Strategies of Fantasy by Brian Attebery

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Research, American, 20th Century

Hardcover

First published March 1, 1992

About the author

Brian Attebery is professor of English at Idaho State University and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He edited The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1997) with Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler and is the author of Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (2014) and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), among other books. In 2019 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow.

Reviews

[Saige · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels odd to give out stars to an academic text like this, but here we are.

It was really interesting, after reading so much fantasy fiction, to delve into not what fantasy does, but how. Attebery has a really good analysis of the ways that fantasy can achieve effects and cause reflection in ways that mimetic fiction simply can't. He does some great close reads of ideas like time travel and meta-fiction. As an English student, I also really appreciated his crash course in Modernism and Postmodernism, fitting fantasy into those discourses and showing how genre fiction is just as relevant to literary criticism as any other fiction.

The book is a bit dated, though. Especially the last chapter, where he deals with a subgenre of fantasy that is arguably now more the norm than the exception. He knew it would date itself though - says so at the top of the chapter - and a lot of his points still stand up. I'm interested, after this, to read some more modern criticism on modern fantasy texts to see how his critical lens has held up after so much time and so many shifts in the genre

[Carol Chiovatto · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in 1992, and I should like to see how Attebery's thoughts about fantasy changed from then to now. Much depends on secondary-world fantasy, and though engaging, some of his views seem a little outdated, if we consider what fantasy has become in the late 20th and early 21st century. I love how he mobilises theory from many many different fields, though his use of Greimasian semiotics is painfully inaccurate.

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

130315: this is very interesting, very engaging, as an overview of lit crit in collision with fantasy, the only problem being it is 21 years old, so there is no reference to most very modern fantasy like Harry Potter or those massive multi-volume fantasies such as Game of Thrones, nor the vampire urban fantasies of this century...

[Jayden King · Rating 5 out of 5]

The approaches may have aged a bit since publication, and obviously no modern works are discussed, but this is an excellent and essential launching point for anyone studying fantasy as a literary genre.

[Nathaniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 really.

[Rescribo · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Raederle's problem is learning to accept and control the powers she was born with, whereas her male counterpart Morgon must learn his powers step by step. This distinction between acquired and inborn ability or knowledge marks many fantasies by and about women... The fantasies here are echoing a common perception of women as intuitive, men as logical."

Once upon a time in a land far, far away really means never and nowhere

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting insight, first few chapters seem to focus too much on fantasy being recognised as a serious genre - a tedious argument.