Project MUSE®: Studies in the Fantastic - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in the Fantastic.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 3 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: Studies in the FantasticTWOProject MUSE®Studies in the Fantastic2470-34861942-7190Latest articles in Studies in the Fantastic. Feed provided by Project MUSE®“They Hear ’Em, but They Can’t See ’Em”: Uncovering the Hidden Monstrosities of Colonialism in Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986101
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“It is hard to deny that Australia has a racist past,” Graeme Turner bluntly begins in his analysis of Australian Indigenous representation, “and it is only now coming to terms with a racist present . . . Given the relationship between the ideologies of a culture and its representations of itself in film, it is hardly surprising that racism still structures the representation of Aborigines in Australian film” (135). Turner’s assessment of the status of Australian cinema and the portrayal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is indeed correct, with scholars like Kim Bullimore remarking on the continued tendency of filmmakers, following in the footsteps of visual and literary artists, to rely upon a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmall“They Hear ’Em, but They Can’t See ’Em”: Uncovering the Hidden Monstrosities of Colonialism in Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil2026-03-25text/htmlen-US“They Hear ’Em, but They Can’t See ’Em”: Uncovering the Hidden Monstrosities of Colonialism in Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®892622026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Imagining Slipstream: Undefining Reality in Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986102
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Jan Carson’s 2019 novel The Fire Starters establishes the rules of reality in the first lines: “This is Belfast. This is not Belfast” (7). Carson’s slippery repetition implies two things at once: her Northern Irish city is both a real and unreal place. During real Belfast summers, recent history can feel as if it simmers beneath city streets, igniting into multistory bonfires draped with Irish flags and nationalist effigies to celebrate the Twelfth of July, a day marking the victory of Protestant King William of Orange in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne (Gordon).1 These realities seep into Carson’s unreal city: a Belfast haunted by sirens, daytime vampires, and children who occasionally turn into boats. Both versions
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmallImagining Slipstream: Undefining Reality in Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters2026-03-25text/htmlen-USImagining Slipstream: Undefining Reality in Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®793322026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Toward a Theory of Black Horror and the Fantastic Real: Ontological Violence in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “The Finkelstein 5”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986103
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In recent years, Black speculative fiction has increasingly turned to the Fantastic to articulate the psychic and social realities of anti-Black racial terror.1 By collapsing the boundaries between the real and the unreal, works like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s 2018 short story collection, Friday Black, expose how anti-Blackness functions not merely as a historical event or social fact but as an ontological condition. This essay examines the first short story in Friday Black, “The Finkelstein 5” (2016). The story fictionalizes the #SayTheirNames Movement and the broader contemporary archive of Black death at the hands of police and private citizens. It recounts the murders of Tyler Mboya, Fela St. John, Akua
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmallToward a Theory of Black Horror and the Fantastic Real: Ontological Violence in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “The Finkelstein 5”2026-03-25text/htmlen-USToward a Theory of Black Horror and the Fantastic Real: Ontological Violence in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “The Finkelstein 5”2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®551612026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Legends and Legend Webs in Andy Duncan’s Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986104
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Many fiction writers hail readers who bring an awareness of folklore and folkloristics to their reading. One especially so inclined is contemporary speculative fiction writer Andy Duncan. Readers can enjoy Duncan’s short stories and novellas without knowing much folklore, but knowing folklore considerably enriches their ability to appreciate and interpret his work. His story “Beluthahatchie” (1997), for example, is told through point-of-view character John, who awakens on a train bound for Hell and its suburbs Beluthahatchie, Ginny Gall, Diddy-Wah-Diddy, and West Hell, presenting a landscape from the Mississippi Delta occupied by Black people toiling to farm “[o]ne long, dirty field after another” (Duncan
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmallLegends and Legend Webs in Andy Duncan’s Fiction2026-03-25text/htmlen-USLegends and Legend Webs in Andy Duncan’s Fiction2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®1049472026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Biophilia, New Urbanism, and “He”: H. P. Lovecraft’s Contribution to Environmental Thought
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986105
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H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “He,” written in August 1925 and published in Weird Tales magazine in September 1926, has attracted far less critical attention than his later works, specifically his cosmic tales of alien gods and monsters. In his influential biography, L. Sprague de Camp glosses over the story, which, in his estimation, “is not outstanding among Lovecraft’s work, since it suffers from one of his worst cases of adjectivitis” (242). Peter Cannon likewise dismisses the tale, considering it conventional and anticlimactic: “for this most transparent of autobiographical heroes, disappointing to say, Lovecraft was unable to devise more than a fairly stock supernatural encounter with one of his evil
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmallBiophilia, New Urbanism, and “He”: H. P. Lovecraft’s Contribution to Environmental Thought2026-03-25text/htmlen-USBiophilia, New Urbanism, and “He”: H. P. Lovecraft’s Contribution to Environmental Thought2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®939212026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Magic Cloaks on Spaceships and the Chosen One from Space: Science Fantasy as Metafiction in Spelljammer: Beyond the Moons and Cards of Grief
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986106
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Science fantasy is a genre contested in definition and legitimacy. Prominent science fiction scholar Darko Suvin disparagingly remarks that “SF retrogressing into fairy tale (for example, ‘space opera’ with a hero-princess-monster triangle in astronautic costume) is committing creative suicide” (8). However, its strategy of obfuscating the linear threshold between fantasy and science fiction, and its unique combination of these two seemingly contradictory genres, opens the door for inventiveness and unconventional use of tropes: this enables a reading of science fantasy as metafiction as presented in this paper. In this essay, I do not wish to assert that all science fantasy is meta, but rather to examine specific
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmallMagic Cloaks on Spaceships and the Chosen One from Space: Science Fantasy as Metafiction in Spelljammer: Beyond the Moons and Cards of Grief2026-03-25text/htmlen-USMagic Cloaks on Spaceships and the Chosen One from Space: Science Fantasy as Metafiction in Spelljammer: Beyond the Moons and Cards of Grief2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®903502026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Cripping the Monstrous-Feminine: Reading Disability in Recent Pregnancy Horror Films
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986107
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“Monsters are our children . . . They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions . . . They ask us why we have created them”The year 2024 saw a variety of pregnancy horror films: Immaculate (dir. Michael Mohan), The First Omen (dir. Arkasha Stevenson), Alien: Romulus (dir. Fede Álvarez), and Apartment 7A (dir. Natalie Erika James). This is to be expected in a time when women’s reproductive rights are threatened, but they are only the most recent additions to a long list of monstrous children and ostracized mothers on our screens. The genre’s roots are deep, but it first hit mainstream popularity in the 1960s, alongside the debates raging in the US in the run-up to Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973. Roman Polanski’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmallCripping the Monstrous-Feminine: Reading Disability in Recent Pregnancy Horror Films2026-03-25text/htmlen-USCripping the Monstrous-Feminine: Reading Disability in Recent Pregnancy Horror Films2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®701972026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Gender, Genre, and the Politics of Prestige in the Long Fifties
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986108
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Old habits die hard. For half a century, feminist literary historians have called for serious attention to women’s writing. For nearly as long—since at least Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986)—the once all-important gulf separating high and low culture has been bridged again and again. In spite of these developments, women writers of genre fiction, unlike male authors of “serious” fiction, have not become icons of their eras. One might expect a Mount Rushmore of mid-twentieth-century American authors to memorialize the realists Bellow/Salinger/Cheever, or the counterculture writers Burroughs/Ginsberg/Kerouac, or the African-American novelists Wright/Ellison/Baldwin. But who would expect to see Shirley
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmallGender, Genre, and the Politics of Prestige in the Long Fifties2026-03-25text/htmlen-USGender, Genre, and the Politics of Prestige in the Long Fifties2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®123292026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25“Music So True”: Queering Conjure in Sinners
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986109
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In Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, Yvonne Chireau spins a web between the blues, the erotic, and Conjure that lingers on the skin of those who pass through it. For Chireau, the blues would be incomplete without allusions to the messiness, the longing, and even the sex brought forth through acts of magic. Conjure was “the supernatural force” behind Blind Lemon Jefferson’s lover’s charms, behind the “frustrated paramours who wielded gopher dust or High John the Conqueror Root in their pursuit” of intimate satisfaction (147). To sing the blues in the key of love was to sing of alchemical experiments in a star-crossed sexual life—one doomed from the start by state-sponsored antiblack
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmall“Music So True”: Queering Conjure in Sinners2026-03-25text/htmlen-US“Music So True”: Queering Conjure in Sinners2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®293252026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25Notes on the Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986110
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Jennifer Eastman Attebery is professor emerita, English, at Idaho State University, Pocatello, where she taught folklore and American studies. Her book As Legend Has It: History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity (U of Wisconsin P, 2023) received the American Folklore Society’s Wayland D. Hand Award for best book in folklore and history. Her previous books include Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience, in which she interprets migrant letters as vernacular texts; and a folklore and multimodality study, Pole Raising and Speech Making: Modalities of Swedish-American Summer Celebration. Attebery’s current research expands on As Legend Has It to probe how legends
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/692/image/coversmallNotes on the Contributors2026-03-25text/htmlen-USNotes on the Contributors2026-03-252026TWOProject MUSE®84712026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-03-25