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The Wonderbooks
| Article
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15798 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
4,734 Words |
| Author
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Alfred J. MacAdam
Alfred MacAdam teaches Latin American literature at Barnard
College and Columbia University and edits the journal Review,
a publication of the Americas society. |
THE BOOK OF FANTASY
Edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares
New York: Viking, 1988
384 pp., $19.95
THE DREAM OF HEROES
Adolfo Bioy Casares
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988
244pp., $17.95
As old as fear itself, fantastic fictions antedate the written word. There are ghosts in all the literatures of the world--in the Zend-Avesta, the Bible, Homer, and the Thousand and One Nights. The Chinese may well have been the first specialists in the genre: The admirable Dream of the Red Chamber, erotic, realistic novels like the Chin P'ing Mei and the Shui Hu Chuan, and even Chinese philosophic texts abound in ghosts and dreams. But the editors of this anthology simply do not know how typical these books are of Chinese literature; ignorant, we do not know that literature first hand and must content ourselves with what luck (our oh-so-learned professors, cultural rapprochement committees, Mrs. Pearl S. Buck) supplies us. Limiting ourselves to Europe and the Americas, we can say that as a more or less defined genre, fantastic literature appears in the nineteenth century and in the English language. There were, of course, precursors; we might mention the Spanish prince Don Juan Manuel in the fourteenth century; Rabelais in the sixteenth; in the seventeenth, Quevedo; in the eighteenth, Defope and Horace Walpole; in the nineteenth, Hoffman.
Thus begins
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