The book offers a thorough study of the literary tensions and two-world structure of the fantastic short stories by H. G. Wells (1866–1946). It exposes Trickster games in the storytelling and pinpoints his staple methods of artistic composition.

Halszka Lele?, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies, University of Warmia and Mazury, Poland. She has published on H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, the Themersons and Bertrand Russell, John Berger, and the theory of fantastic fiction. She researches self-referential aspects of storytelling.

by Halszka Lele? is a well-researched and original volume that will be of interest to both Wells specialists and all scholars and students working in literary and cultural studies. Anyone who thinks – as the traditional literary historians did – that H. G. Wells was a minor novelist, a journalist and technological visionary rather than an artist will find this study thought-provoking and inspiring. (Barbara Klonowska, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin) The book is a conscientious scrutiny of H. G. Wells’s twenty-five short stories presenting a doubled chronotope and so rightfully recognised by Lele? as fantastic fiction. The greatest asset of the monograph is focusing on Wells’s intricate use of distinct genre conventions – those of the fairy tale, folk ballad, chivalric romance, detective fiction, dystopia and others – often bound together in particular texts. (Andrzej Zgorzelski, Professor Emeritus University of Gdansk)

Contents: Fantastic short story and literary tensions – H. G. Wells – Literary experiment – Artistic patterns and multiple genre impact – Parody – Polyvalent fantastic worlds – Spatial motifs – Topoi of science and quest – Bakhtin's heteroglossia – Transposition of utopia into dystopia – Inconsequence, instability and trickster strategies.