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This chapter explores contemporary representations of death in American popular culture, and elaborates on their meaning for today's youth. Death appeals to the young for several reasons. The heroes of television shows and movies present a way to negotiate the finality of death. Such characters can be interpreted as modern versions of the psychopomp. Current representations of death, particularly those that target youth, avoid a traditional interpretation of death characterized as final. Instead, death in popular culture is an extension of life—one where good and evil are more clearly defined, and where the fantastic lives. Although the apparent whimsical aspects of these representations seem to indicate that today's youth are denying death, the experiences of the classes the author of this chapter has taught suggests otherwise. The students in those classes maintained a healthy “suspension of belief” while consuming these images. These representations allow students to reflect upon death without the emotional involvement associated with more realistic portrayals of death.

This chapter argues that the phenomenon of confabulation can be seen in schizophrenia. It is clear that it is very uncommon in a spontaneous form, and when it does occur it always seems to take the form of so-called fantastic confabulation. With the possible exception of general paralysis of the insane, this schizophrenic form of confabulation appears to go considerably beyond even the most adventurous and illogical forms of spontaneous confabulation encountered in neurological disease.

The scientific discoveries of the Victorian era enlarged the scope of fantastic fiction. Wells extrapolates from evolutionary theory, geology, temporal physics, and optics to imagine alternate forms of cultural production. Wells’s use of the fantastic does not constitute escapism, however. The irruption of the fantastic into an otherwise realistically narrated fictional world is a reminder that the indefinite passing of history will repeatedly threaten or displace humanity’s misplaced faith in its imagined superior position in the hierarchy of nature. Darwin’s formulation of the theory of evolution, and Wells’s imagining of fictional possibilities, constitute both an opportunity and a warning for humankind: Wells repeatedly insists on the impermanence of the status quo. This chapter also notes the frequency of images of reading and writing in Wells’s fiction: numerous texts include images of defaced or ineffective books and other artworks.

This concluding chapter extends the book's readings of aurality and visuality over a wide-range of late 20th-century African American cultural production including works by hip hop artists Common and OutKast, political figure Malcolm X, artist Robert Colescott, and musicians Parliament/Funkadelic. Intimating the applicability of the book's critical currency of “the remix,” the chapter illustrates the continued salience of art to political discourse.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about the gothic and fantastic writing of Scottish women. The book proposes an earlier date for the fantastic revival and begins its investigation in 1978, the publication date of Emma Tennant's The Bad Sister. It pioneers in-depth investigation of largely neglected contemporary texts including Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box and Ali Smith's Hotel World, and offers new readings of A. L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad and Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

This chapter maps a journey into the history and nature of Salvador Dalí’s involvement with science fiction and ‘futurism’ (the pseudo-science, not the avant-garde movement). It proposes that Dalí used these as a locus for engaging with, and critiquing, mass culture, as well as encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to art, SF and popular culture. Beginning with Dalí’s introduction to America’s fascination with things futuristic and the so-called Atomic and Space Ages, this exploration traces his most notable pseudo-scientific activities and fictive projects throughout his later career, and positions Dali as an agent for mobilizing cultural satire and broadening the boundaries of then-contemporary art. The period in question begins in the late 1930s, when he left the Surrealist movement, and culminates in what was perhaps his most satirical and revealing project in this vein, as well as the least known and most poorly documented; that is, his flamboyant promotional program for the 1966 Twentieth Century Fox SF film Fantastic Voyage, recorded by New York documentarians David and Albert Maysles.

This chapter focuses on the final Zen climax and its psychic inferences. In the aftermath of the Battle of the Haunted Mansion, the film moves on to its fantastic-marvelous phase. The final section of the film goes on to show Yang Huizhen's fulfillment of her other mission — to continue the Gu family line by giving birth to Gu's baby before she can finally withdraw from the world to achieve transcendence. However, just before the film reaches its Zen finale, she is recalled into action in the final climactic battle scenes, suggesting that her xia nü role, pre-given her by the cosmic spider, is unfinished. The Zen subject is an artistic paradox that befits the Jungian idea of wholeness. The film is a carefully designed work of art. It is a sentient art object that comes from the singular mind of King Hu.

This chapter explores Franz Kafka, who has been universally considered as a staple of absurdism. It observes that there are a number of absurdists, proto-absurdists and supposed absurdists who seem to have been at the head of the anticipation, promotion and reinvigoration of the spirit of Kafka. The chapter then studies Kafka's relations with, and influence on, other writers, ending with a section on the concept of ‘bureaucratic fantastic’, as personified in Kafka's works. It notes that Kafka was an exponent not only of stories and novels, but also of fragments, diaries, aphorisms and letters.

This chapter analyses the issues of quests and other worlds in the contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women, explaining that magical journeys to other worlds embody the metaphor of border crossing and the overcoming of familiar thresholds to explore the ‘other’. It describes the deconstructive function the journey and the other world perform in relation to stable notions of identity and ontology. The chapter examines the complex trajectories traced by the most eminently fantastic texts of Margaret Elphinstone's The Incomer and Alison Fell's The Mistress of Lilliput.

This chapter focuses on the topic of witches in contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women. It analyses Ellen Galford's Queendom Come, Alice Thompson's Pandora's Box and Ali Smith's The Accidental. The chapter suggests that the witch in these works is a simultaneous embodiment of female marginalisation and feminist subversion, and that the dangerous woman characters challenge binary oppositions between gender and the established hierarchical order.

This chapter explores the double motif, a thematic area deployed to express the self/other dichotomy and the interrogation of binary oppositions in the fantastic writings of Scottish women. It offers an interpretation of Alison Fell's The Bad Box, Emma Tennant's The Bad Sister and Sian Hayton's The Governors. The chapter argues that doppelgänger in these works prompted the interrogation of gender categories while exposing the schizoid divisions within the female psyche.

This chapter considers the revenant motif in fantastic writings of Scottish women. It explains that this motif serves as the paradoxical site of theoretical discourses about corporeality and ethereality, life and death, and seen and unseen. The chapter offers an interpretation of Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia, A.L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad and Ali Smith's Hotel World, suggesting that the ghost in twentieth-century writings signifies the overcoming of structuralist dualism.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the contemporary fantastic writings of Scottish women. The findings reveal the fragility of rigid parameters of thinking and highlight the possible shift to the right in politics across Europe. The analysis of the notions of three kinds of otherness explored in the book also raised further questions about the future of the ‘others’ and the aftermath of postmodernism in a post-feminist, globalised twenty-first century.

This chapter reflects on Rodia's Watts Towers, described as embodying “a philosophy of freedom, an image of human labor, and the everlasting creative tension—a true performance—toward realization.” Rodia courageously joins the Opus Incertum, assembling it into a new iconology, recycling and upcycling broken parts into meaningful fragments, fractal geometries, and kaleidoscopic aesthetics, where symmetry and rhythm predominate. For Rodia, his Towers have several meanings, including a celebration of California highways (66, 99, 101, the height of the three Towers); a complicated and flamboyant sundial system, casting its shadows in triplicate Stylus, or Gnomon; or a ship of fools or even an ark.

At the height of his career, Banks abandoned the Culture for two very different science fiction novels. Against a Dark Background presented an extreme capitalism that was a deliberate contrast to the communist character of the Culture; while Feersum Endjinn presented a structurally complex and linguistically dense account of a world in collapse. Civil war as a political manifestation of Laing’s divided self would also inform subsequent works of the Scottish fantastic, notably Whit and A Song of Stone. His return to the Culture with Excession and its companion Look to Windward were, it is proposed, intended to end the sequence by addressing the Sublime as a form of the death of civilization.

This chapter analyzes Verdi's Giovanna d'Arco, first performed in February 1845 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. It presents a summary of the libretto by Solera, which was taken from the miraculous tale of the shepherdess of Domrémy. The significant difference between the fantastic and the supernatural is also explained, for the benefit of writers interested in these genres. Both careful study of the score and the public's reception of the opera show that it was inferior to the four that preceded it.