Rhetorics of Fantasy Quotes

“One cannot write about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without considering the footnotes. The experienced reader is conditioned to see footnotes as dry, as a way of grounding the text in reality. But footnotes are also an intervention, or intrusion into the flow of the text, and Clarke takes advantage of this figuring. In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it is in the footnotes that the world of the fantastic slips through to disrupt the meaning or common understanding of the tale told in the main text. The “explanation” they offer is of worlds slipping between each other, of uncontrolled contact with fairy.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“In many of the novels I have discussed in this chapter, the position of the reader vis-a-vis the protagonist is central to the construction of liminality.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“The intrusion fantasy uses the form of the club story - the unquestioned tale - to construct reality, then renders the walls of the world-story translucent.”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“Can one have an internal quest that does not require the protagonist to move through a physical and internal landscape?”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“Is it possible to create a world in which anything can and does happen?”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

“In this book I argue that there are essentially four categories within the fantastic: the portal-quest, the immersive, the intrusive, and the liminal. These categories are determined by the means by which the fantastic enters the narrated world. In the portal-quest we are invited through into the fantastic; in the intrusion fantasy, the fantastic enters the fictional world; in the liminal fantasy, the magic hovers in the corner of our eye; while in the immersive fantasy we are allowed no escape. Each category has as profound an influence on the rhetorical structures of the fantastic as does its taproot text or genre. Each category”
― Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy