Spring has reached Germany and refreshes us with bright flowers, the new-born offspring of animals, and much-needed new energy after the winter. This spirit of renewal and rebirth has taken us in full swing, and April 2025 has seen the publication of a new gem for all readers and researchers of speculative fiction: Volume 41 of the Inklings Yearbook is now online in our repository, The Stacks. Since volume 40, the Inklings Society’s annual is published in open access in The Stacks and can be read and downloaded for free. The current issue has a topic most fitting to the season of renewal: "Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic" (German alternative title: "Inklings-Jahrbuch 41: Dem Tode zum Trotz: Unsterblichkeit und Wiedergeburt in der Phantastik").
The volume collects the 13 best talks presented by international scholars at the 2023 Inklings Symposium on the same theme at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. Dealing with ideas of immortality and rebirth the texts cover a wide range of topics and primary works. While a total of four articles concentrate on the original members of the Oxford Inklings (name giver of the Inklings Society), with articles on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, other texts discuss more recent works. These include American and Canadian authors, such as Madeline Miller, George R.R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, William Gibson, Rick Riordan, T. Kingfisher and Steven Erikson, as well as Brits Richard K. Morgan and Adrian Tchaikovsky. Apart from literary criticism, the volume features criticism on tabletop role-playing games, picture books, TV-series and computer games. Both fantasy and science fiction works are in focus in this peer-reviewed book that tackles death and immortality as multi-faceted concepts involving horror, religious approaches, philosophy and ecocriticism. Five reviews on current publications relevant to researchers of fantastic literature round the volume off.
Read and download Inklings Yearbook 41: "Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic" for free here or explore our growing open-access collection of Inklings Yearbooks (including many previous volumes) here.
