Search Worlds Without End

Paul Alkon concentrates on several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction: Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Time Machine. The author sets these works in the context of their time and place of origin, and discusses the genre in general and its relation to other kinds of literature.

In The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination, Steven Swann Jones draws upon his extensive knowledge of the genre to provide readers with a study that is at once a sorely needed introduction to the subject and an original contribution to existing scholarship.

Step by step, Jones guides the reader in understanding and appreciating the genre's origins and its evolution over the past 3,000 years; synthesizes the various approaches - psychological, sociohistorical, and formalist taken by scholars studying the form; and isolates five key characteristics distinguishing the fairy tale from related forms of folk narrative, such as myths and legends.

A series of close readings of selected old and new fairy tales - among them The Wizard of Oz and The Cat in the Hat - serve to illuminate these characteristics for readers, while chapters on the gendering of fairy tale protagonists and other topics stimulate readers to consider fairy tales from new and multifaceted perspectives.

Complemented by a chronology detailing fairy tales from Boccaccio's The Decameron to Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, as well as a reflective bibliographic essay and a valuable list of recommended readings, The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination is a comprehensive handbook for students from secondary through graduate levels, a one-of-a-kind reference for scholars, and an engaging overview for any interested reader.

Definitions of science fiction abound. Landon concentrates on the notions that sf is the literature of change and that its readers have as much as its writers to do with its definition as either a literature or a genre or a point of view or a facet of popular culture. So approached, the task of encompassing twentieth-century sf in one volume is titanic, but Landon heroically rises to it. He traces the mainstream of sf and also its more recondite subgenres in concentrated but lucid prose, using analyses of selected works to keep the threads of an appallingly complex development from disappearing in a mire of names and titles, which more helpfully appear in a bibliographic essay and an annotated list of recommended reading. A worthwhile, not to say indispensable, addition to the study of science fiction.

Twayne's Studies in Literary Themes and Genres Series is the first choice in reference material. This series is the first to investigate comprehensively yet concisely continuities and changes within individual literary themes and genres. Each book includes: an overview of the evolution of the theme or genre, in-depth analyses of four to six exemplary texts, an extensive annotated list of works for further reading, a discursive critical bibliography, a chronology of major authors, works, and historical events of importance in the development of the theme or genre.

Using a broad definition of fantasy to include myth, folklore, legend and fairy tale, this survey of the genre will entice as well as inform any student interested in the mysterious, mystical or magical. Beloved authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Morris and Robert E. Howard are examined closely.