Instead it examines both men's and women's writing and the question of sexual difference. Begins with science fiction's origins (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) and follows to the present day, suggesting new perspectives on the field's best known writers.

The first study to look at the intersection of the discourse of the Anthropocene within the two highly influential storytelling modes of fantasy and myth, this book shows the need for stories that articulate visions of a biocentric, ecological civilization. Fantasy and myth have long been humanity's most advanced technologies for collective dreaming. Today they are helping us adopt a biocentric lens, re-kin us with other forms of life, and assist us in the transition to an ecological civilization. Deliberately moving away from dystopian narratives toward anticipatory imaginations of sustainable futures, this volume blends chapters by top scholars in the fields of fantasy, myth, and Young Adult literature with personal reflections by award-winning authors and illustrators of books for young audiences, including Shaun Tan, Jane Yolen, Katherine Applegate and Joseph Bruchac. Chapters cover the works of major fantasy authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Prachett, J. K. Rowling, China Mieville, Barbara Henderson, Jeanette Winterson, John Crowley, Richard Powers, George R. R. Martin and Kim Stanley Robinson. They range through narratives set in the UK, USA, Nigeria, Ghana, Pacific Islands, New Zealand and Australia. Across the chapters, fantasy and myth are framed as spaces where visions of sustainable futures can be designed with most detail and nuance. Rather than merely criticizing the ecocidal status quo, the book asks how mythic narratives and fantastic stories can mobilize resistance around ideas necessary for the emergence of an ecological civilization.

Myth is oral, collective, sacred, and timeless. Fantasy is a modern literary mode and a popular entertainment. Yet the two have always been inextricably intertwined. Stories about Stories examines fantasy as an arena in which different ways of understanding myth compete and new relationships with myth are worked out. The book offers a comprehensive history of the modern fantastic as well as an argument about its nature and importance. Specific chapters cover the origins of fantasy in the Romantic search for localized myths, fantasy versions of the Modernist turn toward the primitive, the post-Tolkienian exploration of world mythologies, post-colonial reactions to the exploitation of indigenous sacred narratives by Western writers, fantasies based in Christian belief alongside fundamentalist attempts to stamp out the form, and the emergence of ever-more sophisticated structures such as metafiction through which to explore mythic constructions of reality.

Brian Attebery considers eccentricities and history in the writings of, Baum, Ruskin, MacDonald, Morris, Lewis and Tolkien in a concise survey of the different definitions and characteristics of the genre of fantasy, first exploring it as a whole, then defining its influence on American folklore.

As a geometric term, parabola suggests a narrative trajectory or story arc. In science fiction, parabolas take us from the known to the unknown. More concrete than themes, more complex than motifs, parabolas are combinations of meaningful setting, character, and action that lend themselves to endless redefinition and jazzlike improvisation. The fourteen original essays in this collection explore how the field of science fiction has developed as a complex of repetitions, influences, arguments, and broad conversations. This particular feature of the genre has been the source of much critical commentary, most notably through growing interest in the "sf megatext," a continually expanding archive of shared images, situations, plots, characters, settings, and themes found in science fiction across media. Contributors include Jane Donawerth, Terry Dowling, L. Timmel Duchamp, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Pawel Frelik, David M. Higgins, Amy J. Ransom, John Rieder, Nicholas Ruddick, Graham Sleight, Gary K. Wolfe, and Lisa Yaszek.

Successfully used at over one hundred schools nationwide, these sixty-seven stories offer compelling evidence that science fiction is a source of the most thoughtful, imaginative-indeed, literary-fiction being written today.

Readers will be introduced to some rarely anthologized gems from well-known authors-Poul Anderson, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Joanna Russ, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny-as well as starling work by today's rising stars. Students and teachers alike will appreciate the sophisticated range of voices exploring the nature of reality and the condition of the human spirit.