Faulty Cartography‪.‬

Faulty Cartography. Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2008. 336 pp. $27.95 pbk. Rhetorics of Fantasy is a structuralist account of generic Fantasy that works hard not to be doctrinaire or procrustean. Mendlesohn's project, which is to say disposing a mass of tens of thousands of individual texts into four boxes ("Portal-Quest Fantasy," "Immersive Fantasy," "Intrusion Fantasy" and "Limi-nal Fantasy"), does not render her tone-deaf to the particularities of specific textual production: indeed, the close attention to actual novels is one of the strengths of the book. But the purpose of the work is taxonomical, and as such it seemed to me significant that the four chapters are followed by a fifth called '"The Irregulars'" covering the works that do not fit her schema. It is game of her to concede the limits of her grid (although she suggests that such irregulars are few in number, and the texts she looks at are not very famous ones); but it speaks to one of the venerable problems of structuralist criticism. Mendlesohn is perfectly well aware of it. She begins with a "Health Warning": her book is not intended "to create rules"; "its categories are not intended to fix anything in stone"; and her categories "are constructions imposed on a literary landscape. The same landscape may be susceptible to quite a different cartography" (xxv). This is quite right; although it does not quite amount to a literary-critical Get Out of Jail Free card.