“Book burners at least take fantasy seriously.” — Brian Attebery
One of my fondest childhood memories was sitting on my mother’s lap reading “A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. The main characters embark on a journey through space and time, from galaxy to galaxy, as they endeavor to save a father and the world. With surprising twists and turns, the novel journeys into the war between light and darkness, good and evil, as the young characters mature into adolescents. My young mind was challenged with questions of spirituality and purpose. I felt affinity with the characters as they were thrown into conflicts of love, divinity, and goodness. That early experience cemented my love for this type of story.
Today I ponder my literary experiences with Beowulf, Persephone, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Hades. What do they have in common? Consider The Chronicles of Narnia, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.
The former list is all folklore and mythology, the latter list fantasy. There are critical distinctions. Fantasy stories are usually able to be traced to an author or a named group of them. Mythologies are stories that predate the fantasy genre. Myths are often allegorical, can be foundational to cultures and religions, and rarely have a single author. Most myths possess variations depending on the size of the culture or region from which they have originated. This brings me to Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth by Brian Attebery.
Myth is oral, collective, sacred, and timeless. Fantasy is a modern literary mode and a popular entertainment. Yet the two have always been inextricably intertwined. Stories about Stories examines fantasy as an arena in which different ways of understanding myth compete and new relationships with myth are worked out. The book offers a comprehensive history of the modern fantastic as well as an argument about its nature and importance. Specific chapters cover the origins of fantasy in the Romantic search for localized myths, fantasy versions of the Modernist turn toward the primitive, the post-Tolkienian exploration of world mythologies, post-colonial reactions to the exploitation of indigenous sacred narratives by Western writers, fantasies based in Christian belief alongside fundamentalist attempts to stamp out the form, and the emergence of ever-more sophisticated structures such as metafiction through which to explore mythic constructions of reality.
“Even a quick glance at the fantasy literature that has been written over the past century and a half is enough to realize how much the genre owes to various myths and mythologies,” according to Modern Fiction Studies, by Johns Hopkins University Press. “Attebery takes a more than cursory look at this relationship between myth and fantasy, exploring in detail how ‘fantasy, as a literary form, is a way of reconnecting to traditional myths and the worlds they generate.’”
Ursula K. Le Guin called Attebery the “most readable, the most knowledgeable, and the least quarrelsome of critics. Stories about Stories adds new vistas of understanding to his unsurpassed survey of imaginative literature."
This scholarly work is largely structured chronologically, and juxtaposes fantasy and myth. Connections between the two are displayed in eight chapters that explore a number of junctures on the timeline between the late eighteenth century and today.
Each point offers a particular social and scholarly relation to myths and illustrates the shifts in how myths are incorporated into fantasy stories. Chapters include analytical tools and theoretical background, personal reflections, and illustrative readings of a wide range of works, mixed differently in each chapter.
"With radiant clarity, Attebery's Stories about Stories examines what happens when we 'imagine our way into the realms of mastery and wonder' by considering the performative and contextualizing nature of narrative,” wrote Peter Straub. “It is a brilliant book by one of the fantastic's most informed, most penetrating, and wisest critics, who understands that the subjectivity of fictive knowledge is the engine behind its energy and fascination."
"Stories about Stories is the best analysis we yet possess of mythopoesis. Attebery's work mediates powerfully between the creative appropriations of myth in modern fantasy, a story known to many, and the less well-known stories of the scholarly rediscovery of myth, and the tenuous survival of oral narrative and myth in living context." --Tom Shippey, the author of The Road to Middle Earth
I recommend this book to Tolkienists, lovers of fantasy and myth, and anyone who appreciates good stories. Attebery's exploration of the rediscovery of myth through fantasy literature is useful and engaging. As Lloyd Alexander said, “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.” This quote from the introduction to Stories About Stories resonates with the many recent incidents of book bannings across the United States:
One of the greatest obstacles is the fact that those who don't or can't read fantasy consider themselves superior to it and to the rest of us as if color-blind people were to declare the use of red and green to be an aesthetic defect. The tremendous popularity of particular fantasy texts only tends to make those color-blind people even more resentful. And we cannot forget the book burners: people who consider fantasy of any stripe to be suspect on religious grounds, either because they believe it encourages witchcraft and devil worship or simply because it isn't true and therefore denies Creation.
This last situation, the push to ban fantasy, is the least problematic of the bunch. Book burners at least take fantasy seriously.
EDUCATION
PhD, American Civilization (1979), Brown University
MA, American Civilization (1976), Brown University
BA, English (1974), The College of Idaho
My first scholarly publication was on Emily Dickinson, but I soon turned away from canonical topics. Since that first effort, I have written on fantasy, science fiction, Disney films, utopias, children’s literature, gender, and interdisciplinarity–all dodgy topics for one reason or another. My article on Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and the theoretical basis for their pioneering work in American Studies appeared in American Quarterly in 1996. Collaborators Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, and I edited the groundbreaking Norton Book of Science Fiction; I also wrote a teacher’s guide to the volume. In 1991 I received the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies a year later. I was named ISU’s Distinguished Researcher in 1997 and was given an award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities by the Idaho Humanities Council in 2004. In the fall of 2006 I took over as editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, with graduate students in the ISU English Department serving as editorial assistants.
My most recent scholarly book, Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth again won the Mythopoeic Award for fantasy studies. Since 2016 I have been serving as editor of the Library of America's republication of the works of Ursula K. Le Guin From January through July of 2019 I was in Scotland as Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Fantasy at the University of Glasgow.
Books
Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home. Author’s expanded edition. Edited by Brian Attebery. New York: The Library of America, 2019.
Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Parabolas of Science Fiction. Ed. with Veronica Hollinger. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
"Reinventing Masculinity in Fairy Tales by Men." Marvels & Tales 32.2 (2019).
"The Fantastic." The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 127-138.
"Structuralism and Fantasy." Cambridge Companion to Fantasy. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 81-90.
"Teaching Gender and Science Fiction." Teaching Science Fiction. Ed. Peter Wright and Andy Sawyer. Teaching the New English Series. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011. 146-71.
"Elizabeth Enright and the Family Story as Genre." Children's Literature 37 (2009): 114-36.
"Patricia Wrightson and Aboriginal Myth." Extrapolation 46 (2005): 329-39.
"Dust, Lust, and Other Messages from the Quantum Wonderland." Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience. Ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2004. 161-69.
"The Magazine Era: 1926-1960." The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 32-47
Contributions to Reading Narrative Fiction, by Seymour Chatman. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
Awards/Honors
2019 Leverhulme Visiting Professorship in Fantasy Literature. School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow
Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies for Stories about Stories, 2015.
Distinguished Researcher, ISU, 1997
Master Researcher, ISU, 1991, 1995, 1996
Courses Taught
4492/5592: Folklore and Literature
4467/5567: Studies in Late 19th-Century Literature
4441/5541: History and Criticism of Children’s Literature
2277: Survey of American Literature I
2212: Introduction to Folklore
1115: Literature of the Fantastic
AMST 2200: Introduction to American Studies
Seminar in Genre: Utopia
Seminar in Pedagogy: Teaching Science Fiction
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