Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften H. G. Wells: The Literary Traveller in His Fantastic Short Story Machine: 10 (Mediated Fictions: Studies in Verbal and Visual Narratives)

The 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. Review H. 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) About the Author Halszka Leleń, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies, University of Warmia and Mazury, Poland. She has published on H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, the Themersons and Bertrand Russell, John Berger, and the theory of fantastic fiction. She researches self-referential aspects of storytelling.