Essays on Fantastic Fiction and SF

This is a very useful web page, with short reviews of books of essays on science fiction and other fantastic literature, covering such fields as steampunk and Afrofuturism, and by such authors as Neil Gaiman, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delaney.

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Franziska Kohlt, ‘Alice in the asylum: Wonderland and the real mad tea parties of the Victorians’

An excellent article here by Franziska Kohlt, ‘Alice in the asylum: Wonderland and the real mad tea parties of the Victorians‘. Franziska looks at the Alice books and the theme of madness in the context of both the recent Disney film and the historical context of Victorian society and the treatment of the insane.

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Review: Therapy for a Vampire

This new Austrian vampire film, Therapy for a Vampire looks well worth seeing–a subtle comedy with themes of psychoanalysis and the representation of women. A thoughtful review here (thanks to Stacey Abbott for sharing this).

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CFP: Edited collection on iZombie

I’ve not seen the TV series iZombie (nor the graphic novel on which it is based) but I’ve heard very enthusiastic reports on this new manifestation of the sympathetic zombie (of which one of our favourites, Daniel Waters’s Generation Dead is a seminal example). Stacey Abbott gives an excellent analysis here.

Now, Ashley Szanter and Jessica K. Richards have issued a call for articles for an edited collection on the show and graphic novel.

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Reimagining the Gothic: Gothic Research Award

I am just sharing this news from the Centre for the History of the Gothic as it involves one of my students Daisy. I supervised Daisy’s dissertation and am looking forward to seeing her progress on the ‘Reading the Vampire’ module of her MA next year. Well done Daisy!!

Research Award

We’re very pleased to announce that Jen Baker (University of Bristol), Emily Foster-Brown (University of Sheffield), and Daisy Butcher (University of Hertfordshire) have all been awarded Reimagining the Gothic Research Awards for their outstanding papers presented at the Reimagining the Gothic 2016 Symposium.

The Reimagining the Gothic Project, part of the Centre for the History of the Gothic, promotes and facilitates new research in Gothic studies, and this award is meant to help develop projects with high interdisciplinary potential and encourage MA and PhD students to pursue future Gothic engagements.

The awards will be presented at the CHG Networking Day on July 8th at the University of Sheffield – more details to follow.

Congratulations Jen, Emily, and Daisy!

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Genres, Classification, and Adventures in the Library

In my explorations of the endless swarming and interbreeding of genres that is contemporary popular fiction, I recently discovered a new species. Among the proliferating subsubsubgenres of paranormal romance and similar breeds, I’ve noticed quite a few that feature libraries (or sometimes museums)—a fitting topic for fictions that are often very aware of the power of reading and also of their own indeterminate place in the Dewey system. Fiction about libraries has its parallels (and possibly origins) in more respectable literature with the fantastic fables of Jorge Louis Borges (his ‘The Library of Babel’ in particular) and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Here are some examples of the new form that I have come across (I’ve only read The Invisible Library so far—I enjoyed it very much):

Caine, Rachel, Ink and Bone, Novels of the Great Library, 1 (New American Library, 2016)
Cogman, Genevieve, The Invisible Library, The Invisible Library, 1 (London: Pan, 2015)
Hawkins, Scott, The Library at Mount Char (New York: Crown Publishing, 2015)
Hoffman, Alice, The Museum of Extraordinary Things (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015)
Schwab, Victoria, The Archived (New York: Disney-Hyperion, 2015)

And then, by chance (or Amazon’s algorithm), I came across this TV series, The Librarians—which appeals to me very much; does anyone know it?

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Old French Fairy Tales

The Public Domain Review is a brilliant resource, full of all kinds of texts freely available on line, many of them very beautiful. Here, you can view a 1920 translation of Old French Fairy Tales by the Comtesse de Segur, beautifully illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett. It’s a delight.

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Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, and the New Horror

I must confess I’m not a great fan of horror. But this excellent essay by Terrence Rafferty on a new wave of subtle and ambiguous literary horror does make me want to explore some of the writers here. Joyce Carol Oates is brilliant; I only know Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (from years ago, but I liked it very much); Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney seems to highly favoured in Gothicky circles, and he’s from the North West (so I feel some regional loyalty!).

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Monkey Tales: Apes and Monkeys in Asian Art, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 14 Jun 2016-30 Oct 2016

Number one of Sam’s favourite shapeshifters is Monkey, the character from the Chinese epic Journey to the West which was made into a children’s TV series in Japan in the 1970s. By an uncanny coincidence, 2016 is the Year of the Monkey, and the Ashmolean Museum have an exhibition, Monkey Tales: Apes and Monkeys in Asian Art.

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Generation Dead news

If you don’t know, Daniel Waters‘s Generation Dead and its sequels, Kiss of Life and Passing Strange are wonderful YA novels about teenagers who return from the dead and struggle to find autonomy and love. They’re brilliantly written, full of wit and very moving, and have subtle political arguments woven into them. We’ve been in love with Dan’s books since the beginning of the OGOM Project; in fact, ‘Open Graves. Open Minds’ comes from the novels. But not only have these been re-released with new covers, two more books in the series have been announced: My Best Friends are Dead (due this summer) and Get Animated (next year). And Waters has also had a short story anthologised in Borderlands 6. All this is on the Daniel Waters blog, linked to above, Exciting!

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