This book gathers 25 essays originally presented at the Twelfth Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Its animating focus is the politics of fantasy, considered both as a formal genre and a mode of apprehension. The opening essay, by Brian Attebery, sets the agenda for the book in its forthright rebuttal of fantasy's critics, who see it as either politically naive or even pernicious: rather, Attebery argues, fantasy is a radical mode of perception that contests every form of political orthodoxy.
The book is divided into six large sections. The first broadly addresses the social politics of fantasy, with three essays showing how fantastic literature undermines the assumptions of realism, including such official forms as Socialist Realism. The second section, on technique, focuses on the formal strategies of fantastic texts, with three essays analyzing collage and two the grotesque. Part three offers six perspectives on fantasy's implications for issues of race and gender. Parts four and five, on nature and religion, provide eight views of how fantasy affects apprehension of the natural and the supernatural. Finally, the sixth section contains three essays assessing the politics of intertextuality.
About the Author: ROBERT A. LATHAM is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the coeditor (with Robert A. Collins) of the first four volumes of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual. He has also been review editor of the Science Fiction Research Association Newsletter and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Newsletter. His publications, which include over 100 reviews of fiction and nonfiction titles, have appeared in numerous venues.
ROBERT A. COLLINS, Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, is the founder and first director of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which is now in its 16th year of annual meetings. With Howard Pearce, he coedited the first two volumes of this series of selected essays, The Scope of the Fantastic. For eight years he served as editor of Fantasy Review, and since then has been general editor of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual (Greenwood Press), now in its fifth edition. He has also published essays on Thomas Burnett Swann, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and others.
