Brian Attebery
Professor of English (retired 2022)
EDUCATION
PhD, American Civilization (1979), Brown University
MA, American Civilization (1976), Brown University
BA, English (1974), The College of Idaho
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. Collaborators Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler, and I edited the groundbreaking Norton Book of Science Fiction; 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. In the fall of 2006 I took over as editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, with graduate students in the ISU English Department serving as editorial assistants.
My most recent scholarly book, Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth again won the Mythopoeic Award for fantasy studies. Since 2016 I have been serving as editor of the Library of America's republication of the works of Ursula K. Le Guin From January through July of 2019 I was in Scotland as Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Fantasy at the University of Glasgow.
Books
Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home. Author’s expanded edition. Edited by Brian Attebery. New York: The Library of America, 2019.
Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Parabolas of Science Fiction. Ed. with Veronica Hollinger. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
"Reinventing Masculinity in Fairy Tales by Men." Marvels & Tales 32.2 (2019).
"The Fantastic." The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 127-138.
"Structuralism and Fantasy." Cambridge Companion to Fantasy. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 81-90.
"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.
"Elizabeth Enright and the Family Story as Genre." Children's Literature 37 (2009): 114-36.
"Patricia Wrightson and Aboriginal Myth." Extrapolation 46 (2005): 329-39.
"Dust, Lust, and Other Messages from the Quantum Wonderland." Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience. Ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2004. 161-69.
"The Magazine Era: 1926-1960." The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 32-47
Contributions to Reading Narrative Fiction, by Seymour Chatman. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
Awards/Honors
2019 Leverhulme Visiting Professorship in Fantasy Literature. School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow
Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies for Stories about Stories, 2015.
Distinguished Researcher, ISU, 1997
Master Researcher, ISU, 1991, 1995, 1996
Courses Taught
4492/5592: Folklore and Literature
4467/5567: Studies in Late 19th-Century Literature
4441/5541: History and Criticism of Children’s Literature
2277: Survey of American Literature I
2212: Introduction to Folklore
1115: Literature of the Fantastic
AMST 2200: Introduction to American Studies
Seminar in Genre: Utopia
Seminar in Pedagogy: Teaching Science Fiction