Addressing the world of the imaginary, the dream, the uncanny, the paranormal, and all forms of speculative fiction, "Contours of the Fantastic" is a collection of twenty-two essays that were originally presented as the Eighth International Conference of the Fantastic in the arts at Houston in 1987. The volume gives perspectives on the territory covered by the fantastic, showing the diversity of the field and the variety of approaches used to survey and comprehend it. Each essay brings its own method of investigation - phenomenological, theoretical, historical, sociological, psychological, textual - in an effort to situate the border between reality and fantasy and the passage from one to the other. Authors and works discussed in the volume include Balzac, Dickens, Poe, Aldous Huxley, C.S.Lewis, Tolkien, Muriel Spark, Mary Shelly, Albee's "Zoo Story", Pynchon, Coleridge's "Christabel", Le Fanu's "Carmilla", and Stephen Donaldson's "Thomas Covenant" triologies.
Individual essays within these major divisions discuss specific works of fantasy, offer a psychology of fantasy writers; analyze language; assess fantasy from a national perspective, and investigate Christian horror in fiction. The final two sections delineate the borderline between fantasy and reality - in science and in relation to space and time. Among the contributors are Brian Aldiss, novelist, poet and critic, author of more than two dozen books, Vivian Sobchack, science fiction film critic and writer on semiotics and phenomenology, and Nancy Willard, author of novels, collected stories, poetry and children's books.