first of all, psychoanalysis is fake; the best parts were the times where she veered into Marxism. second of all, like 90% of what she says about the subversive potential of “literary fantasy” (read: things academics like but not, for the most part, anything anyone who reads, you know, actual fantasy would recognize as such) would apply to the texts she dismisses as “faery” or “the marvellous” — the way she talks about Le Guin, in particular, really makes it seem like she’s...never actually read Le Guin. she certainly doesn’t seem to have grasped any of Le Guin’s theoretical and political commitments. the whole book is just an exercise in making academics feel like they’re being politically good and transgressive for continuing to talk about a slight variation on the same corpus they’ve always been interested in, rather than (gasp), any popular literature. like to an extent I think it’s an indication that the fields of science fiction (which is apparently just a branch of “the marvellous”) and fantasy have changed since 1981, but there’s older stuff that I absolutely don’t think is as ideologically bankrupt/regressive/bourgeois as Jackson suggests.
also n.b. if you’re considering reading this, only the first half is theory; the second half is exclusively (not terribly close) readings of primarily nineteenth-century “literary fantasy”.
there are some okay moments, but overall this is a mess.
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