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Rhetorics of Fantasy. By Farah Mendlesohn. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. 336 pp.
Rhetorìcs of Fantasy, by Sarah Mendlesohn, should sit on the bookshelf of die dedicated fantasy reader who yearns for quality research on this popular, yet rarely systematically analyzed, genre. It belongs beside earlier generic classification projects: John Clute and John Grant's The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), Michael Swanwick's The Postmodern Archipelago: Two Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy (1997), Diane Wynne Jones's The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1996), David Pringle's Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels (1988), and Baird Searles, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin's classic Reader's Guide to Fantasy (1982). These nonfiction works have placed diverse stories into historical and thematic clusters, mapping the mega-genre of fantasy - which imagines life, as Lord Dunsany famously defined, "beyond the fields we know." Today the reach of this "beyond" expands into new territories, from high fantasy to "weird fiction," from urban horror to fairy-tale adaptations, from contemporary takes on magical realism to paranormal romances - making taxonomy virtually impossible. Fantasy, like its rationalist twin, science fiction, contains subgenres, conventions, and modes without neatly delineated borders; Brian Attebery called its scope a "fuzzy set" of works, instead of consensually chartable canon(s).
This challenge has not dissuaded Mendlesohn, faculty member at London's Middlesex University, from categorizing nearly two hundred famous books of fantasy from the late 1800s to the present, using the tools of literary theory, particularly from rhetoric, narratology and semiotics. In Rhetorics of Fantasy she poses the question, "Where are we asked to stand in relationship to the fantastic?" (xviii). Her rubric evaluates how an author positions the implied reader with respect to a story's fantastic elements: "How do we meet the fantastic? In what ways does this meeting affect the narrative and rhetorical choices? ... [I] ? what way does the choice of language affect the construction of the fantastic and the position of the reader? What ideological consequences emerge from the rhetorical structures?" (xviii). She foregrounds, through close textual readings, the implied reader's relationship to the fictional protagonist: specifically, the implied reader's affective experience of the protagonist engaging the fantastic. This reader-centric methodology is her major contribution to fantasy studies.
A speculative fiction editor and leader in the International Association...