Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock Critical Essays on the Fiction
Product details
Biographical note
Donald E. Morse is a professor at the University of Debrecen, in Hungary, and is an emeritus professor at the University of Oakland in Michigan. He is the author of a dozen books and over 100 scholarly articles. Kálmán Matolcsy is a translator, poet, composer, and a professor at the University of Debrecen. He has written numerous scholarly articles on the literature of horror, fantasy and science fiction.“As a first step towards providing a serious critical study of the work of Robert Holdstock, we have to welcome this book”—<i>SF Site</i>.
Robert Holdstock was a prolific writer whose oeuvre included horror, fantasy, mystery and the novelization of films, often published under pseudonyms. These twelve critical essays explore Holdstock's varied output by displaying his works against the backdrop of folk and fairy tales, dissecting their spatiotemporal order, and examining them as psychic fantasies of our unconscious life or as exempla of the sublime. The individual novels of the Mythago Wood sequence are explored, as is Holdstock's early science fiction and the Merlin Codex series.
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Under the Spell of a Magician
BRIAN W. ALDISS
Introduction: Mythago Wood—“A Source of Visions and Adventure”
DONALD E. MORSE
Part One: Approaches
1. The Embodiment of Abstraction in the Mythago Novels
W. A. SENIOR
2. Masks in the Forest: The Dynamics of Surface and Depth in the Mythago Cycle
KÁLMÁN MATOLCSY
3. Exploring the Habitats of Myths: The Spatiotemporal Structure of Ryhope Wood
STEFAN EKMAN
Part Two: The Novels
4. Time Winds: Early Science Fiction
ANDY SAWYER
5. Profusion Sublime and the Fantastic: Mythago Wood
MAREK OZIEWICZ
6. Tallis, the Feminine Presence in Mythago Wood: Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region
ELIZABETH A. WHITTINGHAM
7. Embedded Narratives in Lavondyss and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
VERA BENCZIK
8. Stories to Illuminate Truth and Lies to Hide Pain: Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn
DONALD E. MORSE
9. “A Heap of Broken Images”—The Mythological Wasteland of the Mind: The Hollowing and Ancient Echoes
ILDIKÓ LIMPÁR
10. “So many names in so many tongues...”: Allusive Mythology in Celtika
C. W. SULLIVAN III
11. Thresholds, Polders, and Crosshatches in the Merlin Codex
TOM SHIPPEY
Robert Holdstock Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index