Modern Fantasy Writing
A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 October 2026 | Viewed by 552
Special Issue Editor
Interests: medieval and Renaissance literature in its cultural context and its contemporary legacy (especially fantasy fiction); formal aspects of traditional poetics, oral-formulaic literature; links between literature and music since the Middle Ages to the present; culture of the 1960s
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Perhaps no other literary genre occupies a similarly unique position at the crossroads of tradition and modernity as the genre of fantasy. On the one hand, it remains deeply rooted in a variety of premodern literary traditions, while, on the other, it reaches out into new imaginative horizons emerging in the wake of the most recent technological and intellectual trends and developments.
As a result, side by side with examples of heroic, or high fantasy works, which explore the heritage of the heroic literary tradition of the classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages, one encounters fantasy narratives exploring topics like the idea of parallel universes, alternative dimensions and others phenomena brought to our attention with developments in modern physics, the perils and hopes of AI, or the new conceptual perspectives on the human species which are the outcome recent developments in genetics and anthropology.
Consequently, the idea behind this Special Issue devoted to fantasy literature is to offer a meeting point for scholars researching the multifarious aspects relating to the field of fantasy fiction such as medievalism, secondary world construction, reformulations of such traditional narrative motifs as fairy obduction or the heroic quest, the question of human identity vs. the concept of the Other and artificial intelligence, issues relating to intertextuality and metatextuality, the subgenres of high fantasy, urban fantasy, Slavic fantasy, alternative history narratives, the animal fable, or the comic, and mock heroic.
This also includes research projects that reach out towards other media than literature, exploring the appropriations of the fantasy mode in franchises such as Star Wars, Alien, or Westword, where it successfully interacts with the mode of science fiction.
Prof. Dr. Bartłomiej Błaszkiewicz
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- fantasy
- speculative
- medievalism
- fairyland
- quest
- alternative history
- the other
- fable
- secondary world
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