William Coyle

"Fantasy is not a genre but a mode, a way of perceiving human experience." So says William Coyle in his introduction to this selection of academic papers on the subject of fantasy. Fantasy obviously requires the willing suspension of disbelief, but as another contributor pointed out even more starkly, it often provides "a wonderful trick way of telling the truth by means of a lie." Aside from its obvious entertainment value, fantasy so often deals with moral or social or political issues in an alien setting which, through a shift in point of view, frequently lends objectivity that sometimes cannot emerge in a more straightforward manner. We have seen this time and again in both books and film and even television series.

In this collection I came to realize that fantasy literature encompasses much more than my own narrow definition would have admitted. In this book alone, there are essays on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Meyrink's The Golem; Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland and Tolkein's Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; Shakespeare's Winter's Tale; Frank Herbert's Dune; Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies; Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy; and Artaud's "theater of cruelty and the fantastic." There are several touching on fantasy in the cinema including Superman and his ilk, and even television's Fantasy Island. Other essays treat fantasy from more general perspectives.

Altogether, this collection yields up numerous insights into this area that make it very much worth reading if you are interested in looking at fantasy from an analytical point of view. Some pieces are better than others, and in some cases I believe it would have helped to have read the works under discussion. In other cases, the discussion is general enough that this does not matter.… (meer)