Subscription to Studies in the Fantastic
Studies in the Fantastic is a journal devoted to the Speculative, Fantastic, and Weird in literature and other arts. It publishes work from scholars throughout the world and sustains a lively dialogue within an expanding field that includes film, video, games, comics, graphic novels, digital media, and both traditional and innovative literary modes.
Although grounded in literary studies, we are especially interested in articles examining genres and media that have been underrepresented in humanistic scholarship. Subjects may include, but are not limited to weird fiction, science/speculative fiction, fantasy, video games, architecture, science writing, futurism, and technocracy.
Studies in the Fantastic [#8]
Visualizing Edgar Allan Poe for a New Century: The Early Twentieth-Century Illustrators
Tony Magistrale
Holly Black’s The Darkest Part of the Forest: Coming of Age in Dialogue with Fairy Tales
Anelise Farris
“People Change as Much as Oceans”: Posthumanism in Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Jen Harrison
Urban Fantasy, Interconnectedness, and Ecological Disaster: Reading Anne Bishop’s The Others Series
Peter Melville
Reviews
The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
Cameron Kunzelman
George A. Romero Archival Collection, University of Pittsburgh
Sonia Lupher
Sometimes Dead is Better: A Review of Pet Sematary
Lauren Milici
Studies in the Fantastic [#7]
Guest Editor’s Introduction: No More Room in Hell: Reanimation, Consumption, and Undead Media
By Sonia Lupher
Global Racial Capitalism and the Asian American Zombie in Ling Ma’s Severance
By Aanchal Saraf
#1BillionForThriller: Revival of “Dead” Content on YouTube
By Kelsey Cummings
Fungal Zombies and Tentacular Thinking: The Chthonic Mother in the Game The Last of Us
By Geneveive Newman
Pressing Rewind: New Encounters with Analog Memories in Ross Sutherland’s Stand By for Tape Back-Up
By Jordan Z. Adler
If the Goo Sticks: Streamlining Slime with Goosebumps on Canada’s YTV Network
By Pat Bonner
“Living Hell”: Fulci’s Eternal City
By Daniel Sacco
The Living Dead in Post-Soviet Cultural Consumption
By Denis Saltykov
Studies in the Fantastic [#6]
“Transitional Gothic: Hammer’s Gothic Revival and New Horror”
By Adam Charles Hart
“Like Clockwork: French Automatons in Life and Literature”
By W. Bradley Holley
“The Politics of Precarity in William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy”
By Bryan Yazell
“From The Day After to The 100: Nuclear Weapons on Television”
By Steven Holmes
“Creepy Atmospheres and Weird Narration in The OA”
By Steen Ledet Christiansen
Studies in the Fantastic [#5]
The Quest for Female Empowerment in William Morris’s Late Prose Romances
By Weronika Łaszkiewicz
Bad Future: Real-Time Alternate History
By Andrew Frost
Love in the Time of the Zombie Contagion: A Girardian-Weilienne Reading of World War Z
By Duncan Reyburn
The Figure of the Gothic Body in the Fiction of Caitlín R. Kiernan
By James Goho
Studies In the Fantastic [#4]
How to Build a Transsexual Superman: Reading Superman’s Emergence Alongside Histories of Eugenic Science and Gender Confirmation Surgeries
By Dan Vena
How to Hack Lovecraft, Make Friends with His Monsters, and Hijack His Mythos: Reading Biology and Racism in Elizabeth Bear’s ‘Shoggoths in Bloom’
By Anthony Camara
Ghana-da’s Tall-Telling: Reframing History, Estranging Science, and Appropriating Indigenous Structures of Feeling
By Anwesha Maity
‘The Icy Bleakness of Things’: The Aesthetics of Decay in Thomas Ligotti’s ‘The Bungalow House’
By Chris Brawley
O Fortunate Floridian
S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, the leading scholars of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s life and work, have assembled all of Lovecraft’s letters to his friend, Robert H. Barlow of DeLand, Florida, in this impressive volume. Though the two corresponded for only seven years, Lovecraft’s side of the exchange totals nearly 500 pages. The editors have annotated the letters exhaustively, clarifying hundreds of references to people, places, literary works, and history. Their long introduction provides the reader with the essential story of the friendship between Lovecraft and Barlow, and their relationships with friends and colleagues in the worlds of amateur journalism, fandom, pulp fiction, and others.
“What a book! As a young fan first acquiring works by Lovecraft in the 1960s I never dreamed that any such volume would or could be published. You can largely step into the shoes of Robert Hayward Barlow, if you wish, when you read this book. What a privilege!” – Kenneth W. Faig Jr. (The Fossil, January 2008)
Studies in the Fantastic [#3]
With this third issue, Studies in the Fantastic welcomes readers to a reboot and revival of the journal. In the five years since the last issue, many new and exciting trends have arisen in popular culture and scholarship; in the box office, superheroes dominate, and popular franchises—including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Terminator, and Mad Max—are having “reboots” of their own, Game of Thrones has renewed a popular interest in fantasy, and scholarship on popular culture proliferates in venues large and small
Studies in the Fantastic [#3] focuses on reboots, in keeping with a compelling contemporary trend and our own re-launch of the journal. Contributors to the issue tackle issues of adaptation, appropriation, and translation. That these topics are at the heart of current debates in literary and cultural studies speaks to the relevance of the fantastic to critical discourse; that this collection of essays is so diverse speaks to the breadth of scholarly approaches to the fantastic and gives great hope for the future of this field of study.
“The Terror of Translation: Ruins of the Translatio in The Castle of Otranto and Vathek”
by Micheal Angelo Rumore
“Revolutionary Subjectivity in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy”
by Peter Melville
“Rebooting the Damsel: The Transformation of the Damsel Archetype in Spider-Man, Superman, and Batman Films from 1978-2014”
by Joseph Walderzak
“The Emerge(d)nt Weird Tale: A Genre Study”
by Todd Spaulding
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is H. P. Lovecraft’s longest and most personal work of fiction. This edition provides a definitive text, edited with an afterword and notes by the acclaimed Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi. It includes a special photographic section on “Lovecraft’s Providence” featuring the photographs of Donovan K. Loucks.
Special Hardback Edition now out of print
The Library Window
Edited with an Introduction, Afterword, and Notes by Elizabeth Winston
The University of Tampa Press is pleased to present an important and attractive new edition of a classic story by Margaret Oliphant, edited and introduced by Elizabeth Winston. It is the first volume of Insistent Visions, a series dedicated to republishing supernatural fiction, mysteries, science fiction, and adventure stories from the nineteenth century that deserve to be more widely known and appreciated.
The Dead Hand and the Bride’s Chamber
The University of Tampa Press is pleased to publish two tales of the supernatural—“The Dead Hand” by Wilkie Collins and “The Bride’s Chamber” by Charles Dickens–as the fourth volume of Insistent Visions. The stories originally appeared as parts of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices by Dickens and Collins (1857), a collaboration between two giants of nineteenth century literature, with the more famous of the two authors claiming the right to list his name first. The complete work is not often read today, but through Maria Bachman’s discerning presentation of this pair of intriguing stories—published together as stand-alone pieces for the first time here—we hope they will reach a new and wider audience.
The Caves of Death and Other Stories
Volume III in the Insistent Visions series is a collection of the supernatural and weird fiction of California author Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948). She was a best-selling and prolific writer with a long career, spanning the 1890s to the 1940s, who made occasional forays into the supernatural field. Those stories were published in several mixed collections during her lifetime. University of Tampa Press is proud to gather them together in this new edition, edited by scholar S. T. Joshi, who provides an introduction, afterword, and notes on the text.
Looking Backward to Nowhere
Looking Backward to Nowhere: Two Visions of Utopia presents the complete text of two 19th century utopian novels: Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and News from Nowhere by William Morris. The two works offer a fascinating comparison not only because Bellamy speaks from an American perspective and Morris from a British context, but also because Morris wrote his novel as a direct response to Bellamy’s, so the plot and thematic contrasts abound. Short introductory comments by Richard Mathews are supplemented by a generous selection of excerpts from Thomas More’s Utopia, which help to place both texts within the Utopian tradition. This is a convenient text for courses in Utopian studies or imaginary worlds—or for creative thinking about how we might live a better life.
Insistent Visions (Four Volume Set)
Insistent Visions is a series dedicated to republishing supernatural fiction, mysteries, science fiction, and adventure stories from the nineteenth century that deserve to be more widely known and appreciated. As of Winter 2016/2017 the series is made up of four volumes:
The Library Window (94 pages)
A new edition of a classic story by Margaret Oliphant, edited and introduced by Elizabeth Winston.
A Study of Destiny (110 pages)
Count Louis Hamon—also known as Cheiro—was an Irishman who achieved international celebrity as a seer, palmist, numerologist, and bestselling author. A Study of Destiny (also published as The Hand of Fate) was his only work of fiction. This masterful story of a curse—and the fate of the cursed—has been out of print, except for one anthology appearance, since the 1890s.
The Caves of Death and Other Stories (107 pages)
A collection of the supernatural and weird fiction of California author Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948). She was a best-selling and prolific writer with a long career, spanning the 1890s to the 1940s, who made occasional forays into the supernatural field. Those stories were published in several mixed collections during her lifetime. The University of Tampa Press is proud to gather them together in this new edition edited by scholar S. T. Joshi, who provides an introduction, afterword, and notes on the text.
The Dead Hand & The Bride’s Chamber (74 pages)
“The Dead Hand” by Wilkie Collins and “The Bride’s Chamber” by Charles Dickens originally appeared as parts of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices by Dickens and Collins (1857), a collaboration between two giants of nineteenth century literature, with the more famous of the two authors claiming the right to list his name first. The complete work is not often read today, but through Maria Bachman’s discerning presentation of this pair of intriguing stories—published together as stand-alone pieces for the first time here—we hope they will reach a new and wider audience. Edited with an introduction, afterword, and notes by Maria Bachman.
Each title is also available individually, in both paperback and hardback editions.
H. P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography
This new and exhaustively updated comprehensive bibliography from the University of Tampa Press presents, for the first time, a systematic catalog of Lovecraft’s writings from his first appearance in a newspaper in 1906 down to the end of 2007. All of his book publications—the great majority of them posthumous—are listed, along with their contents; appearances of his works in magazines and anthologies are tallied; and information is supplied on apocryphal works, texts edited by Lovecraft, and other miscellany.
The work is divided into three main sections:
1) Works by Lovecraft in English
2) Works by Lovecraft in Translation
3) Works About Lovecraft
Studies in the Fantastic [#2]
CONTENTS: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the New Dark Wave: The Decline and Fall of American Gothic Ethics by Zachary Z. E. Bennett; Mariah, My Soul-Mate by Daniel Pearlman; “Undoing the Mechanisms”: Genre Expectation, Subversion & Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison by Leigh Blackmore; The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction by Lafcadio Hearn; How Bria Died by Michael Aronovitz; Frustrated Love, Restless Death: On Robert Aickman’s “The Unsettled Dust” by Philip Challinor; To Horror by Robert Southey; What Happens in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Death of Halpin Frayser” by S. T. Joshi; Parental Shadows: The Influence of Robert Bloch’s Psycho on Thomas Harris by Benjamin Szumskyj; Selections from The Cutting Room Floor by Evan J. Peterson; Book Review: Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula reviewed by John Edgar Browning.
A Study of Destiny
Count Louis Hamon—also known as Cheiro—was an Irishman who achieved international celebrity as a seer, palmist, numerologist, and bestselling author. A Study of Destiny (also published as The Hand of Fate) was his only work of fiction. This masterful story of a curse—and the fate of the cursed—has been out of print, except for one anthology appearance, since the 1890s. Volume II of the new “Insistent Visions” series.
Studies in the Fantastic [#1]
CONTENTS: Editorial by S. T. Joshi; Apparition of a Genre: The Psychical Case Study in the Pre-Modernist British Short Story by George M. Johnson; Dark Fantasy and Compulsion in Henrich Marschner’s Der Vampyr by Robert H. Waugh; “Passenger Bastion” and “Into Your Tenement I’ll Creep” by Jonathan Thomas; New Verse by Fred Phillips, Anne K. Schwader, and Leigh Blackmore; The Icy Depths of Robert Aickman’s “Niemandswasser” by Philip Challinor; “Through the Gates of Darkness”: The Cosmopolitan Gothic of J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker by John Langan; A Spider in the Distance by Joseph S. Pulver Sr.; On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror (1773) by Anna Letitia Barbauld; Vintage Verse by Edward Thomas, Edwin Markham, and Madison Cawein; “Every Night a Magic Door’: An Approach to the Weird Verse of Victor Daley by Phillip A. Ellis; Barbarism vs. Civilization: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft in Their Correspondence by S. T. Joshi