Writing and Fantasy

Writing and Fantasy brings together essays which restore the sense of the fantastic as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. It moves away from two conventional fields of discussion: psycho-analytic explanations of the mode, where fantasies are produced by the emergence of the consciousness, and concepts of fantasy as a cultural phenomenon by nineteenth-century individualism. The essays in this volume cover the classical period to the twentieth century, and each study focuses on how fantasy acts as a strategy for an individual to contain or exploit specific historical and cultural moments. Multiple genres of fantasy are explored, ranging from ghost stories to feminist utopias and new research is presented which explores areas such as twentieth-century architecture and 'ideal homes'.