Dangerous Fictions
The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Honorable Mention for the Pop Culture Association Awards
In a political moment when social panics over literature are at their peak, Dangerous Fictions is a mind-expanding treatise on the nature of fictional stories as cultural battlegrounds for power.
Fictional stories have long held an uncanny power over hearts and minds, especially those of young people. In Dangerous Fictions, Lyta Gold traces arguments both historical and contemporary that have labeled fiction as dark, immoral, frightening, or poisonous. Within each she asks: How “dangerous” is fiction, really? And what about it provokes waves of moral panic and even censorship?
Gold argues that any panic about art is largely a disguised panic about power. There have been versions of these same fights over fiction for centuries. By exposing fiction as a social danger and a battleground of immediate public concern, we can see what each side really wants—the right to shape the future of a world deeply in flux and a distraction from more pressing material concerns about money, access, and the hard work of politics.
From novels about people driven insane by reading novels to “copaganda” TV shows that influence how viewers regard the police, Gold uses her signature wit, research, and fearless commentary to point readers toward a more substantial question: Fiction may be dangerous to us, but aren’t we also dangerous to it?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic and novelist Gold debuts with a refreshing critique of the assumptions imposed on fiction from both sides of the culture wars. Objections to novels and films from the right and left, whether of the "wokeness" in Marvel movies or the "faults of representation" in YA novels, "arise from the same misguided presumptions about what fictional stories do, how they can or should be regulated, and whether they can be justified," Gold writes. Careful to avoid "false equivalencies" between the right and left but unflinching in her analysis, her wide-ranging study begins with Plato, who worried about fiction's corrosive effects on children, and spans to the current spate of conservative book bans (which she deplores) and liberal claims about literature's supposed "empathy-generating qualities" (which she considers dubious). Dusting off Oscar Wilde's "art for art's sake" dictum, Gold presents it as the better path, arguing that it "isn't some sort of antipolitical statement but a highly political one" because of how it promotes not only artistic freedom but a genuine diversity of perspectives. Throughout, Gold blends rigorous scholarship with internet-literate humor, and in the end, she flips the script on fiction's moral critics, claiming the allegedly harmful effects of fiction are the fault of bad readers, not of bad writing, since readers can't be stopped from seeing what they want to see. This much-needed beacon guides readers through the morass of present-day cultural discourse.
