English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Wheel Of Power In Hbo's Game Of Thrones, Inbar Shaham

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Maps the familial power struggles and patterns of inheritance of Westeros as depicted in the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series by using A.J. Griemas’s semiotic square. Applying this framework to the title logo of the series also supports this interpretation.

Sterner Stuff; Sansa Stark And The System Of Gothic Fantasy, Joseph R. Young

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Contests the suggestion that Sansa Stark, a character in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is a weak and indecisive by analyzing her in relation to William Patrick Day’s system of Gothic fantasy. While Sansa is indeed physically passive, she manages to retain her own identity in a challenging literary environment. This physical passivity allows her to assert herself intellectually, analyzing and indicting the misdeeds and abuses she suffers. This combination of passive and active attributes precisely instantiates the skill set of the detective, a species of literary being developed from the Gothic fantasies Day analyses, and …

Soup, Bones, And Shakespeare: Literary Authorship And Allusion In Middle-Earth, Owen Dugan, James Krasner

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Examines Tolkien’s theory of authorship and storytelling by exploring the literary allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the Witch-king’s fall and the theory of creation in Tolkien’s description of the Silmarils. Tolkien alludes to Macbeth to undercut both the modern view of the author as an isolated genius and to critique the approach to literary allusion that reinforces this view. Fëanor’s creation of the Silmarils serves as a symbolic representation of modern authorship, suggesting that Tolkien not only disagrees with a singular model of authorship but also believes it to be a manifestation of corrupted artistry. Ultimately, both the Witch-king and …

Tolkien And Bakhtin: Symphony Of Time In The Lord Of The Rings, Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltsev

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The essay reveals the nature of time and space in Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings with the help of the chronotope concept proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s classification of spatiotemporal relations in the novel identifies the type of chronotope in Tolkien’s major narrative as one close to folklore, idyll, and epic. Tolkien uses memory and its functioning to create a unique symphony of time in The Lord of the Rings. As a concept that reaches the depth of philosophical abstraction and at the same time appeals to a concrete textual context, Bakhtin’s chronotope is a surprisingly flexible …

Círdan The Shipwright: Tolkien’S Bodhisattva Who Brings Us To The Other Shore, Douglas Charles Kane

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien wrote that Círdan the Shipwright “saw further and deeper than any other in Middle-earth” despite being a minor, incidental character in both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. The important role that Círdan plays in Tolkien’s secondary universe can be understood by looking at him as a bodhisattva in a Buddhist tradition. Círdan’s role throughout the Three Ages of Middle-earth chronicled by Tolkien was to come to the aid of others, to reduce their suffering, and particularly to help facilitate their sailing to the “Blessed Lands” in the West (which can be seen as a metaphor for …

The Tao Masters Who Walk Away From Omelas, Sabina Schrynemakers

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Le Guin primarily intended to portray Taoist enlightenment in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” rather than a moral contemplation or lesson. She first describes Omelas as the pinnacle of human flourishing from a Taoist perspective, then how the residents of Omelas have achieved moral maturity through coming to terms with the necessity of evil, and finally she describes the even greater transcendence of those who have achieved detachment from the goods of Omelas, the Tao Masters. This interpretation is supported by parallels with the Tao Te Ching.

Abolishing Man In Other Worlds: Breaking And Recovering The Chain Of Being In C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy By Courtney Petrucci, Deeper Heaven: A Reader's Guide To C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy By Christiana Hale, And A Compass For Deep Heaven: Navigating The C.S. Lewis Ransom Trilogy, Edited By Diana Pavlac Glyer And Julianne Johnson, Josiah Peterson

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

No Ordinary People: 21 Friendships Of C.S. Lewis By Joel D. Heck, James Stockton

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No Ordinary People: 21 Friendships of C.S. Lewis. Joel D. Heck. Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2022, 395 p. 9781935688228. $19.50.

The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis: Essays In Memory Of Christopher W. Mitchell, Edited By Bruce R. Johnson, Melody Green

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This is a review of The Undiscovered C. S. Lewis edited by Bruce Johnson.

Correspondence: 1927-1987 By Joseph Campbell, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Correspondence: 1927–1987 by Joseph Campbell, edited by Dennis Patrick Slattery and Evans Lansing Smith is a fine addition to The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series. It is a solid work and a pleasure to read for fans of Joseph Campbell and his works. The book provides a balance of letters written by Joseph Campbell to friends and colleagues with letters written to him by the same people over the span of his adult life starting at age twenty-four. The letters provide a picture of the remarkable life of a man who was both a friend to many and a …

Dorothy L. Sayers, A Biography: Death, Dante, And Lord Peter Wimsey By Colin Duriez And Dorothy And Jack: The Transforming Friendship Of Dorothy L. Sayers And C.S. Lewis By Gina Dalfonzo, Gabriel Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Tolkien And The Sea: Proceedings Of The Tolkien Society Seminar 1996, Edited By Richard Cranshaw And Shaun Gunner, Kris Swank

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Review of the book Tolkien and the Sea: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 1996.

Pagan Saints In Middle-Earth By Claudio A. Testi, Toni Thibodeaux

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

A Sense Of Tales Untold: Exploring The Edges Of Tolkien's Literary Canvas By Peter Grybauskas, Robert T. Tally

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas. Peter Grybauskas. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2021. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-60635-430-8. $55.00 (hardcover)

Tolkien And The Classical World, Edited By Hamish Williams, Larry J. Swain

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Race And Technology In Southern Literature, Civil War To Civil Rights, Kaitlyn Elizabeth Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers the intersection of technology and race in the literature of the American South from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though narratives about technology in American literature often promise democracy, equality, improvement, and progress, the role of technology in southern literature is more complex and ambivalent. Literature from and about the South from the Civil War to the civil rights era, by Black and white southern authors like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty reveals technology’s ability to uphold and naturalize southern white supremacy, but also to subvert it. Southern literature traces a pattern …

Restoring Paradise Through Providence: The Emergence Of The Serendipitous Hero In The Hunger Games, Alexandra Elizabeth Oberempt

Theses and Dissertations

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games enhanced the popularity of post-apocalyptic, young adult literature written between 2004 and 2014 (a genre I call millennial dystopia). A government that sends its people to war, spies on them, and sacrifices the sanctity of the community for personal profit while the powerful and wealthy watch from a secure distance is an anxiety addressed in this fiction. The hero of millennial dystopias satiates the suffering that emerges from this angst.

Through her story, Katniss is pushed to her destiny on a path that leads her to become the hero of The Hunger Games trilogy. In …

‘Conspiring Together’: Woolf’S Investigations On ‘Party Consciousness’ And Interwar Instability In Mrs. Dalloway And To The Lighthouse, Madeline Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Woolf has been generalized popularly as enthusiastic about parties, relishing their effervescence and conversation, and she had a particular bent for imagining a party’s vivacity while often remaining distanced from it. This imagination and duality would mark Woolf’s thoughts as is recorded in her diary entries, and they became especially apparent in her fiction. In an entry on April 27^th, 1925, less than one month from Mrs. Dalloway’s May 14^th publication, she declares that “people have any number of states of consciousness” and reports that she “should like to investigate the party consciousness” (A Writer’s …

'The Fidelity Of Promising': Egoism And Obligation In Austen, Melissa J. Ganz

English Faculty Research and Publications

This essay reads the promises that permeate Sense and Sensibility (1811) in the context of late eighteenth-century discussions about the nature and value of voluntary obligations, probing Austen’s engagement with ideas advanced by thinkers including David Hume, Adam Smith, William Paley, William Godwin, and Edmund Burke. In doing so, the essay contributes to long-standing debates about Austen’s ethical vision, highlighting her simultaneous commitment to and critique of the individualist ethos structuring modern life. Austen’s approach to promises, the essay argues, is broadly aligned with that of Hume, Smith, and Paley: like these philosophers, Austen suggests that one is bound by …

Britain's Extraterrestrial Empire: Colonial Ambition, Anxiety, And Ambivalence In Early Modern Literature, Mark Edward Wisniewski

Dissertations (1934 -)

This project uses the context of early modern English colonialism and empire building to examine five British authors whose fiction focuses on extraterrestrial spaces: Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, Francis Godwin, Aphra Behn, and John Milton. I frame the relationship between extraterrestrial settings and British colonialism through Jeffery Knapp’s conception of trifling, that even though early imperial England had little geopolitical power, the nation could differentiate itself as an otherworldly empire, both in origin and aim. Additionally, I build upon the connections drawn between colonialism and early modern literature by theorists such as Richard Helgerson, David Quint, and Stephen Greenblatt. I …