Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Urban fantasy fiction“

Abstract The aim of this article is to investigate the works of Charles de Lint in order to evaluate their position within the genre of urban fantasy. The theoretical framework is adopted from Stefan Ekman’s article “Urban Fantasy: A Literature of the Unseen” (2016) which investigates the genre’s development and formulates a list of its most distinctive features. While this article uses Ekman’s study to examine de Lint’s fictional cities, it also indicates how de Lint’s works challenge Ekman’s analysis. Moreover, the article demonstrates how de Lint’s concern with problems of urban communities transforms his works into narratives of social inclusion, which are particularly significant in the age of the Anthropocene.

Abstract The aim of the present study is to investigate how the consumption of geek products acts in the identity of individuals who see themselves as members of this urban tribe. Geeks are taken as committed members fascinated by topics related to fantasy and science fiction universes; if we take into account a micro-scale, they form an identity territory. Based on its theoretical approach, the goal of the current research lies on promoting a dialogue between studies that have adopted the consumer culture theory (CCT) and organizational identity research, by taking into consideration that urban tribes are a kind of organization. The research corpus comprised interviews with seventeen people who identify themselves as geeks; these interviews were analyzed based on thematic categorization. Based on then results, geek-products’ consumption starts at childhood and goes all the way to adulthood; this process is influenced by characters in the fantasy and fiction universes. The consumed products hold symbolic elements of fantasy and fiction, so that they end up representing the extension of this tribe’s members ‘self’; moreover, they are a way of building collective identities within an urban tribe, in this case, geeks. We have shown that organizational identity studies can lead to greater dialogue with CCT in order to better understand complexities added to identity and multiple affiliations, and links in the identity construction of people forming an organization.

Abstract The aim of the present study is to investigate how the consumption of geek products acts in the identity of individuals who see themselves as members of this urban tribe. Geeks are taken as committed members fascinated by topics related to fantasy and science fiction universes; if we take into account a micro-scale, they form an identity territory. Based on its theoretical approach, the goal of the current research lies on promoting a dialogue between studies that have adopted the consumer culture theory (CCT) and organizational identity research, by taking into consideration that urban tribes are a kind of organization. The research corpus comprised interviews with seventeen people who identify themselves as geeks; these interviews were analyzed based on thematic categorization. Based on then results, geek-products’ consumption starts at childhood and goes all the way to adulthood; this process is influenced by characters in the fantasy and fiction universes. The consumed products hold symbolic elements of fantasy and fiction, so that they end up representing the extension of this tribe’s members ‘self’; moreover, they are a way of building collective identities within an urban tribe, in this case, geeks. We have shown that organizational identity studies can lead to greater dialogue with CCT in order to better understand complexities added to identity and multiple affiliations, and links in the identity construction of people forming an organization.

The paper looks at Solvent (2003), a novel by the prominent modern science fiction author Sadik Yemni, to study the predominant motifs of Turkish urban fantasy. We prove that the motifs of dual worlds, dreams and hallucinations, fall from grace, punishment, a quest-like journey, and mysteries and secret organizations are central not just to this particular novel's plot but also to the entire urban fantasy sub-genre. The latter assumption is highly relevant, because it facilitates the review of features typical of the aforementioned sub-genre in Turkish literature, which remains almost entirely unstudied by either Russian or foreign literature scholars. We also highlight the eclectic nature of urban fantasy, which incorporates the features of conspiracy novels and philosophical novels, thus reflecting the postmodern synthesis of genres and genre forms. The eclectic nature of urban fantasy allows for, on the one hand, studying it as a meta-genre, and on the other, talking about the emergence of a new type of entertainment-focused popular literature, where the fantastical situation is interlaced with existential and ontological messages. Our hypothesis is that the genesis of urban fantasy entails expanding and elaborating on the moral and psychological aspects (humankind's place in the world, faithfulness to moral guidelines).

Abstract Examines Dickens's influence on Mervyn Peake, taking in their respective writing styles, artistic convictions, thematic explorations of class, and representations of the city. Uses J.R.R.Tolkien to tease out affiliations between Peake and Dickens by way of contrast with a third figure. Suggests that Peake forged a vital link between Dickensian fiction and a new generation of urban fantasy authors.

Abstract: In this study, the author examines the literary landscape in Turkey given the new dimension opened by the vertical gradation of fiction. The division of literature into high literature (classic), middle-tier (Belles-lettres), and low-tier literature (for mass consumption) is becoming increasingly prominent. Belles-lettres seems to be the most mobile of those, with its representatives being able to, over time, find themselves both at the top and the bottom rung of this paradigm. Zülfü Livaneli's works straddle the line between the high literature and belles-lettres, while books by Barış Müstecaplıoğlu are a perfect example of mass literature becoming regarded as belles-lettres. Another productive approach is horizontal gradation – dividing modern Turkish literature into genres. This is especially true for mass literature, where a clear classification into genres and subgenres is pretty much a precondition for existence. The study singles out such genres of mass literature as detective novels, women's romance novels, and historical adventure novels. Speculative fiction occupies a special place in this, with its genre affiliation being a topic of major discussions. The Turkish literature of the 2000s features several principal genres of speculative fiction: sci-fi (K. Kutlu, G. Berkkan, H. Balçı) with alternative history being a part of such (G. Dayıoğlu, H. Kakınç); fantasy with its subgenres of urban fantasy (S. Yemni, S. Atasoy, G. Elikbank, F. O. Şeran, C. Yücel), "sword and sorcery" fantasy (B. Müstecaplıoğlu, A. Aras, G. Canbaba) and dark fantasy (S. Ersin, G. Öğüt), as well as the genre of dystopia (A. Şaşa). In conclusion, the author argues that analyzing literary pieces necessitates operating with both the vertical and horizontal paradigms simultaneously.

The article deals with the problem of interpreting the phenomenon of fantasy in modern science. Fantasy has spawned many discussions related to the definition of its sources and genre nature, the relationship with the myth-folklore tradition, the problems of classification, the specifics of extra-literary functions and many others. We consider fantasy to be one of the branches of speculative fiction, which naturally formed into an independent industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Initially having appeared as a genre, fantasy subsequently has outgrown this category. Today we can say with confidence that fantasy is a meta-genre, which has its own structure of modeling the world and unites various literary genres (novel, novelette, lyric poetry and others) and types of art (sculpture, cinema, animation, graphic arts, painting, and others) with a common subject of artistic representation.The constant dynamics of fantasy leads to the increase in the number of topics (heroic, epic, historical, magical, scientific, romantic and mystical) and, as a result, the readership as well. For example, it can be classified by age criterion (children – adult), by geographic criterion (urban – countryside), and even by gender principle (men – women fantasy). There are several approaches presenting different aspects of the phenomenon: classifications by the type of adventure or problematic-thematic principle (Ramin Shidfar or Sergey Alekseev and Mikhail Batshev). Such a diverse scientific interest in fantasy, multiple attempts to classify and systematize it, as well as going beyond the boundaries of the literary genre, testify to the ongoing process of its development.

AbstractConfronting the unfamiliar is a common theme in the fantasy fiction genre. British author Adrian Tchaikovsky underlines this theme in his ten-book series Shadows of the Apt (2008–2014) with a dichotomy of apt–inapt. This is enhanced by the insect-derived traits of the characters, which are reflected in the cities of this imagined fantasy world. Various urban architectures provide backgrounds for the protagonists as they face a foreign reality. The reader interpretation presented here focuses on the urban spaces and the architecture. The reading is structured by a division into strategies and tactics, as defined by Michel de Certeau. This provides a basis for understanding the interaction between the spaces and the spatial practices of the protagonists, as they move about in unfamiliar surroundings, confronting otherness. The architectural reading of the story opens the scalar structure used by the author and underlines the importance of the collective in the individual growth stories.

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s chapter on ‘Adaptive/Appropriate Reuse in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Having One’s Cake and Eating it Too’ argues that historical fiction writers’ persistent fascination with the long nineteenth century enacts a simultaneous drawing near to and distancing from the period, the lives of its inhabitants, and its cultural icons, aesthetic discourses, and canonical works. Always constituting at least in part as a fantasy construction of ‘the Victorian’ for present-day purposes, the process of re-imagining involves not just a quasi resurrection (of nineteenth-century historical persons, fictional characters, traumas, aesthetics, values, and ideologies) but also a relational transformation – a change in nature, a conversion into something other, namely what we want ‘the Victorian’ to signify rather than what it was. Hence adaptive practice in the neo-Victorian novel, applied both to Victorian literary precursors and the period more generally, may be better described as adaptive reuse (to borrow a term from urban planning’s approach to historic conservation) or, perhaps, appropriative reuse. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels Kohlke explores the prevalent perspectival frames and generic forms employed in neo-Victorian appropriative reuse and their divergent effects on present-day conceptions of Victorian culture.

This chapter deconstructs the narrative of Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper to examine the complexities of representing Latinx characters within the white theoretical framework of the young adult novel. The chapter examines how Older uses urban fantasy to create a distinct space which allows non-white bodies to exist authentically and to generate an empathic reader-response. Humanizing brown and black characters are underrepresented in speculative fiction, de-incentivizing non-white readers and denying white readers the opportunity to conceptualize the consciousness of unfamiliar cultures through strategic empathizing. Older’s diverse characters navigate and reclaim white spaces, utilizing space to challenge the reader to reconsider racial and spatial expectations.

Perdido Street Station is the first book of the Bas-Lag novel series, written by British writer China Miéville. It is regarded as one of the prominent examples of new weird fiction, a literary genre that utilizes aspects of fantasy, horror, science.fiction and other speculative fictional tropes. Perdido Street Station is set in a world where magic and steampunk technology coexists. The novel is critically acclaimed for its intricately worked out and richly described setting. The city of New Crobuzon, an imaginary metropolis in the world of Bas-Lag, is the center of the narrative with an immense sprawl of architectural elements. New Crobuzon also has a distinctive geography and habitation: It borrows picturesque elements of Victorian-era London and reshuffles them with steampunk esthetics in all brashness. It blends baroque, British and punk to create a unique urban landscape. This essay investigates the ways in which Perdido Street Station represents social segregation and divulges how governments enforce submission by creating monstrous architectural structures. The architectural lines that determine the boundaries of a city’s different layers and define social stratifications, are also linked to New Crobuzon’s power relations. Such depiction is a reminder of Henri Lefebvre’s notion that urban centers are favorable environments for the formation of authoritarian power, where the depicted dystopian government of New Crobuzon forecloses emancipatory aspirations through spatial control and exercises its authority with threatening urban structures.

The New Weird engages audiences in ways that are dark, terrifying, speculative and fantastic. Despite its essential hybridity – drawing from Gothic horror, science fiction and urban fantasy – the New Weird is largely Gothic in style, particularly through its bleak and terrifying atmospheres, its violence, its extravagance and its suspicion of predominant social and cultural institutions. Further, the New Weird pushes the boundaries of sanity by suggesting that common-sense notions of reality are unstable, that human beings are not the centre of everything and that human cosmology is fatally flawed. To address these themes, my discussion largely turns to a handful of representative texts, including City of Saints and Madmen(2001), by Jeff VanderMeer;Threshold(2001), by Caitlín Kiernan;Perdido Street Station (2000), by China Miéville; and The Etched City(2003), by K. J. Bishop.

Los megadesarrollos turísticos de sol y playa han sido impulsados por el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) como proyectos de estrategia de desarrollo turístico, en México nacen los Centros Integralmente Planeados (CIP´s) para dar orden urbano, descentralizando grandes inversiones turísticas principalmente de origen extranjeros. Son identificados ante la promoción turística por la inversión de insumos y tecnología. Los emplazamientos turísticos de sol y playa han crecido y destinan espacios para el hospedaje turístico temporal y permanente. Este tipo de emplazamientos destacan por ser representaciones de exclusividad, privacidad y seguridad, manifestando enclavamiento en la serie de conjuntos turísticos construidos para integrar el megadesarrollo turístico, demarcando un acceso que indica el inicio del montaje realidad-ficción, conformando el montaje de ficción, que llevan a construir una realidad a partir del imaginario. Lo sucedido fuera del montaje será considerado como realidad, al establecerse una serie de compaginaciones que fabricarán la nueva realidad, la realidad-ficción, entre representaciones de fantasía visuales, de sonidos y sobretodo de ideas por transmitir, como es lo motivante que resultan para los turistas las guías turísticas. Las representaciones son basadas en imágenes de paisajes, personas, ciudades, entre otros emblemas simbólicos. Cada espacio por destacar será retomado para enfocar el montaje en dibujos, pinturas, danzas, arquitectura, entre otras dinámicas de conquista turística, igual sucede con la reproducción de sonidos relacionados con la exclusividad, privacidad y seguridad para el turista al interior del conjunto. Toda construcción de la realidad se realiza en un espacio y un tiempo definido a partir del imaginario, ya que existe el objetivo de cautivar al visitante, dentro de una serie de montajes continuos donde será eliminada la línea de corte entre montajes, convirtiendo la ficción en realidad para el turista, el montaje correcto y el escenario indicado, señalan el orden constante de los montajes. Del trozo de imágenes fabricadas y rescatadas del ambiente natural o real, se conformara una relación argumental a través de la compaginación con la secuencia adecuada de cada una de las escenas plasmadas por el imaginario, unir y encauzar los montajes para el cumplimiento de la representación en un filme. De los ejemplos más destacados son las creaciones a partir del imaginario en los Emiratos Árabes Unidos, representados en los hoteles como torre hilton baynunah, jumeirah Beach burj al-arab, hotel w, hotel apearon island y hotel eta, los cuales exponen servicios como compras de lujo, centros spa con instalaciones exclusivas para el deporte y el tiempo libre, habitaciones equipadas, climatizadas y con lo último de la tecnología. Se distinguen los colores y las formas por resaltar ante la cultura árabe, pero es importante señalar que cada uno de esos megadesarrollos turísticos marcará su filme con esta serie de montajes, que permitirán compaginar la serie de trozos de imágenes fabricadas ante la fantasía imaginada. Los megadesarrollos turísticos se distinguen por crear escenarios turísticos a partir del imaginario, destacando el enclavamiento a través de la búsqueda del concepto de seguridad, con un marcado interés para conformar comunidades nuevas, asimismo elementos como los acceso se encuentran custodiados por personal de seguridad que indicara la bienvenida al turista, sin conocer que será guiado y vigilado por cámaras de video ocultas en la masa de la edificación, también se distinguen elementos de seguridad para la movilidad y accesibilidad al conjunto, destacando vía aérea, naval ó terrestre, el recorrido al interior marcándose bajo un escalonamiento de cota descendente a nivel de playa, mostrara cada uno de los escenarios turísticos montados para indicar el recorrido al turista al interior del conjunto turístico. The sun and beach tourist megadevelopments have been stimulated by the Inter-American Bank of Development (BID) as projects of strategy of tourist development, in Mexico there are born the Integrally planned Centers (CIP's) to give urban order, decentralizing big tourist investments principally of origin foreigners. They are identified before the tourist promotion by the investment of inputs and technology. The emplacements have grown and destine spaces for the tourist temporary and permanent. This type stand out for being representations of exclusivity, privacy and safety, demonstrating interlock in the series of tourist sets constructed to integrate the tourist megadevelopment, limiting an access that indicates the beginning of the montage reality - fiction, shaping the montage of fiction, that they lead to constructing a reality from the imaginary one. The happened out of the montage will be considered to be a reality, on there having be established a series of page lay-outs that will make the new reality, the reality - fiction, between visual representations of fantasy, of sounds and overcoat of ideas for transmitting, since motivation is that the tourist guides prove for the tourists. The representations are based on images of landscapes, persons, cities and symbolic emblems. Chaque espace pour se faire remarquer sera repris pour mettre au point le montage dans des dessins, des peintures, des danses, une architecture, entre d'autres dynamiques de conquête touristique, égale il succède avec la reproduction de sons relatifs à l'exclusivité, confidentialité et sécurité pour le touriste à l'intérieur de l'ensemble. Toute construction de la réalité est réalisée dans un espace et le temps défini à partir de l'imaginaire, puisqu'il existe l'objectif de captiver le visiteur, à l'intérieur d'une série de montages continuels où la ligne de coupure sera éliminée entre des montages, en changeant la fiction en réalité pour le touriste, le montage correct et la scène indiquée, ils marquent l'ordre constant des montages. Of the chunk of images made and rescued of the natural or real environment, a plot relation was conforming across the page lay-out to the suitable sequence of each one of the scenes formed by the imaginary one, to join and to channel the montages for the fulfillment of the representation in a movie. Of the most out-standing examples they are the creations from the imaginary one in the United Arab Emirates represented in the hotels as tower hilton baynunah, jumeirah Beach burj al-arab, hotel w, hotel apearon island y hotel eta, which expose services as purchases of luxury, centers spa with exclusive facilities for the sport and the free time, equipped rooms with the last technology. The colors and the forms are distinguished for standing out before the Arabic culture, but it is important to indicate that each of these megadevelopments will mark with this series of montages, which will allow to arrange the series of chunks of images made before the imagined fantasy. The megadevelopments differ for creating tourist scenes from the imaginary one, emphasizing the interlock across the search of the safety concept, with a marked interest to shape new communities, likewise elements like them I access they are guarded by safety personnel that was indicating the welcome to the tourist, Without knowing that it will be guided and monitored by secret video cameras in the mass of the building, also safety elements are distinguished for the mobility and accessibility to the set, emphasizing airway, navally ó terrestrial, the tour to the interior being marked under an stairs of descending level to beach level, there was showing each of the tourist scenes mounted to indicate the tour to the tourist to the interior of the set.