The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts [Hardcover]

The Celebration of the Fantasticreaffirms the wide range and validity of the subject, treatment, and approach that the fantastic demands. Twenty-five essays, selected from among the more than 230 presented at the Tenth Anniversary Conference of the IAFA, consider writers as diverse as Stephen King, Doris Lessing, Rudyard Kipling, Loren Eiseley, Mary Stewart, Bernard Malamud, Orson Scott Card, Toni Morrison, Henry James, and Ray Bradbury as well as television personalities, film directors, and German and Hungarian visual artists. Also included are essays on science fiction writers Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, and Greg Bear.

Some of the more provocative work is on Feminist Fantasy and Open Structure, The Greatest Fantasy on Earth: The Superweapon in Fiction and Fact, Virtual Space and Its Boundaries in Science Fiction Film and Television, The Fantastic in German Democratic Republic Literature, Csontvary: The Painter of the Sun's Path, and The Shaman in Modern Fantasy. The essays illustrate the essential theme of the fantastic: the testing of the limits of civilization and the questioning of commonly accepted values and ideas as writers and artists explore the hidden and the repressed.

DONALD E. MORSE is Professor of English and Rhetoric at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan. He is co-editor (with Csilla Bertha) ofMore Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts(Greenwood Press, 1991) and editor ofThe Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts(Greenwood, 1987). He has contributed numerous articles on Joyce, Beckett, Auden, Vonnegut, American drama, adult development, and cognitive psychology to various journals.

MARSHALL B. TYMN is Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. He is past President of The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, an internationally recognized scholar in science fiction and the fantastic, and he received the Pilgrim Award of the Science Fictil/