The Centre
for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for
Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2022 with the theme of
'Fantasy Across Media'.
Much of
fantasy studies has focused on the genre’s presence in literature, with
histories and theoretical frameworks often either implicitly or explicitly
centring the written word. In some cases, academic, critic, and fan responses
to the genre outside of literature even go so far as to erase or question the
possibility of the genre’s existence in other media, perhaps most famously
embodied in J.R.R. Tolkien’s insistence in ‘On Fairy-stories' that some media,
such as drama, are fundamentally incompatible with fantasy. These types of
responses fail to account for the medium-specific benefits and challenges that
different media pose for depictions of the impossible, serving to establish
hierarchies between media, exclude non-literary media from analyses of the
genre, and potentially limit a full understanding of the genre’s history.
Fantasy and
the fantastic have had long, rich histories outside of literature, playing a
central role in the development of theatre, film, and comic books, and
celebrating a more recent boom on the small screen. Furthermore, from the
innumerable reimaginings of the Arthurian tradition, to The Wizard of Oz, to
manga and anime, to contemporary multimedia franchises and cinematic universes,
fantasy texts have been integral to the history of transmedia storytelling,
allowing their rich storyworlds to expand across multiple media.