Theorising the Fantastic (Interrogating Texts) Book

This book will aim, like others in the Interrogating Texts series, to show how theory can be used to enrich the reading of texts; but it starts off with both an advantage and disadvantage. The advantage is that the literary fantastic is automatically accepted as an interesting object of study. The (potential) disadvantage is that there is little consensus on what constitutes fantasy: romantic fiction? science fiction? children's anthropomorphic books? gothic horror?...and so on. One of the strengths of this study is that it demonstrates the sterility of that approach and focusses instead on the role of the fantastic as "an uncertain and ambiguous problematising of the accepted conventions of normal reality". With that understanding it becomes possible not only to look at work in the fantasy genre (however defined) but also at the use of fantasy as a "narrative strategy" in otherwise "straight fiction".Read More