Strategies of Fantasy

By Brian Attebery

Brian Attebery's "strategy of fantasy" include not only the writer's strategies for inventing believable impossibiltes, but also the reader's strategies for enjoying, challenging, and conspiring with the text. Drawing on a number of current literary theories (but avoiding most of their jargon), Attebery makes a case for fantasy as a significant movement within postmodern literature rather than as a simple exercise of nostalgia. Attebury examines recent and classic fantasies by Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, and Gene Wolfe, among others. In both its popular and postmodern incarnations, fantasic fiction exhibits a remarkable capacity for reinventing narrative concentions. Attebery shows how plots, characters, settings, storytelling frameworks, gender divisions, and references to cultural texts such as history and science are all called into question the moment the marvelous is admited into a story.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253310709
• ISBN13: 9780253310705
• Release Date: March 1992
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.2"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A must-buy for fantasy scholars

Although now more than a decade old, Attebery's book is one of the finest critical works on fantasy that can be found. His writing is pleasant but insightful, and where many critics spend a lot of time and effort coming up with their own particular definition of the fantasy genre (often including or excluding too much, thus rendering the definition useless), Attebery introduces the concept of the fantasy genre as a fuzzy set, centred on one (or a handful) of works which can be considered typically fantasy. The genre then spread out from this centre, changing but maintaining something in common with the central works.In my opinion, this is a book which is almost as hard to ignore to the fantasy scholar as is Tolkiens "On Fairy-Stories".