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Illger, Daniel, Jacek Rzeszotnik, and Lars Schmeink, eds. Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung 1. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011. 146 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-3-643-99899-6. euro14.90.
This is the first issue of the German-language membership journal (ZFF) from the recently formed Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (GFF) [Association for Research in the Fantastic]. ZFF is a peer-reviewed journal from LIT Verlag, a prestigious publisher of academic studies and peer-reviewed journals in the human and social sciences with offices throughout the German-speaking realm. On the GFF Web site, the journal describes itself as the first academic association in the German-speaking world committed to furthering research on the fantastic in art, literature and culture.1 Of the journal's three editors, Daniel lllger, Jacek Rzeszotnik, and Lars Schmeink, the latter is well known as a contributing member of the fantastic/sf community in the USA. ZFF is an interdisciplinary journal, currently based in Hamburg and appearing twice a year. It strives to broaden scholarly and cultural insights in this area, and its notion of the fantastic as an "umbrella term" includes horror, Gothic, fables, myths, and sf, to mention some of the many variations of the fantastic. Besides original essays examining the fantastic across the disciplines, the editors also intend to publish translations of texts from the international canon of research into the fantastic in order to promote and stimulate this research in the German language.
In their introduction to the first volume, lllger, Rzeszotnik, and Schmeink elaborate on the vision statement posted on the ZFF.2 Their goal is to transport research in and discussion of the fantastic beyond the organization's membership and thus to facilitate entrance of German-speaking scholars and fans into a true international fantastic community. The first call for papers was in keeping with their broad definition of the fantastic and, consequently, so are the contents of the journal's first issue. It contains new essays on genre-definition, queer reading The Lord of the Rings, the films of Christian Petzold, and a German TV-series [The Rebellion of the Elderly]. The translation in this volume is an extract from Robin Wood's canonical text Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (revised 2003) . Seven book reviews then follow, and the volume closes with notes about the contributors. The footnotes are true footnotes;...