Research background
' ‘The speculative fiction umbrella’ continues research about how university creative writers might reprise popular fantasy tropes as new knowledge, and whether the ‘speculative’ genre term is oxymoronic in relation to some popular fantasy texts. This story uses the quest trope and postmodern techniques – blended genres, pastiche, playful intertextuality, borrowed motifs, metafiction, irony and satire – to critique these texts, especially their stylistic excesses in both the market and some student submissions. Its protagonist embodies the daffy sexuality, schlock horror agency and determined pragmatism present in some texts. Hutcheon argues that ‘parody works to foreground the politics of representation’ (1989: 93).'