This study looks at the complex relationship between postmodernism and the fantastic in contemporary British fiction and shows that a new type of the fantastic arises in postmodernism. Arguing against interpretations that view postmodernism as inherently fantastic, it seeks to define the postmodern fantastic as a narrative mode that is influenced by certain traits both of the traditional fantastic and of literary postmodernism but does not simply conflate both. In the first theoretical part, a number of theories of the fantastic and of postmodernism are used to set the fantastic apart from other non-mimetic forms of literature and to create a model of the postmodern fantastic that postulates the totalisation of the fantastic in postmodernism. In the second part of this study, this model is applied to a number of contemporary British texts which are particularly susceptible to this form of the fantastic due to several characteristics such as their muted kind of postmodernism and their frequent construction of parallel worlds. The analysis of these texts focuses on four thematic fields of the postmodern fantastic: the figure of the other as defined by Bernhard Waldenfels, time and history, text and textuality and the development of the Todorovian pure fantastic. Finally, the question of the death of the fantastic in postmodernism is examined.

Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.

Considers the profound influence of fairy tales on contemporary fiction, including the work of Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson. Recent decades have witnessed a renaissance of interest in the fairy tale, not least among writers of fiction. In Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, editor Stephen Benson argues that fairy tales are one of the key influences on fiction of the past thirty years and also continue to shape literary trends in the present. Contributors detail the use of fairy tales both as inspiration and blueprint and explore the results of juxtaposing fairy tales and contemporary fiction. At the heart of this collection, seven leading scholars focus on authors whose work is heavily informed and transformed by fairy tales: Robert Coover, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, and Salman Rushdie. In addition to investigating the work of this so-called fairy-tale generation, Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale provides a survey of the body of theoretical writing surrounding these authors, both from within literary studies and from fairy-tale studies itself. Contributors present an overview of critical positions, considered here in relation to the work of Jeanette Winterson and of Nalo Hopkinson, suggesting further avenues for research. Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale offers the first detailed and comprehensive account of the key authors working in this emerging genre. Students and teachers of fiction, folklore, and fairy-tale studies will appreciate this insightful volume.

Literature after Postmodernism explores the use of literary fantastic storylines in contemporary novels which begin to think beyond postmodernism. They develop an aesthetic perspective that aims at creation and communication instead of subversion and can thus be considered no longer deconstructive but reconstructive.

This collection of 12 new essays brings together prominent literary experts to explore the importance of Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks, both his mainstream and science fiction work. It considers Banks as a habitual border crosser who makes things fresh and new by subversive and transgressive strategies. The essays are divided into four thematic areas--the Scottish context, the geographies of his writing, the impact of genre and a combined focus on gender, games and play--and will be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary literature, Scottish literature and science fiction.

This essential guide provides a comprehensive survey of the most important debates in the criticism and research of contemporary British fiction. Nick Bentley analyses the criticism surrounding a range of British novelists including Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson. Exploring experiments with literary form, this authoritative book considers cutting-edge concerns relating to the neo-historical novel, the relationship between literature and science, literary geographies, and trauma narratives. Engaging with key literary theories, and identifying present trends and future directions in the literary criticism of contemporary British fiction, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature, teachers, researchers and scholars.

The language of science fiction, and of fantasy, has a steep challenge: that of the creation of other worlds, societies and characters that are alien to us in diverse and fundamental ways, but still compelling and knowable. This exciting book steps away from the issues of race, gender and politics that have saturated sci-fi and fantasy criticism. Rather, it challenges two widely held but poorly substantiated beliefs circulating about science fiction and fantasy - that they are a) written in plain and unremarkable prose and b) apt to present characters that are flat types rather than fully realised individuals. Mandala draws on traditional syntactic categories of stylistic analysis as well as the relatively more recent pragmatic and sociolinguistic paradigms such that the original analyses here take our understanding of these two genres beyond the usual confines, to consider how language is used to draw alternative words, represent the far future and distant past, and create psychologically believable characters. Covering both British and American fiction and television, this is a wide-ranging and perceptive book.

This book represents an analysis of contemporary fantasy (non-mimetic) literature in all its richness and diversity, and offers a preliminary definition of the major fields of taxonomical interest, in addition to marking some of the unmapped territories of “fantastic” fiction. In its first part, the book presents an overview of all major previous theoretical discussions of the issue, particularly those by Tzvetan Todorov, Rosemary Jackson, Darko Suvin, Brian Attebery, Marek Oziewicz and Farah Mendlesohn. The second part of the book provides an interesting comprehensive taxonomy of its own, based on the notion of supragenological types of literature, first introduced by Andrzej Zgorzelski.

This book explores the use of literary fantasy in the construction of identity and ‘home’ in contemporary diasporic Chinese women’s literature. It argues that the use of fantasy acts as a way of undermining the power of patriarchy and unsettling fixed notions of home. The idea of home explored in this book relates to complicated struggles to gain a sense of belonging, as experienced by marginalized subjects in constructing their diasporic identities — which can best be understood as unstable, shifting, and shaped by historical conditions and power relations. Fantasy is seen to operate in the corpus of this book as a literary mode, as defined by Rosemary Jackson. Literary fantasy offers a way to rework ancient myths, fairy tales, ghost stories and legends; it also subverts conventional narratives and challenges the power of patriarchy and other dominant ideologies. Through a critical reading of four diasporic Chinese women authors, namely, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adeline Yen Mah, Ying Chen and Larissa Lai, this book aims to offer critical insights into how their works re-imagine a ‘home’ through literary fantasy which leads beyond nationalist and Orientalist stereotypes; and how essentialist conceptions of diasporic culture are challenged by global geopolitics and cultural interactions.