Brian Attebery
Professor
English and Philosophy
Idaho State University
United States of America
Biography
My first scholarly publication was on Emily Dickinson, but I soon turned away from canonical topics. Since that first effort, I have written on fantasy, science fiction, Disney films, utopias, children’s literature, gender, and interdisciplinarity–all dodgy topics for one reason or another. My article on Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and the theoretical basis for their pioneering work in American Studies appeared in American Quarterly in 1996. Along with collaborators Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, I edited the groundbreaking Norton Book of Science Fiction, which is used in many science fiction courses around the country; I also wrote a teacher’s guide to the volume. In 1991 I received the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies a year later. I was named ISU’s Distinguished Researcher in 1997 and was given an award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities by the Idaho Humanities Council in 2004. The Science Fiction Research Association gave me its Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction and fantasy criticism in 2009.
Research Interest
Literature
Publications
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Attebery B, Hollinger V, editors. Parabolas of science fiction. Wesleyan University Press; 2013 Jul 15.
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"High Church versus Broad Church: Christian Myth in George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis." The New York Review of Science Fiction 207 (Nov. 2005): 14-17.
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"Teaching Gender and Science Fiction." Teaching Science Fiction. Ed. Peter Wright and Andy Sawyer. Teaching the New English Series. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011. 146-71.
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"Structuralism and Fantasy." Cambridge Companion to Fantasy. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 81-90.
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"The Fantastic." The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 127-138.
