Department of English and German Philology

Rosemary Jackson (1981) has defined fantasy fiction as corresponding to the first stage in Freud's evolutionary model, the magical animistic stage during which primitive man and the child alike have no sense of difference between" self" and" other." That is, a literature that works to dissolve structures, moving towards an ideal of entropic undifferentiation," of transgression of the limits separating self from other, man from woman, human from animal, organic from inorganic objects"(Jackson 1981: 73).

In a recently published book entitled Trauma and Ethics in the Novels ofGraham Swift, Stef Craps points out how Linda Hutcheon's adscription of Waterland to the category of “historiographic metafiction” in her immensely influential book A Poetics of Postmodernism, largely determined the shape and form of academic criticism on Swift's work in general and on Waterland in particular.

John Fowles came to public notice on the American literary scene earlier than in Britain, and was sooner appreciated by popular fictionl reviewers than by academic circles. As Jeff Rackham has pointed out, Fowles was" generally dismissed as a teller of yarns and suspense and while even the earliest reviewers praise [d] his craftsmanship, most [found] no need to search for symbolic echoes"(89).

In the last forty years or so, the number of academic books and essays devoted to the analysis of the birth of English Studies has been not only too numerous to be mentioned but also widely divergent in their accounts of the phenomenon. Characteristically, early books written by ...