New Publication! (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts)

And now, with official peer-reviewed publications in Extrapolation, Tolkien Studies, and JFA all under my belt, I feel like I've finally earned my Academic Big Boy Pants™.  :) 

The article in question is "History and Precarity: Glen Cook and the Rise of Picaresque Epic Fantasy." Alongside my two other articles, "On Ways of Studying Tolkien" and "Feminism and Sexed Violence in Stephen R. Donaldson," this article ranks among my most ambitious and theoretically demanding, so you can imagine I'm pretty chuffed about it finally appearing.

It's also the first article (to my knowledge) to discuss "totality" as a concept meaningful for epic fantasy.

Anyway, if anyone's interested, here's the history behind "History and Precarity." If nothing else, it's a useful marker for the long and troubled road all peer reviewed research must travel.

2016. I wrote an early version of this article, sending it off to Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Although both reviewers were kind enough to suggest "Revise & Resubmit" while offering many helpful suggestions, I realized in retrospect that they were being exceptionally kind. My dissertation defense got in the way, but when I re-read the submission in September 2017, I realized that it was absolutely awful. Like, embarrassingly awful. I ended up shelving the project for a few years .... but also discovered military fantasists like Paul Hoffman and Paul Kierney, whom my reviewers recommended.

January 2019. Older and wiser, I returned to the article ... and revamp it completely. This time, I added the concepts of the picaresque and totality to the article, which necessitated me figuring out what, exactly, the picaresque was. (A remark of Cook's in one of his rare interviews clued me into the topic.) The article itself was a devil to write, but eventually I finished it and sent it off to Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, but they rejected it after editorial review. Basically, they recommended I find an SFF journal  ... which is mostly what happens when I try to submit to non-SFF places.

April 2019. After minor revisions, I re-submit "History and Precarity" to JFA. The wait, admittedly, seemed to take forever ... but that's also when my wife and I had a nice 7-week sojourn in Europe, so that was fine. 

August 2019. After a four-month wait (and one follow-up query), JFA sent me three reviews. All liked it, but all agreed that I needed to define epic fantasy more thoroughly .... and, since it's rare to see three different reviewers all making the same remark, you can imagine how eagerly I followed their advice. In late October, the Assistant Editor informed me about official acceptance.

Over the next year, I made some minor revisions according to some suggestions by the Assistant Editor, then later checked the proofs. 

December 2020. The article is finally published.

Weirdly enough, I was amused to see that the editor's introduction to this issue of JFA actually mischaracterizes my argument. After describing Glen Cook's writing as "heroic fantasy" (which is weird considering how much time I spend calling it epic fantasy), the introduction then approvingly quotes a passage from my article .... although the very next sentence in my article says, basically, "But that's the exactly opposite of what Cook's doing." However, the quoted passage fits the introduction's theme well, so it's good karma to stay humble about such matters.