Explore the vast range of titles available.

Elizabeth J. Bellamy here casts new theoretical light on the Renaissance genre of the dynastic epic. Drawing upon Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to illuminate the emergence of an epic \"subjecthood,\" she focuses on Virgil'sAeneid, Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Spenser'sFaerie Queene in an attempt to demonstrate how the operations of the unconscious may be interpreted within narrative history. Bellamy first evaluates the psychoanalytic approach to epic as a possible alternative to the new historicism. Turning to theAeneid, she discusses Freud's'neurotic'relation to Rome as a founding image for a historical unconscious. She then interweaves a genealogy of epic subjecthood with the motif of the translatio imperii, likening the'translations of power'that constitute the translatio imperii to extended meditations on the fate of Troy throughout literary history. According to Bellamy, the epic genre manifests a repeated displacement and repression of its Trojan origins, and the doomed city of Troy represents the locus of epic's own narrative narcissism. Offering provocative analyses of epic temporality and of the function of the death drive in epic narrative, she concludes that dynastic epic may be seen as a structure of narcissistic desire which undermines the capacity of the epic to embody a fully articulated historical subject. Translations of Power will enliven current debates among scholars and students of Renaissance culture, literary theory, gender studies, and psychoanalytic criticism.

Reminiscent of More's Utopia and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Denis Veiras's History of the Sevarambians is one of the great utopian novels of the seventeenth century. Set in Australia, this rollicking adventure story comes complete with a shipwreck, romantic tales, religious fraud, magical talismans, and supernatural animals. The current volume contains two versions of Veiras's story: the original English and the 1738 English translation of the expanded French version. Veiras's work was well known in its own time and has been translated into a number of languages, including German, French, Russian, and Japanese, while the English version has been largely forgotten. The book has been read to teach a variety of political doctrines, and also has been cited as an early development in the history of ideas about religious toleration. It reveals a great deal about early modern English, Dutch, and French attitudes toward other cultures. One of the first utopian writings to qualify as a novel, it can be interpreted as a metaphor for human life, in all its complexity and ambiguity.

During the 1920s, sound revolutionized the motion picture industry and cinema continued as one of the most significant and popular forms of mass entertainment in the world. Film studios were transformed into major corporations, hiring a host of craftsmen and technicians including cinematographers, editors, screenwriters, and set designers. The birth of the star system supported the meteoric rise and celebrity status of actors including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino while black performers (relegated to \"race films\") appeared infrequently in mainstream movies. The classic Hollywood film style was perfected and significant film genres were established: the melodrama, western, historical epic, and romantic comedy, along with slapstick, science fiction, and fantasy. In ten original essays,American Cinema of the 1920sexamines the film industry's continued growth and prosperity while focusing on important themes of the era.

In the complex arena of international relations, literature and narratives can, like a transparent mirror, reveal the hidden and emotional aspects of political and diplomatic actions. The trilogy \"The Adventures of Two Captains\"[1] by Paul Jan Amroud and Elias Aghili Dehnavi is one of these narrative texts that has a high capacity for exploring this arena.   [1] Dehnavi, E. A., & Amord, P. J. (2019). Adventures of Two Captains: an epic science fiction poem. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379565767_Adve ntures_of_Two_Captains_An_Epic_Science_Fiction_Poem.

Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice demonstrates a significant effect of epic fantasy's conventions for creating the history of a fictional world. By prefacing each chapter with an epigraph from an official in-world historical text before giving a first-person personal narrative, the novel blurs the boundaries between text and paratext, public and private, official history and personal myth-making. This structure raises questions about what is central and marginal in history, suggesting the extent to which historical narrative is constructed in the imagination by taking the facts surrounding a central event from which the historian is absent-a process much like negative space drawing in the visual arts. The novel uses negative space an image, a formal structuring principle (both in the style of the text and the relationship between text and epigraph), and a philosophical concept about the construction of history. Both the epigraphs and negative space, then, suggest that fantasy, as a genre which invents history, is wellpositioned for metafictional reflection on the constructed narrativity of history and the dependence of historical \"fact\" upon the historian's imagination. At the same time, epigraphs and negative space claim authority for reporting events \"as they really happened,\" displaying a collision between fantasy's constructivist metafictional overtones and its mythic, essentialist need to secure the reader's belief. Ultimately, Hobb's novel suggests a more dynamic relationship between epic fantasy and postmodernism than is usually assumed.

Since it was first presented in 1985 in Beaumont, Texas (where the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts found itself briefly exiled from its usual Florida venues), the Crawford Award has become a respected part of the annual cycle of honors in the broad arena of fantasy, science fiction, and horror literature. In 1986, the second award was presented to Nancy Willard, who had already established a substantial reputation for her children's books, including a Newbery Award for A Visit to William Blake's Inn. The World Fantasy Awards, established a decade earlier, already included a popular vote component (along with a jury), and IAFA's purview was so broad-including science fiction, horror, folklore, film and media, art and architecture, gaming, even music-that only a segment of the membership focused on contemporary fantasy literature. The renowned editor David Hartwell, by then a member of the Association's Board of Directors, suggested that we begin identifying critics and scholars whom we knew to be active in reading newer fantasy, and who might identify a broader range of international candidates.

Frank Herbert's influential science fiction novel Dune (1965) is usually understood as a prescient work of environmentalism. Yet it is also concerned with empire, and not merely in an abstract way. Herbert worked in politics with the men who oversaw the United States’ overseas territories, and he took an unusually strong interest in Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the Quileute Nation. Conversations with Quileute interlocutors both inspired Dune and help explain Herbert's turn toward environmentalism. This article recovers the neglected imperial context for Herbert's writing, reinterpreting Dune in light of that context.

The appeal to The Lord of the Rings comes not only from Tolkien's handling of the plot, characters, mythology, language, and themes, but also from the strong portrayal of evil. It stems from the Orcs being powerful physical images of evil. They are salient to the plot of the novel and are indispensable in complementing other images of evil. This paper discusses the two forms of evil, spiritual and physical, and how there exists a form of dependence of spiritual evil (Sauron) on physical evil (the Orcs). The Orcs come across as an important image of physical terror because of their sheer physicality and pervasive presence throughout the epic. They symbolise Sauron's authority and the spread of evil throughout the realm and their countless involvement in many events have shaped them into compelling physical images of terror which inadvertently transform Tolkien's epic into an inspiring and riveting novel. My study of the Orcs as powerful physical images of evil also seeks to unveil the influential role of secondary images of evil in the novel. The Orcs are an example of Tolkien's ingenuity; they reflect the extent of his astute imagination in creating a host of characters, each unique in its own form and function. The presence of the Orcs also symbolises the necessary existence of darkness that is essential for the aesthetic experience of art to be felt. In that, it is from the coexistence of evil and good, and the conflict that is generated from it that inspires the dualities and complexities of our philosophical understanding of good and evil from the lens of Tolkien's epic mythology.