Call for papers
Fastitocalon volume III (2012)
Published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT)
http://fastitocalon.kolbitar.de


Humour and the Fantastic

Humour has been a recognisable part of literature ever since antiquity. The ‘Homeric laughter’ has become proverbial and Lucian dazzled the readers of his Vera Historia with a firework of comic (and absurd) ideas. Nevertheless, the co-existence or even symbiosis of humorous and fantastic elements is the exception rather than the rule. Lucian’s work points the way for most of the later instances, and we find elements of the fantastic and the humorous co-existing most often in texts that show a self-reflexive genre awareness; in consequence the ‘funny’ fantastic results from parodistic exaggeration of certain traits.
Non-parodistic fantastic literature is, at least in the Western tradition, mostly free of humour. A cursory glance at the ‘canon’ of the fantastic affirms this impression, though we can also note attempts at combining the Gothic with the humorous, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost (1887), or the absurd (as another category of the humorous) with the fantastic, as in Nicolai Gogol’s The Nose (1835), or the fantastique with the French humour tinged with bitter irony, as in Honoré de Balzac’s L'Élixir de longue vie (1846) or Gérard de Nerval’s Le Monstre vert (1852). It is only at the end of the 20th century that the subcategory of ‘the humorous fantasy’ makes an appearance, most notably in the works of Terry Pratchett and his highly successful parodies of the genre.


Fastitocalon is pleased to solicit proposals for papers for its third volume, which explore the relationship between Humour and the Fantastic. Contributions may focus on individual works or protagonists, discuss the historical development and transformations, or explore the literary-theoretical aspects connected with these aspects. Even though the language of publication is English, we would like to encourage the contributors to include works in other languages in their discussion of the phenomenon.


Deadline for abstracts (issue 1): 30 November 2011
Deadline for full papers (issue 1): 29 February 2012

Deadline for abstracts (issue 2): 31 January 2012
Deadline for full papers (issue 2): 30 June 2012


Fastitocalon is a peer-reviewed journal. Abstracts and/or full papers submitted will be reviewed by the editors and members of the board of advisors.


Abstracts (c. 600 words or 3,000 characters) or full papers (up to c. 8,000 words or 40,000 characters), together with a brief biographical sketch, are to be sent to either of the following addresses:


Prof. Dr. Fanfan Chen
Email: ffchen@mail.ndhu.edu.tw / chenfantasticism@gmail.com
Postal mail: Dept. of English & Doctoral Program of Comparative Literature
National Dong Hwa University
97401 Shoufeng, Hualien County
Taiwan


Prof. Dr. Thomas Honegger
Email: Tm.honegger@uni-jena.de
Postal mail: Institut für Anglistik & Amerikanistik
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Ernst-Abbe-Platz 8
D-07743 Jena
Germany