Celebration of the Fantastic

The Celebration of the Fantastic reaffirms 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) of More Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts (Greenwood Press, 1991) and editor of The 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 Fiction Research Association in 1990. The author of numerous books and dozens of articles, he is the series editor of Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy for Greenwood and The Year's Work in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

CSILLA BERTHA is Associate Professor of English and Irish at Lajos Kossuth University, Debrecen, Hungary. Her publications include: two books in Hungary: Yeats the Playwright and English Literature in the 19th and the First Half of the 20th Centuries well as More Real Than Reality (Greenwood, 1991). She has also authored numerous articles in Hungary, Ireland, and the United States on Irish drama, Yeats, J.B. Keane, B. Friel, T. Murphy, the fantastic in Irish literature, and parallels between Irish and Hungarian literature.