Description
Book SynopsisThe book offers a thorough study of the literary tensions and two-world structure of the fantastic short stories by H. G. Wells (1866–1946). It exposes trickster games in the storytelling and pinpoints Wells’s staple methods of artistic composition – the mounting of various literary tensions built upon the body of traditional, dexterously combined genre elements and innovative topoi.
Trade ReviewH. G. Wells: The Literary Traveller in His Fantastic Short Story Machine by Halszka Leleń is a well-researched and original volume that will be of interest to both Wells specialists and all scholars and students working in literary and cultural studies. Anyone who thinks – as the traditional literary historians did – that H. G. Wells was a minor novelist, a journalist and technological visionary rather than an artist will find this study thought-provoking and inspiring. (Barbara Klonowska, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin)
The book is a conscientious scrutiny of H. G. Wells’s twenty-five short stories presenting a doubled chronotope and so rightfully recognised by Leleń as fantastic fiction. The greatest asset of the monograph is focusing on Wells’s intricate use of distinct genre conventions – those of the fairy tale, folk ballad, chivalric romance, detective fiction, dystopia and others – often bound together in particular texts. (Andrzej Zgorzelski, Professor Emeritus University of Gdansk)
Table of ContentsContents: Fantastic short story and literary tensions – H. G. Wells – Literary experiment – Artistic patterns and multiple genre impact – Parody – Polyvalent fantastic worlds – Spatial motifs – Topoi of science and quest – Bakhtin's heteroglossia – Transposition of utopia into dystopia – Inconsequence, instability and trickster strategies.
