Fantastic Modernity

Fantastic Modernity
Author: Orrin N. C. Wang
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2000
Genre: Criticism
ISBN: 9780801865251

Focusing on the convergence of Romantic studies and literary theory over the past twenty-five years, Orrin N. C. Wang pairs a series of contemporary critics with "originary" Romantic writers in order to illuminate the work of both the contemporary theorist and earlier Romantic. Wang examines Paul de Man's deconstructive use of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jerome McGann's Marxist-inflected appropriation of Heinrich Heine, contemporary feminist interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Harold Bloom's pragmatic reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through these examinations, along with commentary on Keats, Jameson, Lovejoy, and Spitzer, Fantastic Modernity attempts a series of new readings of both the theory being used by the various critics and the primary Romantic texts under consideration.

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature
Author: Susan Napier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2005-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134803354

Modern Japan's repressed anxieties, fears and hopes come to the surface in the fantastic. A close analysis of fantasy fiction, film and comics reveals the ambivalence felt by many Japanese towards the success story of the nation in the twentieth century. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature explores the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. It takes in the nightmarish future depicted in the animated film masterpiece, Akira, and the pastoral dream worlds created by Japan's Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo. A wide range of fantasists, many discussed here in English for the first time, form the basis for a ground-breaking analysis of utopias, dystopias, the disturbing relationship between women, sexuality and modernity, and the role of the alien in the fantastic.

Uncanny Modernity

Uncanny Modernity
Author: Jo Collins
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2008-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230582826

This book explores the sense in which the uncanny may be a distinctively modern experience, the way these unnerving feelings and unsettling encounters disturb the rational presumptions of the modern world view and the security of modern self-identity, just as the latter may themselves be implicated in the production of these experiences as uncanny.

The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain

The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain
Author: Antonio Cordoba
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2016-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137600209

This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.

Tourism and Modernity in China

Tourism and Modernity in China
Author: Tim Oakes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2005-06-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134659997

This book explores how the experience of modernization is revealed in China's newly constructed tourist landscapes. It argues that in China's burgeoning ethnic tourist villages and theme parks can be seen all the contradictions, debasement, and liberating potentials of Chinese modernity. Tim Oakes uses the province of Guizhou to examine the Chinese tourist industry as an example of the state's modernization policies and how local people have engaged with these changes.

Urban Fantasy

Urban Fantasy
Author: Stefan Ekman
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2024-08-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1643150642

The first book-length historical and theoretical analysis of the urban fantasy genre

Civilization and Monsters

Civilization and Monsters
Author: Gerald A. Figal
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822324188

Discusses the representation/role of the supernatural or the "fantastic" in the construction of Japanese modernism in late 19th and early 20th century Japan.

Modernity

Modernity
Author: David Punter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2017-09-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137050306

This exciting volume in the Transitions series explores both history and contemporary ideas, pushing forward the boundaries of what we understand by 'modernity'. This book is distinguished from its competitors by its clear focus on close readings of commonly-studied texts and a strict policy on writing for an undergraduate readership.

Dread Trident

Dread Trident
Author: Curtis D. Carbonell
Publisher: Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2019-11-27
Genre: Fantasy games
ISBN: 1789620570

Dread Trident examines the rise of imaginary worlds in tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs), such as Dungeons and Dragons. With the combination of analog and digital mechanisms, from traditional books to the internet, new ways of engaging the fantastic have become increasingly realized in recent years, and this book seeks an understanding of this phenomenon within the discourses of trans- and posthumanism, as well as within a gameist mode. The book explores a number of case studies of foundational TRPGs. Dungeons and Dragons provides an illustration of pulp-driven fantasy, particularly in the way it harmonizes its many campaign settings into a functional multiverse. It also acts as a supreme example of depth within its archive of official and unofficial published material, stretching back four decades. Warhammer 40k and the Worlds of Darkness present an interesting dialogue between Gothic and science-fantasy elements. The Mythos of HP Lovecraft also features prominently in the book as an example of a realized world that spans the literary and gameist modes. Realized fantasy worlds are becoming ever more popular as a way of experiencing a touch of the magical within modern life. Reworking Northrop Frye's definition of irony, Dread Trident theorizes an ironic understanding of this process and in particular of its embodied forms.

Fantastic Reality

Fantastic Reality
Author: Mignon Nixon
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2005
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780262140898

A critical study of Louise Bourgeois's art from the 1940s to the 1980s: its departure from surrealism and its dialogue with psychoanalysis.