| Abstrakt: |
This essay concerns the Australian-born swimmer, diver, lecturer, writer, vaudeville artiste, stunt woman, and silent film star Annette Kellerman's powerfully gendered and embodied mermaid performances and representations. Courting celebrity and some notoriety, Kellerman fashioned a compelling amphibious fairy-tale "mersona" in print, on stage, and on film in the years around World War I. Her creative productions in various fantastic forms and genres, I argue, help us understand how fantasy generally and mermaid fictions more specifically can trouble anthropocentrism, which situates humanity outside (and above) the nonhuman biosphere, and geocentrism, which particularly disavows humanity's vital interdependence with aquatic creatures and oceanic environments. Building on ecocritical approaches to fantasy, monster studies, and blue humanities scholarship, I analyze moments of human-ocean-fish entanglement in Kellerman's fitness manual How to Swim (1918), her fantasy film Venus of the South Seas (1924), and her short story collection Fairy Tales of the South Seas (1926). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
