Much of fantasy studies has focused on the genre’s presence in literature, with histories and theoretical frameworks often either implicitly or explicitly centring the written word. In some cases, academic, critic, and fan responses to the genre outside of literature even go so far as to erase or question the possibility of the genre’s existence in other media, perhaps most famously embodied in J.R.R. Tolkien’s insistence in ‘On Fairy-stories’ that some media, such as drama, are fundamentally incompatible with fantasy. These types of responses fail to account for the medium-specific benefits and challenges that different media pose for depictions of the impossible, serving to establish hierarchies between media, exclude non-literary media from analyses of the genre, and potentially limit a full understanding of the genre’s history.
Fantasy and the fantastic have had long, rich histories outside of literature, playing a central role in the development of theatre, film, and comic books, and celebrating a more recent boom on the small screen. Furthermore, from the innumerable reimaginings of the Arthurian tradition, to The Wizard of Oz, to manga and anime, to contemporary multimedia franchises and cinematic universes, fantasy texts have been integral to the history of transmedia storytelling, allowing their rich storyworlds to expand across multiple media. By examining fantasy with a focus on media, we find a genre shaped in distinct ways by the many different media and creative industries that produce it, with specific creative processes and varying cultural media traditions opening onto distinct forms of fantasy that may not be properly accounted for in fantasy studies’ traditional focus on Anglophone literature.
GIFCon 2022 is a three-day virtual conference that seeks to examine the myriad narrative possibilities afforded by fantasy across media. We welcome proposals for papers relating to this theme from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers,and researchers whose work focuses on non-Anglocentric fantasy. We will also offer creative workshops for those interested in exploring how the creative processes of different media shape fantastic storytelling on a practical level.
We ask for 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers. See our Suggested Topics list below for further inspiration.
Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bionote via this form by December 3rd 2021 at midnight GMT.
If you have any questions regarding our event or our CfP, please contact us at GIFCon@glasgow.ac.uk. Please also read through our Code of Conduct. We look forward to your submissions!
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Fantasy texts in film, theatre, television, oral traditions, comic books, games (both video and tabletop), new media, virtual reality, theme parks, podcasts, scripts, visual arts, etc.
The relationship between genre and medium
Histories of Fantasy media beyond literature
The cross-media influence of Fantasy texts
Medium-specificity or interrogations of medium-specificity in genre studies
Adaptations of Fantasy texts
Fantasy transmedia franchises
Fanworks of Fantasy texts
Fantasy and the fantastic in a non-Anglocentric medium, e.g. Bollywood fantasies, manga, anime, JRPGs, Karagöz shadow plays
Relationship between Fantasy texts and the regional cultural industries that produce them
Mapping the Impossible is a brand new open-access student journal publishing peer-reviewed research into fantasy and the fantastic. The editorial board and reviewers are composed of current students and recent graduates from institutions across the world, and we are so pleased to be opening for submissions this month. If you’d like to get involved, we are currently looking for reviewers and we would love to hear from you.
We currently have two issues lined up. Our first issue, to be published in October 2021, will be a special issue for papers submitted from this year’s GIFCon. Our second issue, to be published in March 2022, will be a general issue. We operate with a rolling submissions window, and if you’re interested in submitting to us, we would love to see your paper no matter when it’s ready! Check out our submissions page for the details and guidelines.
Mapping the Impossible has been developed specifically with early-career research into fantasy and the fantastic in mind. We exclusively publish papers by current students and recent graduates, and we define “fantasy” very broadly. Our aim is to highlight the brilliant work being done by undergraduates, postgraduates and student researchers looking into fantasy, and give them a new avenue to publication.
We are affiliated with and supported by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic along with the annual fantasy research conference GIFCon, and are generously hosted by the University of Glasgow. It’s wonderful to be a part of such a vibrant community of fantasts, and we strongly encourage checking out the Centre, GIFCon, and the University of Glasgow’s Masters in Fantasy if the research we’re publishing inspires you.
On a personal note – putting together this journal, along with my colleagues Katarina O’Dette and Emma French, has been a real work of love, and we have a lot of people to thank for helping us get it off the ground. In the first instance, we have to highlight the wonderful work being done over at our sister publication, Press Start, who are publishing early career research in Game Studies and were the inspiration for Mapping the Impossible. The Press Start team have provided us with brilliant support in setting up, and without Matt Barr it’s likely we would have never got off the ground. Everyone at the Centre for Fantasy has been so enthusiastic and helpful, and their guidance has helped us work out the fine details of what you see today. And a special thanks must go to my brilliant sister, Lois Langmead, who was generous enough to donate some really wonderful illustrations to the site.
The University of Glasgow Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is very proud to announce that we have partnered with the Tolkien Society (TS) to host this year’s Tolkien Reading Day!
Each year, Tolkien Reading Day is held on the 25th of March. The purpose of the event is to encourage fans to celebrate and promote the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien by reading favourite passages.
The theme of this year’s Tolkien Reading Day is Hope and Courage. What will you be reading?
We are working with the Tolkien Society to create engaging and interactive social media throughout March. Then, we will come together on the 25th of March, when the Centre will be hosting three Zoom meetings for readers around the world to share their favourite passages and react to the passages shared by others.
Does this sound like fun? Do you want to be involved? Here are the best ways to join in the fun:
Share your stories, comments, and photos on any social media platform and use the hashtag #TolkienReadingDay2021. Most of all, we’d love to see videos of you reading!
If you want to attend a Zoom session on March 25th, we have three opportunities. With sessions in the morning, midday, and evening (UK time), we hope that we can find a time that matches everyone’s time zone. Please use these Eventbrite links to register for your preferred session! (Please note that the times shown on the Eventbrite pages automatically sync to your time zone.)
2020 was a year for reflection. In the course of her reflections, PhD student Lucy Holdsworth came up with the idea of memorialising the achievements of the University of Glasgow’s Fantasy graduates: students like herself who had taken the bold step of enrolling on the University’s MLitt in Fantasy, regardless of the puzzlement, amusement and even disapproval such a step might bring about. Since the foundation of the MLitt (formally the MLitt English Literature: Fantasy) in September 2015, many students from all over the world have joined the programme, united in their love of the mode or genre called Fantasy, a genre that permeates the creative arts in the twenty-first century but whose study is as yet in its infancy. Many of those students have gone on to work with Fantasy in other capacities, whether as PhD students, like Lucy, or as teachers, publishers, videogame professionals, novelists, entertainers and vocal advocates. Their passion is infectious, their imagination boundless, their thinking innovative and courageous. Their work and mutual support deserves some form of recognition.
How better to celebrate these graduates, Lucy thought, than with the gift of trees? Trees permeate Fantasy literature, from the walking trees and their tree-like shepherds, the Ents, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, to the trees that populate the slopes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Mountain; from the village trees of the Douen in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber to the mysterious branch-like lettering that obsesses a young librarian in Patricia McKillip’s Alphabet of Thorn. Forests are everywhere in fairy tales, myths and chivalric romances, and have a tendency to fill our dreams. As Ursula K. Le Guin puts it, ‘We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone’. Fantasy pays tribute to these mental forests and explores their depths.
In the twenty-first century, forests also hold the key to the future. Without extensive reforestation it is hard to imagine a way to counter the destructive effects of human dominance of the planet. For all these reasons, Lucy found her thoughts turning to a project called Trees for Life, which aims to rewild the ancient Caledonian forest by planting saplings at remote sites in the Highlands of Scotland. Planting trees for the MLitt students seemed like the perfect way to salute their achievements and to celebrate the community they have formed. No one knows where each of the Trees for Life will be; we only know that each will make a small contribution to enriching a larger whole. In this way each tree is like a student of fantasy, each of whom makes a small but vital contribution to a new but rapidly expanding field of study with its roots in the past, just as the trees we plant in their honour have their roots in soil that has been enriched by ancient leaves and branches.
Lucy explained her thinking to her supervisor, Matt Sangster, one of the founding members of Glasgow’s recently-launched Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. Matt at once set about the process of putting her vision into practice, consulting fellow members of the Centre and obtaining funding from a generous donor to plant the first set of trees. This blog post marks the launch of Lucy’s memorial, and will be followed by an informal launch event on 24 February.
We have named our widely-scattered Grove the Immanent Grove after a wood on the Island of Roke in Ursula Le Guin’s classic fantasy series, the Books of Earthsea. Many people think that this wood ‘moves about in a mystifying manner’; but in this they are mistaken, Le Guin informs us, ‘for the Grove does not move. Its roots are the roots of being. It is all the rest that moves’. May our wood, planted in the name of our graduates who are moving on, help to move the world on, too, in a better direction.
Rob Maslen, Co-Director, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
There is always smoke rising from Glasgow these days.
My walk to university had always been a pleasant one—under the shade of young trees by the canal, down past a dim and mysterious grove, and on towards the west end. I knew where to look for foxes and deer, made friends with the squirrels, and even tempted a bird or two to say hello.
Pleasant, that is, until the grove vanished, broken stumps torn up and turned over, all trace of the vibrant ecosystem scraped away to make room for construction.
Not long after, I moved, this time to a flat surrounded by trees almost as tall as my building—old, majestic, strong. They have been torn down too; a carpark covers their grave.
While I understood the reason—people need homes, people need schools, and they have to go somewhere—still it felt like a betrayal, and unbidden, the voice of Treebeard began to echo in my mind: ‘there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves. I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!’
I don’t have any power over Glasgow’s dwindling green spaces, but what I do have is an imagination and a community of people who, like me, were raised on stories of the beauty and magic of forests, and so the seed (sorry) of an idea began to grow.
Fantasy is often dismissed as mere escapism, but Le Guin reminds us that ‘escape is the direction of freedom’. Freedom from tyranny, freedom from oppression, freedom from our own abuse of power—once we have imagined a world in which we are free from these things, we begin to see a path towards it. Fantasy is the first step of all activism, and as such, it has an incredible power to change the world for the better. The Centre has used this power to imagine and create a world in which academia and environmentalism can go hand in hand, but it is my hope that the Immanent Grove will act as a catalyst for wider action in this vein. Tolkien said of escapism that, ‘if we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and take as many people with us as we can.’ I look forward to escaping into a better world with you all and creating a future we can be proud of.
Lucinda Holdsworth, PhD student, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
Because we wouldn’t want to plant trees for our graduates without their permission, we’ve begun the Grove by inviting our most recent graduating cohort, the Owls, who finished their degrees amidst the complexities of lockdown and pandemic. Their names and their messages can now be seen on the website that logs the Grove’s progress. Their trees will be planted in the Highlands in the spring.
We’re keen to expand the Grove to include all our MLitt Fantasy graduates who’d like to be included: Canaries, Phoenixes, Ravens and Merlins. If you’re a member of one of these cohorts and would like a tree added to the Grove in your name, please fill out this form to let us know how you’d like to be named and whether you’d like to add a message.
Please return the completed form to the Fantasy Centre e-mail address (arts-fantasy@glasgow.ac.uk), using ‘Immanent Grove’ in the subject line.
Moving forward, we’ll also be planting trees for the current MLitt cohort (the Nightingales) and for those who’ve yet to join us. We also look forward to adding our PhD students to the Grove as they successfully defend their theses.
Matt Sangster, Senior Lecturer and Core Team Member, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
Join us on the 24th of February for an evening of magic and nature to celebrate the brilliance of our students and the wonderful work done by Lucy Holdsworth and Matt Sangster, who made this project possible. Let’s talk about trees, fantasy, and the Glasgow Fantasy program.
Calling all aspiring adventurers! Join us on our quest to uncover the literary history behind Dungeons & Dragons with scholar and RPG editor John D. Rateliff, in this event co-hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and the Games and Gaming Lab at the University of Glasgow!
How has fantasy literature influenced and inspired the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons? How has the relationship between the two fantasy media developed over time? Join us on 28th January 2021 at 6pm (GMT) for an event discussing the history of this much beloved game. Tolkien scholar and RPG designer/editor John D. Rateliff will discuss its early roots in the works of twentieth-century fantasy authors, including J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. His talk will be followed by a Q&A.
The event will also include a short introduction to contemporary Dungeons & Dragons by Grace A. Worm – with a brief, but fun, dip into how to play!
An evening of chilling tales of ghosts and hauntings.
Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.
— Jerome K. Jerome
As the year settles firmly into winter, we are delighted to invite you to celebrate these long, dark nights with some bone-chilling tales of ghosts and hauntings at our midwinter event!
Join us on the 16th of December at 5 PM GMT for an evening of Christmas chills and winter wonder. We will enjoy an introduction to the tradition of the Christmas ghost story by Dr Derek Johnston of Queens University Belfast. We will explore midwinter’s association with gothic and occult in our discussion panel with Dr Tiffany Angus (Anglia Ruskin University), Professor Christine Ferguson (University of Stirling) and Dr Derek Johnson (QUB).
About our presenters:
Dr Tiffani Angus is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (UK) and the General Director of the Anglia Centre for Science Fiction & Fantasy. A graduate of Clarion, she’s also published short fiction in a variety of genres and her debut novel Threading the Labyrinth (about 400 years in a haunted garden) came out in mid-2020. Her research interests include apocalyptic fiction, horticultural history, and time travel narratives.
Prof. Christine Ferguson is a Professor in English studies at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on the entwined histories of the literary gothic and the British occult revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is on the board of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism and the editorial boards for the Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Review, Victoriographies, the Cambridge Elements in Magic, and the Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism series. Her major publications include Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing 1848-1930 (2012) and Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (2006). She is at work on a new project on the popular fiction networks and periodical culture of the Victorian occult revival.
Dr Derek Johnston is a Lecturer in Broadcast at Queen’s University Belfast, where he teaches the history and analysis of broadcast media. His research engages with fantastic genres such as science fiction and horror, typically placing media texts in their cultural and social context, and frequently considering their connections to issues of national identity. His monograph on broadcast seasonal horror traditions is titled Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween. He is also author of a number of articles and book chapters, including the ‘Ghosts and Television’ chapter for The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story, and the chapter on ‘Gothic Television’ for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 3.
The event is free but ticketed. Please book your ticket here.
This event is presented by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic via the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow.
