Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Figures and Table -- Abbreviations -- 1 Introduction: These Are the Voyages… -- 1.1 The Old Irish ‘Genre System’, Otherworlds, and Utopias -- 1.2 The Tropological Mode -- 1.3 The Intertextual Matrix -- 1.4 Structure and Route -- 2 C. S. Lewis, the Dawn Treader , and St Brendan -- 2.1 C. S. Lewis’s Dialogic Imagination -- 2.2 The Dawn Treader and Fourfold Interpretation -- 3 Umberto Eco, ‘Reality’ and Prester John -- 3.1 Creating and Following the Footsteps of Saint Brendan -- 3.2 Umberto Eco’s Construction of Space -- 3.3 Making the Incredulous Reader Believe in the Fantastic -- 4 Jonathan Swift, the Echtra and the Immram Tradition -- 4.1 Swift and Allegorical Reading -- 4.2 Swift’s Real-World Framework -- 4.3 Gulliver’s Islands and the Problems of Utopia -- 5 Star Trek as Immram , and ‘Space, the Final Frontier…’ -- 5.1 Planets as Islands -- 5.2 ‘Optimism, Captain!’ Rowing-about with Cheer -- 5.3 These are the Immrama of the Starship Echtra -- 6 Stargate as an Echtra Narrative -- 6.1 Stargate ’s Planetary Otherworlds -- 6.2 Stargate Ustopias -- 6.3 Postcolonial Echtrai -- 7 Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book explores the reception of the medieval Irish tradition of fantastic journey tales in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels , C.S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , Umberto Eco's Baudolino , and the science fiction television franchises Star Trek and Stargate . In doing so, the book opens the door to a new history of literary reception, using Old Irish genre categories to analyse post-medieval texts. It aims to show that there is a family of texts produced in the post-medieval period that are heirs of the medieval Irish literary tradition of fantastic voyage narratives and that using Old Irish genre categories to analyse post-medieval works can open up new perspectives in our understanding of these works.

English

Description based on print version record.