Speculative Mimesis in Fantasy Literature
Rethinking Relations Between Fiction and Reality
Series: Perspectives on Fantasy;
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Product details:
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
- Date of Publication 13 November 2025
- Number of Volumes Hardback
- ISBN 9781350521438
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages224 pages
- Size 236x154x20 mm
- Weight 500 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Long description:
"
With perceptions of reality in the 21st-century increasingly seen as pluralistic and a matter of interpretation, this open access book identifies fantasy literature as a uniquely and highly effective form of storytelling for engaging with our contemporary sense of reality in all its fluidity and complexity.
Proposing a new theory of fantasy's relationship with our reality as a speculative form of mimesis, Elise Kraatila demonstrates how the genre exemplifies literary ways of engaging with the complexities of our contemporary sense of reality by means of ""what if?"" propositions, grand-scale scenario models, imaginative world-building and thought experiments.
Discussing works of 21st-century fantasy by celebrated authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, N. K. Jemisin, Joe Abercrombie and Lev Grossman, Speculative Mimesis in Fantasy Literature lays bare the complexity and interpretive ambiguity that characterizes the relationship between fantasy fiction, the art of storytelling, and our contemporary sense of reality at large. Illuminating how these contemporary storytellers turn to the expressive repertoire of fantasy fiction to explore topical issues from global inequality to climate crisis and the 'post-truth' breakdown of our conception of reality, this book positions fantasy as a major participant in contemporary responses to our ideas of reality with the power to make actual change. Critically acknowledging and interrogating this most popular genre and the ontological and epistemic force of its narratives, Kraatila offers a perspective to fantasy world-building as a form of literary mimesis that highlights the complex and historically changeable conceptions of what it means for fiction to represent reality more generally.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Tampere University, Finland.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Fantasy, Mimesis, and the Crisis of Representation
Part I: The History and Present of Speculative Mimesis
1. Dragons in the Margins: Mapping Fantasy into Modernism and Postmodernism
2. World-Creating Mimesis: Ontological Poetics across Fantasy and Postmodernism
3. Speculation as the New Mimesis: Reinventing Responses to Reality for the 21st Century
Part II: Reading for Speculative Mimesis in 21st-century Fantasy
4. Fantasy Worlds as Heuristic Devices: Reading for Speculative Mimesis in a Time of Global Crises
5. Stories about the Power of Stories: Fantastic Reflections on the Storytelling Boom
6. Mimesis as Contribution: the Ethos of Fantasy in an Age of Uncertainty
Coda: Rethinking Relations between Fantasy and Mimesis
Works Cited Notes
Index
