Brett Cooke

Jaume Marti-Olivella

George E. Slusser

The Fantastic Other is a carefully assembled collection of essays on the increasingly significant question of alterity in modern fantasy, the ways in which the understanding and construction of the Other shapes both our art and our imagination. The collection takes a unique perspective, seeing alterity not merely as a social issue but as a biological one. Our fifteen essays cover the problems posed by the Other, which, after all, go well beyond the bounds of any single critical perspective. With this in mind, we have selected studies to show how insights from deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and Freudian, Jungian and evolutionary psychology help us understand an issue so central to the act of reading.

An Interface of Perspectives

The Fantastic Other

The first comprehensive study of one of the most important twentieth-century Russian novels, this book is also the first to apply the perspective of biopoetics to a Russian masterwork. As such, Human Nature in Utopia offers a valuable new approach to Evgenii Zamyatin's We while it explores the workings of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in the conception, reception, and enduring interest of other fictional - especially utopian and dystopian - works. A classic of both Russian literature and science fiction, Zamyatin's 1921 masterpiece depicts a world so perfected by social engineering as to be unfit for human habitation. More than a prescient portrayal of the incipient Soviet state (it became the first novel banned in the USSR), We exposes human universals central to social construction in general. Reading the novel as a complex cross-matrix of psychological forces, an engine of narrative force and artistic interest, Brett Cooke identifies a number of the diverse ways in which the text reveals and reaches out to human nature. His theoretical framework allows him to offer compelling insights into the creation of the novel, its style, content, and genre, and its long-lived

Zamyatin's We

Human Nature in Utopia

Frederick Turner

Biopoetics

What were the consequences of Tolstoy’s unusual reliance on members of his family as source material for War and Peace? Did affection for close relatives influence depictions of these real prototypes in his fictional characters? Tolstoy used these models to consider his origins, to ponder alternative family histories, and to critique himself. Comparison of the novel and its fascinating drafts with the writer’s family history reveals increasing preferential treatment of those with greater relatedness to him: kin altruism, i.e., nepotism. This pattern helps explain many of Tolstoy’s choices amongst plot variants he considered, as well as some of the curious devices he utilizes to get readers to share his biases, such as coincidences, notions of “fate,” and aversion to incest.

Tolstoy’s Family Prototypes in "War and Peace"

George Edgar Slusser

Jan Baptist Bedaux

Sociobiology and the Arts

Brett Cooke

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