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178 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
1996), p. 60. It is also reflected in a predisposition among postmodernist
critics (such as contributors to the collections of essays drawn from the
International Conferences on the Fantastic in the Arts) to ignore popular
genre fantasy in favour of texts and theoretical perspectives expressive of
the ‘subversive’ strategies of the (literary) fantastic.
19. For a discussion of these trends in fantasy see Lisa M. Heilbronn, ‘Natural
Man, Unnatural Science: Rejection of Science in Recent Science Fiction
and Fantasy Film’, in Michele K. Langford (ed.), Contours of the Fantastic:
Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic
in the Arts (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 113–19.
20. See Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing
from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1995); Jennifer Wicke, ‘Fin de Siècle and the Technological Sublime’, in
Robert Newman (ed.), Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means (Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 302–15; Robert Burns Neveldine,
Bodies at Risk: Unsafe Limits in Romanticism and Postmodernism (New
York: State University of New York Press, 1998); Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism:
Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real
(Cambridge MA:and London: MIT Press, 1999).
21. See Irwin, The Game of the Impossible, pp. 8–9, and Rabkin, The Fantastic
in Literature, p. 41, for definitions of ‘the fantastic’ as an element that
disrupts ‘reality’. See Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of
Subversion (New York, Methuen, 1981) for a discussion of the fantastic as a
mode; William Coyle also conceptualized it as a mode in his introduction
to W. Coyle (ed.), Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second
International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film (Westport
CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 2. Tzvetan Todorov’s study The Fantastic:
A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973) was influential in popularizing
the term; see Allienne R. Becker, ‘Introduction’ in A.R. Becker (ed.),
Visions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fifteenth International
Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (Westport CT: Greenwood Press,
1996), pp. xi–xiii, for an overview of the French tradition of inquiry into
‘the fantastic’ which influenced Todorov.
22. Helen Merrick, ‘Feminist/Science/Fictions: A Case Study of Feminist
Cultural Production in Critical and Popular Communities’, Ph.D. Thesis,
University of Western Australia, 1998, p. 92.
23. Jackson, Fantasy, p. 10. Also see Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic, p. 3.
24. Jackson, Fantasy, p. 179. This effect is compounded by her study’s orientation
as a contribution to the critical tradition established by Todorov, whose
characterization of ‘the fantastic’ also evinced a considerable degree of
overlap with Gothic; he wrote, for example, that ‘the fantastic produces
a particular effect on the reader — fear, or horror, or simply curiosity