In the Mirror of the Past

Of Fantasy and History
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4438-4528-1
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 115 Seiten

These days, we are ever more often confronted by overwhelming events. Searching for a way to understand them, we turn to mythic archetypes still present in our culture. The authors of these essays pose questions about the reliability of the archetypes found in tradition, history, and scattered mythologemes.

The essays in this collection deal with the presence of mythic time in modern speculative fiction, such as fantasy and alternate histories, and discuss major mythologemes and their functions in popular literature and extra-literary reality. The authors show how mythopoeic fiction becomes a (genetically) modified mythic mirror in which we hope to see answers to vexing questions, or just a reality superior to the ordinary one.

In the Mirror of the Past: Of Fantasy and History is a collection of seven essays by American and Polish authors, including Brian Attebery, Terri Doughty, and Marek Oziewicz, with Mircea Eliade’s concept of “return from history to History” as their underlying theme.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rzyman, Aleksander

Trocha, Bogdan

Ratajczak, Tomasz

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen

Über Autor(innen)

Bogdan Trocha is a specialist in literature and philosophy. He graduated from the Papal Academy of Theology in Cracow and the Pedagogical University in Zielona Góra. He received a PhD in Philosophy in 1999 and a post-doctorate degree in Literature in 2010. He is based at the Department of Polish Studies at the University of Zielona Góra, and lectures in philosophy and popular literature. He is also a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Szczecin, the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan, and the High School of Pedagogy and Journalism in Poznan. He is the Head of the Centre for Mythopoetics and Philosophy of Literature at the University of Zielona Góra, and the author of Degradacja mitu w literaturze fantasy.

Aleksander Rzyman graduated from the Department of English Studies at the University of Wroclaw. He is based in the English Division of the Department of Modern Philologies at the University of Zielona Góra, and teaches literary and specialist translation as well as grammatical-lexical issues in English. Since 1995, he has been a certified court translator.

Tomasz Ratajczak holds a PhD in Polish Studies. He specialises in history of literature and history of popular and non-literary books, also in internet-and-literature related issues. He is based at the Department of Polish Studies at the University of Zielona Góra, and is the Head of the Centre for Literary Studies and Auxiliary Sciences.