We are enslaved to the past. So when is it best to forget it?
Tag: Essays
Part I: A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint’s Moonheart
The following is the first part of a presentation I gave for this year's MA colloquium. I have included the accompanying PowerPoint file as well. Historicizing Moonheart Presentation A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint's Moonheart “Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is …
The Alchemist’s Quest
To create the animated stone, take the juice of a Saturnine herb to extract mercury and evaporate it to get the purest earth. Join this with its like in equal weight and dissolve both with a crude metallic humor. Putrify for forty days. You may also calcine the earth with fire alone, join it with …
Unreliable Narrators and Historical Fantasy
Unreliable narrators have a way of turning up in the most recent short stories I have drafted, so, in the interest of attaching this idea to historical fantasy, here is my blog post of this week: In my Honours thesis, I drew attention to the conflict posed by fusing the historical novel with the fantasy …
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History as Fantasy: My Honours Thesis on Guy Gavriel Kay Summarized
The Build-Up to my Honours Thesis I was in my second year at McGill University, struggling to find a mentor for my Honours thesis in English literature. I'm in an advanced program, and I needed it to graduate and to develop my own critical voice. Oh, the ambition! My mission was to write on fantasy …
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Matthew Rettino 