Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        Terry Gilliam

        by Peter Marks

        Terry Gilliam presents a sustained examination of one of cinema's most challenging and lauded auteurs, proposing fresh ways of seeing Gilliam that go beyond reductive readings of him as a gifted but manic fantasist. Analysing Gilliam's work over nearly four decades, from the brilliant anarchy of his Monty Python animations through the nightmarish masterpiece Brazil to the provocative Gothic horror of Tideland, it critically examines the variety and richness of Gilliam's sometimes troubled but always provocative output. The book situates Gilliam within the competing cultural contexts of the British, European and American film industries, examining his regular struggles against aesthetic and commercial pressures. He emerges as a passionate, immensely creative director, whose work encompasses a dizzying array of material: anarchic satire, childhood and adult fantasy, dystopia, romantic comedy, surrealism, road movie, fairy tale and the Gothic. The book charts how Gilliam interweaves these genres and forms to create magical interfaces between reality and the illuminating, frightening but liberating worlds of the imagination. Scrutinising the neglected importance of literature and adaptation in Gilliam's career, this study also observes him through the lenses of auteurism, genre, performance, design and national culture, explaining how someone born in Minnesota and raised in California came to be one of British television and film's most compelling figures.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2006

        Socio-ideological fantasy and the Northern Ireland conflict

        The Other side

        by Adrian Millar, Peter Lawler, Emmanuel Pierre Guittet

        Conducting a Lacanian-inspired psychoanalysis of some of the most candid interview materials ever gathered from former IRA members and loyalists, the author demonstrates through a careful examination of their slips of the tongue, jokes, rationalisations and contradictions, that it is the unconscious dynamics of socio-ideological fantasy, i.e. the unconscious pleasure people find in suffering, domination, submission, ignorance, failure and rivalry over jouissance, that lead to the reproduction of antagonism between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. In the light of this, he concludes that traditional approaches to conflict resolution which overlook the unconscious are doomed to failure and that a Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding of socio-ideological fantasy has great potential for informing the way we understand and study all inter-religious and ethnic conflicts. Whether you find yourself agreeing with the arguments in this book or not, you are sure to find it a welcome change from both the existing, mainly conservative, analyses of the Northern Ireland conflict and traditional approaches to conflict resolution.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2023

        The illusion of the Burgundian state

        by Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, Christopher Fletcher

        On 25 January 1474, Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, appeared before his subjects in Dijon. Robed in silk, gold and precious jewels and wearing a headpiece that gave the illusion of a crown, he made a speech in which he cryptically expressed his desire to become a king. Three years later, Charles was killed at the battle of Nancy, an event that plunged the Great Principality of Burgundy into chaos. This book, innovative and essential, not only explores Burgundian history and historiography but offers a complete synthesis about the nature of politics in this region, considered both from the north and the south. Focusing on political ideologies, a number of important issues are raised relating to the medieval state, the signification of the nation under the 'Ancien Regime', the role of warfare in the creation of political power and the impact of political loyalties in the exercise of government. In doing so, the book challenges a number of existing ideas about the Burgundian state.

      • Trusted Partner

        The Emerald Land

        by Yuan Ye

        This book is a fantasy novel which written by Yuanye, who places his gaze on the prairie where his life came from, gazing at the unique experience of exploring nature by Mongolian children. Through the perspectives of teenager Baiyin, Suolong and Uncle Tonglaga, their fantastic adventures show the beauty of the prairie's animals, plants, and folklore. This is a fantasy world in the depths of the prairie, which reads fantastically and purely. The naivete of children, the simplicity of herders, the reverence of nature, the exploration of the unknown world, and the cherishing of culture grow in this prairie, where there are adventures and growth, pure laughter and tears, making people yearn for childhood.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2024

        A book of monsters

        Promethean horror in modern literature and culture

        by David Ashford

        This books traces the rise to prominence in the twentieth-century of a sub-genre of gothic fiction that is, emphatically, a horror of enlightenment rationality rather than gothic darkness, examining post-modern revisions of Modernist "Promethean" tropes in an eclectic range of gothic, fantasy and SF writing. Whether the subject be terror of London's churches in the psychogeographical fiction of Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, the Orcs in the linguistic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, King Kong, killer-computers, or demon-children in post-war British science-fiction, A Book of Monsters offers illuminating perspectives on the darker recesses of the post-modern imagination, setting out a compelling, and comprehensive, overview on our contemporary unconscious.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA
        2020

        The After-Time Chronicles

        One Small Spark

        by Andy Woodage

        In the footsteps of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series comes Andy Woodage's debut novel and our entrance into his bio-engineered fantasy world. The After-Time Chronicles: One Small Spark is a young-adult fantasy novel of good, evil, genetically engineered creatures, romance, blood, and the search for belonging. Imagine a world without oil, where metals are only available if they can be salvaged or recycled. Imagine if coal was running out. It’s a world where armies no longer build metal monsters, but biological horrors. A world where genetic engineering has become the art of war. This is 12-year-old Jothan’s world. Orphaned by a terrible accident, he dreams of leaving his uneventful life with his grandparents on the family’s griffin farm. However, when a catastrophic attack wipes out every homestead in The Zoological Zone, his world is turned upside down. He finds himself thrust into a story larger than he ever dreamed, embarking on a rough journey with a mysteriously appearing warrior to the fabled ‘Temple of Elohim’. Accompanied by his best friend, the griffin Gozell, Jothan sets off across a land ravaged by poverty and wild creatures. Battling his way across the dangerous landscape, his eyes are opened to an empire in the grip of war and unrest... with the ever increasing weight of his role in events to come. Will they make it to the Temple? Will they be welcomed when they arrive? Can Jothan unravel the secrets that seem to control the lives of everyone he meets, including his mysterious saviour?

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2001

        The New Inn

        By Ben Jonson

        by Michael Hattaway

        The New Inn is one of the most neglected of Jonson's plays which is now finding a new and appreciative audience. May be read, according to this Editor's introduction, as a tribute to Shakespeare, and as a belated recognition that the fantasies of romance contain profound truths. The spelling has been modernised and the text updated and corrected for this paperback edition. There is also a critical introduction, helpful appendices and a commentary which explains difficult or significant passages within the play. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        August 2016

        L.O.R.D (Legend of Ravaging Dynasties) 1: Fog and Snow

        by Guo Jingming

        Sold over 1,700,000 copies!The four nations -- Water, Wind, Earth and Fire jointly build up a fantasy world -- Odin Continent. In this world dominated by mysterious sorcery, the Top 7 sorcerers are known as ""Lords"", who represent the peak of the whole nation's strength. In Aslan Empire, a water source in the west of the continent, sorcerers display their powers by manipulating and controlling water elements such as ice, frost, rain and snow. The story starts from Qi Ling, a young civilian in Fortune Town in the south of Aslan, who is involuntarily involved in a fight among sorcerers. When he comes to himself after injury, he, who has never been in contact with the sorcery world, is told that he has become a disciple of the 7th Lord --- a successor to the lord. What's more, in his body there appears a formidable, ferocious soul beast... The door to the new world opens slowly, and the dazzling sorcery fight, which existed only in people's imagination before, unfolds before the eyes of Qi Ling, like a magnificent picture impregnated by blood and glory...

      • Trusted Partner
        Fiction

        The Messenger

        by Liu Liangcheng

        “A novelist is also a message deliverer, for writing is the art of delivering a message.”—Liu Liangcheng   Set in Pisha and Heile, two warring countries in the west without any official communication, this excellent fantastic fable centers on a story between Ku, a messenger and famous translator fluent in several languages and a donkey named Xie, which is said to be a message itself. Ku was asked to deliver the donkey Xie to his hostile country thousands of miles away, thus the two of them embarked on the journey. Together, they crossed battlefields and deserts, witnessing incredible happenings in life and death.Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, The Message Deliverer is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of war, love, faith and power. Liu Liangcheng tiptoes the harmony between human and nature in this weird and wild novella, sticking to his writing concept of “everything has a spirit.”

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA
        December 2018

        The Tree Boy

        by Srididhya Venkat and Nayantara Surendranath

        Sid is a lonely boy who detests idle, lonely trees. He has good reasons though. At least he likes to think so. He does not notice the friendship between the dangling leaves, dancing to the song of the wind. He ignores countless birds returning to the safety of their comfy homes, nestled in the soft spots of rough branches, after a long day of collecting worms. So when he is called a brainless tree for missing a save in soccer at school, it is easy for him to decide he never wants to be a tree, until one morning he wakes up to have transformed into one. Srividhya Venkat spins a delectable fantasy around thinking twice about what you wish for, or not and depicts the transformation of Sid’s lonely life after he embraces the excitable voices of kids twisted in his vines and the ecosystem hovering above him. Nayantara Surendranath’s eccentric combination of art collage and digital creation expresses the refreshing quirks that breathe life into the tale.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2018

        Clive Barker

        Dark imaginer

        by Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

        Clive Barker: Dark imaginer explores the diverse literary, film and visionary creations of the polymathic and influential British artist Clive Barker. In this necessary and timely collection, innovative essays by leading scholars in the fields of literature, film and popular culture explore Barker's contribution to gothic, fantasy and horror studies, interrogating his creative legacy. The volume consists of an extensive introduction and twelve groundbreaking essays that critically reevaluate Barker's oeuvre. These include in-depth analyses of his celebrated and lesser known novels, short stories, theme park designs, screen and comic book adaptations, film direction and production, sketches and book illustrations, as well as responses to his material from critics and fan communities. Clive Barker: Dark imaginer reveals the breadth and depth of Barker's distinctive dark vision, which continues to fascinate and flourish.

      • Trusted Partner
        Picture storybooks
        January 2016

        Kaaljayi Kambakth (The Time-Conqueror Wretch)

        Diary of a Time-keeper

        by Amit Dutta

        Sham is a precocious schoolboy who dreams about making sense of the world he inhabits. Shaman, his friend and alter-ego prods him along. They walk together exploring the gullies and outskirts of their suburban hill village. They passionately glean whatever information is available to them through books or people. They make patterns out of this information and scheme to gain control over their reality. The villagers become characters in their scheme and start revealing the cracks in their reality. As fragments of science, philosophy, fairy-tales, folk-legends and history start seeping into their everyday existence, Sham and Shan find themselves deep in an unmanageable world of their own fantasies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2023

        The fall and rise of the English upper class

        Houses, kinship and capital since 1945

        by Daniel R. Smith

        The fall and rise of the English upper class explores the role traditionalist worldviews, articulated by members of the historic upper-class, have played in British society in the shadow of her imperial and economic decline in the twentieth century. Situating these traditionalist visions alongside Britain's post-Brexit fantasies of global economic resurgence and a socio-cultural return to a green and pleasant land, Smith examines Britain's Establishment institutions, the estates of her landed gentry and aristocracy, through to an appetite for nostalgic products represented with pastoral or pre-modern symbolism. It is demonstrated that these institutions and pursuits play a central role in situating social, cultural and political belonging. Crucially these institutions and pursuits rely upon a form of membership which is grounded in a kinship idiom centred upon inheritance and descent: who inherits the houses of privilege, inherits England.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA
        2014

        Felt art of Kazakhs

        by Shaizada Tokhtabayeva

        This book is dedicated to the promotion of the leading branch of Kazakh nation’s arts and crafts: the art of feltmaking. The album illustrates the total diversity of the most representative and typical felt items from the fund of the State Museum of Arts named after A. Kasteev. It also demonstrates felt pieces of work by modern professional applied artists. And these pieces reflect the heritage of the ethnic traditions combined with their authors’ fantasies. This book in the popular-scientific form presents the results of its author’s many-years research alongside with such analyses of felt works as cultural-and-genetic, structural-and-morphological, art-and-technical, semiotic, and historically comparative ones. In these analyses information from the theoretical data of archeology, source studies, ethnography, folklore studies, history of art, and semiotics was used. This book-album will become of an interest not only to specialists in the humanitarian area, but for everyone who is fascinated with the artistic heritage of the Kazakh nation.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        March 2005

        French cinema in the 1970s

        The echoes of May

        by Alison Smith

        This book re-examines French cinema of the 1970s. It focuses on the debates which shook French cinema, and the calls for film-makers to rethink their manner of filming, subject matter and ideals in the immediate aftermath of the student revolution of May 1968. Alison Smith examines the effect of this re-thinking across the spectrum of French production, the rise of new genres and re-formulation of older ones. Chapters investigate political thrillers, historical films, new naturalism and Utopian fantasies, dealing with a wide variety of films. A particular concern is the extent to which film-makers' ideas and intentions are contained in or contradicted by their finished work, and the gradual change in these ideas over the decade. The final chapter is a detailed study of two directors who were deeply involved in the debates and events of the 70s, William Klein and Alain Tanner, here taken as exemplary spokesmen for those changing debates as their echoes reached the cinema. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        French cinema in the 1970s

        The echoes of May

        by Alison Smith

        This book re-examines French cinema of the 1970s. It focuses on the debates which shook French cinema, and the calls for film-makers to rethink their manner of filming, subject matter and ideals in the immediate aftermath of the student revolution of May 1968. Alison Smith examines the effect of this re-thinking across the spectrum of French production, the rise of new genres and re-formulation of older ones. Chapters investigate political thrillers, historical films, new naturalism and Utopian fantasies, dealing with a wide variety of films. A particular concern is the extent to which film-makers' ideas and intentions are contained in or contradicted by their finished work, and the gradual change in these ideas over the decade. The final chapter is a detailed study of two directors who were deeply involved in the debates and events of the 70s, William Klein and Alain Tanner, here taken as exemplary spokesmen for those changing debates as their echoes reached the cinema.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2008

        States of suspense

        The nuclear age, postmodernism and United States fiction and prose

        by Daniel Cordle

        When the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, it precipitated a nuclear age that shaped the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. States of suspense is about the representation of this nuclear age in United States literature from 1945-2005. The profound psychological and cultural impact of living in anticipation of the Bomb is apparent not only in end-of-the-world fantasies, but also in mainstream and postmodern literature. This book traces the ways in which key motifs - the fragility of reality; the fear of closure; the inadequacies of language to represent the world - move between nuclear and postmodern cultures of the Cold War era. Taking three symbolically threatened environments - the home, the city, the planet - the book explores their recasting as 'nuclear places' in literature, and shows how these nuclear concerns resonate with those of other cultures. States of suspense will be of interest to students and scholars of American literature, and postmodern and technological culture. It will also be interest to those more generally intrigued by the cultural fallout of the nuclear age. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA

        Wild. They Hear You Thinking

        by Ella Blix

        They hear you thinking. But you can’t understand them. Not yet! After a terrifying experience on a school trip to the forest, Noomi isn’t the same anymore. Fragments of memories that are as thrilling as they are disturbing continually lead her back to this same day in the forest. Something has happened to her since then and she has to find out what went on there. Why can’t she remember? Why does she now feel so close to animals? One secret experiment. Four young offenders. Animals acting like humans in the forest. Evolution at a turning point - FEEL NATURE! Atmospheric, enigmatic and disturbing – the new novel from the prize-winning author duo Ella Blix, consisting of Antje Wagner and Tania Witte. 2019 literary awards: the Mannheim Feuergriffel (Fire Pen) for Tania Witte and the town of Wetzlar’s Fantasy Prize. Printed on recycled paper and certified with the Blue Angel.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter