This carefully crafted ebook: "The Plattner Story and Others (The original 1897 edition of 17 fantasy and science fiction short stories)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. The Plattner Story and Others is a collection of seventeen short stories written by H.G. Wells. This volume was first published in March 1897 by Methuen & Co. Table of contents :"The Plattner Story" "The Argonauts of the Air" "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham" "In the Abyss" "The Apple" "Under the Knife" "The Sea-Raiders" "Pollock and the Porroh Man" "The Red Room" "The Cone" "The Purple Pileus" "The Jilting of Jane" "In the Modern Vein" "A Catastrophe" "The Lost Inheritance" "The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic" "A Slip Under the Microscope"Herbert George "H. G." Wells (1866 - 1946) was an English writer, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games.

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

Fantasy addresses a previously neglected area within film studies. The book looks at the key aesthetics, themes, debates and issues at work within this popular genre and examines films and franchises that illustrate these concerns. Contemporary case studies include: Alice in Wonderland (2010) Avatar (2009) The Dark Knight (2008) Edward Scissorhands (1990) Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-2007) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) Shrek (2001) Twelve Monkeys (1995) The authors also consider fantasy film and its relationship to myth, legend and fairy tale, examining its important role in contemporary culture. The book provides an historical overview of the genre, its influences and evolution, placing fantasy film within the socio-cultural contexts of production and consumption and with reference to relevant theory and critical debates. This is the perfect introduction to the world of fantasy film and investigates the links between fantasy film and gender, fantasy film and race, fantasy film and psychoanalysis, fantasy film and technology, fantasy film storytelling and spectacle, fantasy film and realism, fantasy film and adaptation, and fantasy film and time.

Slavoj Žižek is one of the world's foremost cultural commentators: a prolific writer and thinker, whose vividly adventurous, unorthodox and wide-ranging writings have won him a unique place as one of the most high profile thinkers of our time. Covering psychoanalysis, philosophy and popular culture and drawing on a heady mix of Marxist politics, Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the writings collected in Interrogating the Real reflect not only the remarkable extent of Žižek's varied interests, but also reveal his controversial and dynamic style.

Behind our computer screens we are all cyborgs: through fantasy we can understand our involvement in virtual worlds. Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore we need to take a psychological approach to understand our experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our relationship to computers and digital technology. Lacanian psychoanalysis considers fantasy to be an indispensable “screen” for our interaction with the outside world; Nusselder argues that, at the mental level, computer screens and other human-computer interfaces incorporate this function of fantasy: they mediate the real and the virtual. Interface Fantasy illuminates our attachment to new media: why we love our devices; why we are fascinated by the images on their screens; and how it is possible that virtual images can provide physical pleasure. Nusselder puts such phenomena as avatars, role playing, cybersex, computer psychotherapy, and Internet addiction in the context of established psychoanalytic theory. The virtual identities we assume in virtual worlds, exemplified best by avatars consisting of both realistic and symbolic self-representations, illustrate the three orders that Lacan uses to analyze human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Nusselder analyzes our most intimate involvement with information technology—the almost invisible, affective aspects of technology that have the greatest impact on our lives. Interface Fantasy lays the foundation for a new way of thinking that acknowledges the pivotal role of the screen in the current world of information. And it gives an intelligible overview of basic Lacanian principles (including fantasy, language, the virtual, the real, embodiment, and enjoyment) that shows their enormous relevance for understanding the current state of media technology.

This study argues against vague interpretations of fantasy as mere escapism and seeks to define it as a distinct kind of narrative. A general theoretical section introduces recent work on fantasy, notably Tzventan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). Dr Jackson, however, extends Todorov's ideas to include aspects of psychoanalytical theory. Seeing fantasy as primarily an expression of unconscious drives, she stresses the importance of the writings of Freud and subsequent theorists when analysing recurrent themes, such as doubling or multiplying selves, mirror images, metamorphosis and bodily disintegration.^l Gothic fiction, classic Victorian fantasies, the 'fantastic realism' of Dickens and Dostoevsky, tales by Mary Shelley, James Hogg, E.T.A. Hoffmann, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, R.L. Stevenson, Franz Kafka, Mervyn Peake and Thomas Pynchon are among the texts covered. Through a reading of these frequently disquieting works, Dr Jackson moves towards a definition of fantasy expressing cultural unease. These issues are discussed in relation to a wide range of fantasies with varying images of desire and disenchantment.

This study examines the children’s books of three extraordinary British writers—J.K. Rowling, Diana Wynne Jones, and Terry Pratchett—and investigates their sophisticated use of narrative strategies not only to engage children in reading, but to educate them into becoming mature readers and indeed individuals. The book demonstrates how in quite different ways these writers establish reader expectations by drawing on conventions in existing genres only to subvert those expectations. Their strategies lead young readers to evaluate for themselves both the power of story to shape our understanding of the world and to develop a sense of identity and agency. Rowling, Jones, and Pratchett provide their readers with fantasies that are pleasurable and imaginative, but far from encouraging escape from reality, they convey important lessons about the complexities and challenges of the real world—and how these may be faced and solved. All three writers deploy the tropes and imaginative possibilities of fantasy to disturb, challenge, and enlarge the world of their readers.

Provides an accessible introduction to psychoanalytic explanations of consumer desire. Topics are drawn widely to reflect the scope of Freud's vision and include dreams, sexuality and hysteria. Discussion is widened to selectively include authors such as Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, and to include evaluation of current research.

This sweeping study of fantasy literature offers “new and often surprising readings of works both familiar and obscure. A fine critical work” (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts). Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Drawing on nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn identifies four categories—portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal—that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to some of the best works in the contemporary field. Mendlesohn discusses works by more than one hundred authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Miéville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams, and many others.