At the Crossroads of Worlds

This collective academic monograph contains contributions from twenty-one authors reflecting on the expression of the fantastic in literary and theatrical works. Five thematic sections (On Utopianism in Literature; Sharing Story, World, and Language; To the Roots of Czech and Other Fantastic Fiction; Creativity and the Fantastic – Stories Not Just for Children; and Central European Postmodernism) present ways of exploring the phenomenon of the fantastic from the perspectives of literary theory and history, theatre and cognitive science, philosophy, and comparative studies. The broad conception of the fantastic applied in the book allows for a focus on both genre and non-genre forms of fantastic literature, thus helping to bridge the largely artificial boundary between them.