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Copyright of European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A literary criticism of the book "Tropic of Orange" by Karen Tei Yamashita is presented. The author discusses the use of magical realism as a tool through which they interrogate political boundaries and their negative impacts on the individuals and communities they divide. It notes that the book is full of thematic and literal borders that much of the scholarship written on it thus far focuses on its intersections with geography and cartography.

The topic of fictional objects is a familiar one, the topic of fictional properties less so. But it deserves its own place in the philosophy of fiction, if only because fictional properties have such a prominent role to play in science fiction and fantasy. What, then, are fictional properties and how does their apparent unreality relate to the unreality of fictional objects? The present paper explores these questions in the light of familiar debates about the nature of fictional objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present paper is to consider Remades (posthuman figures who populate China Miéville’s “Bas-Lag trilogy”) as simulacra of their social milieu, highlighting the interconnection of power and economic systems which shapes the “remaking” process and ultimately the position of Remades in society. Two methodological approaches are applied to the analysis. The first draws from Halberstam, Livingston and Micali to account for the “posthumanity” of Remades, interpreting them as liminal figures who physically summarise various categories of inhabitants of the Bas-Lag. The second moves from Foucault’s reflections on the relation between power and punishment and on the centrality of the body in this relation to determine how these categories – power and punishment – work in the context of the specifically posthuman bodies of Remades. Combining these perspectives produces interesting results. First, it can account for the “otherness” of Remades on the level of their physical transformation (from “whole” bodies to Remades) as well as on the level of their social position (from citizens, to prisoners, to outcasts). In addition to this, by providing some key examples, the paper foregrounds that, if the dialectical relationship between Remades and society is overtly inscribed on their bodies, different societies are likely to alter them in different ways. As a result, a totalitarian structure will inflict marks that are not superimposable with those produced by an egalitarian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of China Textile Leader is the property of China Textile Information Center and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Lady White Bone, a demon from the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West (Xiyou ji 西遊記), has grown into one of the most celebrated femme fatales in popular imagination. This paper explores the formation of this monster as a gendered skeleton and its association with the dead body. Contextualizing this character in a broadly defined genre of skeleton fantasy, I investigate her lineage in a textual network of literature and religion, focusing on zhiguai 志怪 (accounts of anomalies) short stories and the Buddhist meditation "White Bone Contemplation" (baigu guan 白骨觀), which in turn, leads to the notion of "beauty is white bone" (meiren baigu 美人白骨), a highly gendered rendering of the Buddhist notion "form is void" (se ji shi kong 色即是空). To study the creation and development of this dazzling undead is to examine how women are posed as danger in various traditions, and to understand how this character continues to fascinate readers and viewers centuries after its creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bolivian Studies Journal is the property of University of Pittsburgh, University Library System and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper introduces the theory of the circle of subgenres of fantasy literature. This theory combines the standard (fan) inner division of fantasy into high, heroic, urban etc. and selected scientific theories dealing with fantasy literature. The need to create a circle of subgenres is based on the extent of the fantasy genre and its growing popularity, as well as inconsistencies in the definition of subgenres, especially by fans' definitions. The circle of subgenres can be applied to the so-called core texts, which can be found using Attebery's theory of fuzzy sets, Wittgenstein's theory of of family resemblance and particular intertextual characteristics. These core texts are then divided into individual subgenres according to their distinctive features. The paper draws attention to certain differences between the understanding of subgenres in the Czech and Anglo-Saxon environment, which exist due to the unique development of fantasy in the Czech cultural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fantasy and science fiction genres extensively use imaginary settings and locations different from realistic ones but striving to look real. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, pioneers of the science fiction genre in Russia, actively exploited the potential of both genres in their early tale, Monday starts on Saturday (1964), which combines features of the two space types. The present paper analyses the principles of creating 'mago-space' in the book. To do so, we look at the spatial organization of the events involved in the plot and the personages' ideas regarding space. The research will enable us to clarify the role of space in conveying the authors' message, which in this tale is quite explicit. We argue that the space changes significantly within the book, accompanying genre transformations and the development of the protagonist. Since the tale uses 'mental sublocations' as the main units of spatial organization, each part is determined by a certain type of cultural heritage. In the first part, it is the mental space of folklore and classical literature, in the second - that of mythology and science fiction, and in the final - philosophy and science. Mental spaces that coexist and follow various laws form a narrative which turns out to be a journey to the described present in the variety of its forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food in literature is always part of a symbolic act, as the characters within do not eat to stay alive as humans do, but rather, this depiction of eating is always a symbolic process. Food, especially in science fiction and fantasy fiction, works on an even grander scale by being an integral part of the world-building process. It operates on a two-fold scale by serving as a familiar anchor in futuristic and fantastical settings, while also functioning as a defamiliarizing agent that adds to the strangeness of the story world. Food is an incredibly complex motif to be explored in literature, but what will be concentrated on here is the aspect of commensality that is related to food and food practices. Commensality, often seen as related to conviviality, is the practice of sharing a table and consuming food together. This practice has connotations of the deeper meanings vested within food practices in a communal and social sense. These practices promote harmony and feelings of belongingness and togetherness. This paper looks at The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2015) by Becky Chambers through the lens of food to explore how commensality works to create a home and promote the feeling of togetherness amongst an inter-galactic space crew that consists of multiple alien species from radically different cultures and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper - which has been developed within a dialogue with Simona Micali's one, regarding possible worlds within science fiction - aims at investigating those narrative strategies engaged in the processes of world building and construction of meaning in fantasy. Within such a frame, all the typical mechanisms related to the act of reading and to the act of make-believe will be also taken into account. The analysis focuses onto Ende's Neverending Story, which is interpreted through a confrontation both with Wolfgang Iser's theory about the act of reading, considered as a phenomenological act, and with Tolkien's primary fantasy model of The Lord of the Rings. Starting from these premises, the paper also suggests a possible theoretical model of textual cooperation reader-author within the specific literary genre of fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, there is a more frequent replacement of books by e-books, which have become an increasingly viable format and make it easier for readers to read books in a variety of places. Public libraries therefore focus more often on the provision of e-books as one of the components of their digital services. However, these services do not always meet with an adequate demand from readers due to several factors, such as service charges or a lack of awareness. Therefore, in this article, the authors focus on the demand side, represented by e-book readers. Specifically, they focus on the Municipal Library of Prague's e-book readers' behaviour and propose a three-step research model. It consists of analyses focusing on: (1) the specifics of the Municipal Library of Prague's e-book readers; (2) e-book readers' interest in borrowing e-books; and (3) e-book readers' interest in the Municipal Library of Prague's e-service when they must pay a fee. As a data source, the authors use unique data from an online questionnaire survey among readers of the Municipal Library of Prague in 2019 by the Sociores agency. The results show that science fiction and fantasy readers represent the most significant group of e-book readers at the Municipal Library of Prague, and that Facebook is the most significant channel for communication with e-book readers. The authors also confirm the importance of e-book readers and smartphones as devices that significantly affect readers' decision to read e-books. In the final part of the article, the authors propose some practical recommendations that could attract more e-book readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zoo City is set in an alternative Johannesburg, in which animals and humans, and magic and science, co-operate and co-exist. In this alternate setting, people who commit murder are "animalled" with spirit animals that remain attached to their hosts for life. Despite its fantastical setting, Beukes's novel challenges the hectic rhythm of Johannesburg by presenting the urban space as a temporal palimpsest, with each layer informing the city's present. While evoking the detective mystery, the novel unfolds as a narrative of Zinzi's political maturation. In this paper, I argue that Zoo City explores South Africa's historical past through the novel's fantastical ruinscape, which brings to the surface the colonial and apartheid national infrastructure of twenty-first-century Johannesburg. The palimpsestic textures within this ruinscape prompt a desire in characters to connect with the historical present against the amnesia-inducing time of hustle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how HIV criminalization is portrayed in the mainstream Canadian press by examining news representations of Trevis Smith. Smith's case is the most reported case of criminal HIV non-disclosure in Canadian history. Our analysis is based on a corpus of 271 articles written about Smith between 2005 and 2012. Our analysis shows that coverage of Smith's case is distinct from reportage of other criminal HIV non-disclosure cases because he was a well-known Black athlete playing for the Saskatchewan Roughriders at the time of his criminal charge. We argue that news articles represent Smith as a particular kind of threatening racialized 'other' through forms of writing that link crime reporting with sports reporting. Our analysis of headlines and quotation patterns emphasizes how news articles construct Smith as a blameworthy outsider and produce Canada as an imagined white settler nation. Keywords: HIV Criminal Law; Racialization; Representation; News Media; Sport Cet article analyse la facon dont la criminalisation du VIH est decrite dans la presse canadienne par l'etude des representations mediatiques de Trevis Smith. Le cas de Smith est le cas le plus mediatise de non-divulgation du VIH menant a une poursuite criminelle dans l'histoire du Canada. La recherche est tiree d'une archive de 271 articles rediges sur Smith entre 2005 et 2012. Cet analyse atteste ceci: la couverture du cas de Smith est distincte du signalement d'autres cas criminels de non-divulgation du VIH parce ce dernier etait un athlete noir celebre qui, au moment de son accusation, etait joueur de l'equipe << Roughriders >> de la Saskatchewan. Nous soutenons que les articles de presse concoivent Smith comme etant une menace et creent son alterite par le biais de formes d'ecriture qui relient les chroniques sur les mefaits aux reportages sportifs. Cet analyse des titres et des modeles de citations met l'accent sur la facon dont les rubriques de presse font de Smith un etranger coupable et font du Canada un pays des colons blancs invente. Mots cles: loi criminelle; medias; racialisation; representation; sport; VIH, INTRODUCTION This paper studies how HIV criminalization is reported on in mainstream Canadian newspapers. HIV criminalization refers to the use of the criminal law to respond to people living with [...]

Fictocritical writing has been defined as an interdisciplinary practice that seeks to "blur the boundaries between the fictional, the factual and the theoretical." As a mode of experimental writing, it holds a great potential to reinvigorate the current state of critical art writing - specifically, artistic research. The present paper sets out to investigate the usefulness of venturing beyond the constative function of the text and discusses the performative nature of writing employed at the service of artistic enquiry. To that end, I examine three key case studies that shed light on the intricacies of fictocritical writing: Bert Danckaert's The Extras, Barbara Browning's The Gift, and Katrina Palmer's The Dark Object. They all constitute artistic research projects written as novels (two of them are also PhD theses) that, at the same time, are inscribed in an art project. Furthermore, I offer a practice-based example, an excerpt from my novel The Fantasy of the Novel (also part of my PhD thesis), with the hope that the reader will be able to apprehend the effects of fictocritical writing directly, rather than just their description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to explore the concept of the secondary world as developed in Susanna Clarke's 2020 fantasy novel Piranesi. The analysis is conducted in the context of the evolution of the literary motif of fairy abduction between the classic medieval texts and its current incarnations in modern speculative fiction. The argument relates the unique secondary world model found in Clarke's novel to the extensive intertextual relationship Piranesi has with the tradition of portal fantasy narratives, and discusses it in the context of the progressive cognitive internalisation of the perception of the fantastic which has taken place between the traditional medieval paradigm and contemporary fantasy fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to configure the necessary landmarks for understanding fantasy literature, the avatars of the genre, viewed through the prism of renewals, „compromises”, adaptations and updates by reading the Doina Roman’s novel, Pragul and its narrative strategies [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at discussing the role and meaning of history in a Hindi short story by Uday Prakāś, Vāren hesṭiṅgs kā sā̃ḍ ("Warren Hastings' Bull," 1996). Based on the historical figure of Warren Hastings, this work of fiction intermingles fantasy and facts, imagination and history. Significantly, Uday Prakāś warns his readers about this matter right at the beginning of the narrative: if readers look for history in his short story, they will be left "with a heap of sand in their hands." This and similar statements immediately give rise to other crucial questions, i.e. what exactly is the history that the readers expect to find in the story? What are the strategies adopted by the author while addressing the subject of history? What is the role and meaning of the past in a postcolonial and progressively postmodern reality like that of India at the dawn of the new millennium? By focusing on some 'dark areas' of Warren Hastings' private life, Uday Prakāś not only offers an unusual perspective from which to view the figure of the British Governor but also engages his readers in an explicit reflection on the meaning and the presence of the past in our own reality. A short story (kahanī), based on a two hundred-and-fifty-years old tale (kathā), becomes a powerful instrument for criticizing the anomalies of the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few decades, dystopian narratives have been increasingly concerned with climate change and its cataclysmic effects, as witnessed by the emergence of a new narrative genre labelled 'climate fiction'. Within this context, the present paper offers an analysis of Kirsty Logan's fantasy novel The Gracekeepers (2015), a flooded dystopia in which environmental issues, though not pro- grammatically announced, are nevertheless repeatedly foregrounded in the course of the story. Logan provides an original rethinking of the individual's relationship with nature and of human presence in the world, in a powerfully imaginative effort to 'reconfigure the possible' by overcoming traditional boundaries and privileging a new approach based on inclusiveness and hybridisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Antología de la literatura fantástica by Borges, Ocampo and Bioy Casares, a work that marked a milestone in the history of the fantasy genre in Argentina due to its great influence, delights us with a series of stories - tales, fragments of novels, plays, fables, etc. - that includes a single text from Greco-Roman antiquity: the encounter with the werewolf narrated by Niceros during the dinner with Trimalchio in Petronius' Satyricon. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to demonstrate that the translation of Petronius' text is based on Tomás Meabe's version, which, in turn, is based on the French translation of Charles Heguin de Guerle, published in 1862. Secondly, to analyze the different ways in which the anthologists manipulated Meabe's version in order to highlight the fantastic aspects of Petronius' tale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a number of African-authored narratives (novels and film) in the light of recent thinking about futurism and the role of speculative fiction as a means of envisioning the future. Uppinder Mehan, coeditor of the first ever anthology of 'postcolonial science fiction and fantasy,' So Long Been Dreaming, notes that postcolonial writing has rarely 'pondered that strange land of the future' and warns, 'If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again' (Mehan 270). Kodwo Eshun, in a seminal essay, expands on this to argue that, while the 'practice of countermemory as ... an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten' has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity, this has been progressively challenged by 'contemporary African artists ... [for whom] understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act' (292). The paper proposes that this chronopolitical act (what in literature we now call speculative fiction) has its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth, orality, and indigenous belief systems that lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies, the rewriting of history in the light of future realities, and the use of extra-realist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative, this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception. The turn from mythic revisioning to speculative fiction as a distinct and recognizable genre in the 21st century has notably been embraced by women writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, in whose work gender/femininity is a determinant in the projection of imagined futures. The paper examines how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent (those characterized, for example, by genocide, civil war, cross-continental migration, urban dereliction, xenophobia, violence, and the occult) and the potential futures to which they point. The paper argues, therefore, that such narratives, rather than being relegated to the category of fantasy, deserve attention as key indicators of futuristic thinking., HISTORY OF A GENRE The social realist strain of much Anglophone African literature that has, since the inaugural moment of Things Fall Apart (1958), dominated the landscape and shaped critical [...]

In this paper, the author proposes J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ring of Power actually possesses (within the fantasy “frame”) both sentience (consciousness) and sapience (the ability to think and act). Numerous other writers have investigated the literary and mythic origins of the One Ring, but there appears little discussion, beyond its creation, of how and why the Ring does what it does. The author here uses Tolkien’s own writing (rather than the myriad of fan speculation or the numerous adaptations of the Tolkien canon) to show the One Ring has, within the frame of the story, an innate ability to think and act, that is, possesses actual sentience and sapience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nasleđe is the property of University of Kragujevac, Faculty of Philology & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper discusses the occurrence of magic realism in children's literature. It argues that the structure of such texts is a major factor in both determining the presence of magic realism and in allowing the merging of realism and fantasy found in such texts. Drawing on the theories of narratology and reader response, this paper examines the nature of the implied reader for such texts and demonstrates how existing criticism of magic realism can be employed when analysing children's literature texts. This paper concludes that magic realism in children's literature has its own discrete codes, which distinguish it from both existing magic realist texts and fantasy texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"In addition to our immediate personal conscious...there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals and is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes" (Jung, The Collective Unconscious). The Collective Unconscious is a term that reflects upon the Doctrine of Innatism that each person is born with a dominant pre-existent image that only grows, solidifies, and gains consciousness in the environment that is offered to it. However, these images or archetypes that humans are born with are only actualized when they interact with the real world and grow along with the sociological manifestations. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to highlight and analyze how the characters from the fantasy fiction novel, The Lord of The Rings are based on the Jungian Archetypes and how at the end each of these characters falls into place vis a vis the archetypal dominance found in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]