| Zusammenfassung: | This paper argues that the portal-quest fantasies written by Neil Gaiman and China Miéville — contemporary figures in the field interested in navigating its creative scope and established tropes — reorient this sub-genre towards a radical reconceptualization of the portal and its uses via a self-aware methodology of iteration, satire, and suspicion. Taking up Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996) and American Gods (2001) and Miéville's The City and the City (2009) and King Rat (1998), it explores the form's predilection for closed narrative loops, while offering a counter narrative that interrogates the status quo via critical figures like Farah Mendlesohn, China Miéville, Mikhail Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, and John Cawelti. Significantly, this paper suggests that, via self-conscious world-building, portal fantasies allow reader and writer the opportunity to inhabit those spaces between textual, ideological, generic, metaphorical, irrational, fantastic worlds.
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