Ever since the fin de siecle Austrian literature has been fertile ground for fantasy in the widest sense and the genre was taken up again by new generations after the Second World War. The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000 contains stories from authors of the 1890s (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), the years around the First World War (Kafka, Meyrink), the post-war era, when Kafka was rediscovered, (Jeannie Ebner, Ilse Aichinger) to the present day (H C Artmann, Michael Koehlmeier). The stories range from the 'freudian' to the 'kafkaesque', to the surreal, grotesque, comic, occult and straightforwardly supernatural. A.S.Byatt described it in The Guardian as one of the best anthologies she has ever read.

Once upon a time all literature was fantasy, set in a mythical past when magic existed, animals talked, and the gods took an active hand in earthly affairs. As the mythical past was displaced in Western estimation by the historical past and novelists became increasingly preoccupied with the present, fantasy was temporarily marginalized until the late 20th century, when it enjoyed a spectacular resurgence in every stratum of the literary marketplace. Stableford provides an invaluable guide to this sequence of events and to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks the evolution of fantasy from the origins of literature to the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulses creating and shaping fantasy literature, the problems of its definition and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes cross-referenced entries on more than 700 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum, while more than 200 other entries describe the fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that ranges from general textbooks and specialized accounts of the history and scholarship of fantasy literature, through bibliographies and accounts of the fantasy literature of different nations, to individual author studies and useful websites.

Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in translation (SFT). Rachel Cordasco examines speculative fiction published in English translation since 1960, ranging from Soviet-era fiction to the Arabic-language dystopias that emerged following the Iraq War. Individual chapters on SFT from Korean, Czech, Finnish, and eleven other source languages feature an introduction by an expert in the language's speculative fiction tradition and its present-day output. Cordasco then breaks down each chapter by subgenre--including science fiction, fantasy, and horror--to guide readers toward the kinds of works that most interest them. Her discussion of available SFT stands alongside an analysis of how various subgenres emerged and developed in a given language. She also examines the reasons a given subgenre has been translated into English. An informative and one-of-a-kind guide, Out of This World offers readers and scholars alike a tour of speculative fiction's new globalized era.

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

"This Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature provides an invaluable guide to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks fantasy's evolution from the origins of literature until the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulse to create and shape fantasy literature, the problems in defining what it is, and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes more than 700 entries on authors, both contemporary and historical, and more than 200 entries on fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon of the absurd in a full literary context (that is to say, primarily in fiction, as well as in theatre).

A major critical reassessment of the fable and of the literary representation of the human-animal relationship after Darwin.

Josef Blau is a high school teacher who comes from a poor background, poorer than that of most of his pupils. The insecurity this causes him leads to an obsession with order and discipline. He senses his pupils watching him, waiting for the slightest weakness; the least infringement, he feels, will lead to the complete collapse of this tightly ordered world. The other focus of his obsession is his attractive wife. Despite al the evidence and her assurances, he cannot believe she will be faithful to him. He forces her to shave her hair and wear clothes that are no more than shapeless sacks, yet still cannot conquer his fears. Catastrophe is looming and, once the first breach is made inevitable. 'We are all schoolchildren, ' Blau says, 'in one great class...

Here is the first English bio of the cult author of The Golem, written by a prize-winning scholar. The remarkable life and the fantastic legend that was Meyrink, allowing him and those who knew him to speak in their own words wherever possible. The illegitimate son of an aristocratic politician and an actress, Meyrink established himself as a banker in Prague, while achieving notoriety as a dandy and rake, while also being a successful sportsman. About to commit suicide, he chanced on a pamphlet about life after death, put his revolver away and started a lifelong interest in the occult. He unmasked false mediums and experimented with alchemy, drugs and clairvoyancy until an affair of honor led him to challenge the whole of the Prague officer corps, setting machinations in motion which resulted in his being wrongly imprisoned. His bank then collapsed and he became a writer. Stories collected around him, so that it is often difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.