Forms of the Fantastic

This new essay collection, edited by Jan Hokenson and Howard Pearce, explores the surprising variety of guises the impulse toward the fantastic has taken throughout history. Incorporating wide-ranging perspectives, the twenty-six essays in the volume include studies of the fantastic in literature, art, philosophy, film, psychology, drama, history, and aesthetics. Among the subjects and forms examined are allegories, animal fables, horror stories and films, and monsters and fabulous beasts. Examples are drawn from Elizabethan drama, German Romantic music, French Expressionist painting, American science fiction, and cubist film. The contributors, in their exploration of the fantastic, consider the possibility of an intrinsic character or essential nature and examine its characteristic elements. Most of the texts studied have been found to contain echoes of myth and epic, linguistic archaism or invention, emphasis on freedom, and especially in more recent works, concern with sexuality, as well as a penchant for reflexive game-playing with a chosen form.