Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Fantasy as a Route to Myth
Taxonomic Interlude: A Note on Genres
Chapter 2: Make It Old: The Other Mythic Method
Chapter 3: Silver Lies and Spinning Wheels: Christian Myth in
MacDonald and Lewis
Chapter 4: Romance and Formula, Myth and Memorate
Chapter 5: Expanding the Territory: Colonial Fantasy
Chapter 6: Angels, Fantasy, and Belief
Literalist Interlude: Burning Harry Potter
Chapter 7: The Postcolonial Fantastic
Chapter 8: Coyote's Eyes: Situated Fantasy
Works Cited
Brian Attebery is Professor of English at Idaho State University and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He is also the coeditor, with Ursula K. Le Guin, of The Norton Book of Science Fiction (Norton, 1997) and the author of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (Routledge, 2002) among other works.
"I highly recommend Brian Attebery's new book. It's a scholarly
work, but it reads with bright clarity as takes us back and forth
between fantasy and myth, showing not only the connections, but
also how the best of fantasy is a roadmap that can return the
reader to its source material."--Fantasy and Science Fiction
"Brian Attebery is the most readable, the most knowledgeable, and
the least quarrelsome of critics. Stories about Stories adds new
vistas of understanding to his unsurpassed survey of imaginative
literature." --Ursula K. Le Guin
"Brian Attebery hits the mother lode in this brilliant archaeology
of fantasy and myth. The closest thing to a definitive guide for
what C.S. Lewis called 'lies breathed through silver,' Stories
about Stories enables us to understand the higher truths of
narratives that walk a tightrope between sacred and profane, faith
and skepticism, poetry and prose." --Maria Tatar, author of
Enchanted Hunters
"With radiant clarity, Brian Attebery's Stories about Stories
examines what happens when we 'imagine our way into the realms of
mastery and wonder' by considering the performative and
contextualizing nature of narrative. It is a brilliant book by one
of the fantastic's most informed, most penetrating, and wisest
critics, who understands that the subjectivity of fictive knowledge
is the engine behind its energy and fascination." --Peter
Straub
"Stories about Stories is the best analysis we yet possess of
mythopoesis. Attebery's work mediates powerfully between the
creative appropriations of myth in modern fantasy, a story known to
many, and the less well-known stories of the scholarly rediscovery
of myth, and the tenuous survival of oral narrative and myth in
living context." --Tom Shippey, the author of The Road to Middle
Earth
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