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Beyond All Worlds: George Macdonald, The Pre-Tolkienians, And The Forgotten Possibilities Of Fantasy, Ethan Patrick Stevens

Masters Theses

The history of modern fantasy has been powerfully shaped by the worldbuilding paradigm so successfully executed in J.R.R. Tolkien's 1954-55 trilogy The Lord of the Rings. However, there were nearly a hundred and fifty years of creative work between the birth of fantasy as a genre and Tolkien’s publication of The Lord of the Rings. By examining the pre-Tolkienian fantasists, we find that Tolkien's way of exhaustive consistency was not, and is not, the only way to write fantasy. Phantastes (1858), the first novel by the influential Victorian fantasist George MacDonald, defies contemporary worldbuilding standards almost constantly in …

Genre In Translations Of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Madison Schow

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

A comparison of J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published posthumously in 1975, and Simon Armitage’s 2007 translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight reveals that a translator’s choices can affect the genre of a work. Tolkien’s foreignizing translation situates Sir Gawain in the tradition of medievalist fantasy and should be read in the context of twentieth century fantasy, the same genre as Tolkien’s original works. Armitage’s domesticating translation places Sir Gawain in the context of twenty-first century fantasy. An examination of the subgenres represented in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ghost story, thriller, …

Tolkien’S Coleridgean Legacy, Martina Juričková 928827

Journal of Tolkien Research

In his published materials, Tolkien rarely ever directly mentioned by name any philosophers or literary theoretics he might have been influenced or outright inspired by in forming his own views on the origin, nature, and purpose of myth, imagination, and literature as presented in his essay On Fairy-stories. However, as an Oxford Don, he must have been well acquainted with the theoretical-philosophical work of one of the greatest British literati and, I daresay, progenitor of the fantasy genre in the Isles, Samuel Coleridge. Anyone conversant with Tolkien’s lore who starts reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria must be stricken by how …

History In The Margins: Epigraphs And Negative Space In Robin Hobb’S Assassin’S Apprentice, Matthew Oliver

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

Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice demonstrates a significant effect of epic fantasy’s conventions for creating the history of a fictional world. By prefacing each chapter with an epigraph from an official in-world historical text before giving a first-person personal narrative, the novel blurs the boundaries between text and paratext, public and private, official history and personal myth-making. This structure raises questions about what is central and marginal in history, suggesting the extent to which historical narrative is constructed in the imagination by taking the facts surrounding a central event from which the historian is absent—a process much like negative space drawing …

Mythic Circle #44

The Mythic Circle

Greetings, Subscribers, Contributors, and Readers, All, and welcome to the 2022 edition (issue #44) of The Mythic Circle, the creative writing publication of The Mythopoeic Society. With this issue, we continue our 44-year-old tradition of offering our members and the general public a selection of fiction, poetry, and images that develop, extend, or recapitulate the mythic concepts used by J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and the other Inklings, and also by mythic storytellers from pre-literate antiquity to the modern world.

This issue begins with the proper publication, in its intended form, of a poem that was misrepresented in …

Gender, Fantasy, And Misogyny In The Age Of Innocence: A Character Study Of Newland Archer, Sonia Comstock

University Honors Theses

In this thesis, I’ll be analyzing Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence through a feminist lens, with a focus on the character of Newland Archer. Specifically, I'll examine who Archer is beyond a surface level, looking at his thoughts and fantasies and exposing his twisted, misogynistic outlook. I'll explore how his delusions affect the lives of the women around him, and how his behavior is reflective of the larger dynamic between men and women in society. Because the novel is written in close omniscient third person, the reader can both assess and align with Archer's mentality; the gap between the …

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

The Madwoman In The Refrigerator And A Song Of Ice And Fire., Alex Herm

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

There is an existing trope in the fantasy genre I call the madwoman in the refrigerator—in which a female character is killed, maimed, raped, depowered, and/or made to go mad or insane when she is no longer able to uphold the conventional genre expectations of her role in the narrative, such as the angel, monster, or angelic monster. It is a combination of the theory from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that women are demure angels when they are fulfilling stereotypical feminine roles in a narrative and when desire or agency is found, the woman is a monster, portrayed as …

George Macdonald's Phantastes As A Bildungsroman Of Spiritual Reality, Hannah O'Malley

Senior Theses

George MacDonald's 1858 novel Phantastes is one of the first fantasy novels written for adults, but it has received little attention in part because of its confusing structure. I argue that Phantastes is best understood as a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation. While the Bildungsroman is usually a realist novel of commercial society, Phantastes’ fantasy elements allow the protagonist to grow up into a spiritual reality that contrasts with many commercial values. MacDonald uses the fantasy genre to show his protagonist's inner development as he learns humility, gains feminine and childlike virtues, and leaves behind the old self

Wave By Wave: A Fantasy Author's Guide For Refining A Creative Writing Style, Michael Bose

Senior Honors Theses

Writing a novel is a great undertaking. Many would-be writers have set out to create a novel and give up halfway through, uncertain where or how they failed. This project aims to help prospective authors get past that barrier. By analyzing one’s own writing style, a writer can ascertain greater insight into the strengths and weaknesses of one’s own work and therefore help rectify mistakes one might make otherwise, or learn to see a chapter from a new angle. The author will demonstrate this method on himself first by way of focused revisions. A sample chapter of a fantasy novel, …

Castles And Curses: An Analysis Of Speech Acts And Stereotype Threat In Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle, Jennifer Peña

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes significant moments and selected excerpts from Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, focusing on the protagonist Sophie’s character development and uses of magic through speech in relation to stereotype threat and speech act theory. This thesis connects recent scholarly conversations about stereotype threat to the metaphor of Sophie’s spoken magic as the means by which she establishes her own identity and reclaims power over her life. This thesis considers Jones’s reflections about connections between fantasy writing and reality, as well as the potential significance of those connections for children whose experiences are reflected in fantasy works …

The David Oberhelman Collection Of Science Fiction, Fantasy, And Tolkieniana At Oklahoma State University, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

In September 2020 I drove to the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Stillwater campus to see “The David Oberhelman J. R. R. Tolkien Collection” exhibit, on display on the Edmon Low Library’s second-floor mezzanine in the Lisa and Mark Snell Gallery.

Books Within Books In Fantasy And Science Fiction: “You Are The Dreamer And The Dream”, Phillip Fitzsimmons

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

This chapter discusses books that exist only within works of science fiction and fantasy—what the “List of Fictional Books” on Wikipedia calls a “fictional book” and what Claire Fallon calls “invented books” in her article for the Huffpost website, “Fictional Books Within Books We Wish Were Real.”

Orts 77, 2022, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The last two and half years have seen big changes in how we connect and interact with each other, and this is especially the case for a Society like ours, where many are also geographically separated. While covid is still with us, hopefully things are slowly returning to the “new normal,” however, some of the changes that have occurred will have lasting significance, particularly the accelerated use of technology and move online. There is definitely still a place for face to face meetings, but Societies like ours also need to adapt, and a recurring theme in this newsletter is change. …

Tea, Fiction, And The Imperial Sensorium, Kate Thomas

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

This article explores a cultural paradox in nineteenth-century England: that tea, a colonially sourced comestible, was figured as a curative for the exhaustions incurred by building and administering an empire. Pursuing the idea that colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of both colonised and coloniser, I trace how tea – as a stimulant and a palliative – was an agent in mediating the highs and lows of imperial feeling. I correlate sitting down and tea-drinking with the settlings of colonial annexation and with the consumption and production of fiction, specifically the genres of fantasy and sensation fiction. Writers engaged include Wilkie Collins, …

David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus: An Anti-Fantasy, Bryan Wysopal

Masters Theses

This is a study of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) in which I argue that the novel is an anti-fantasy, that is, a fantasy that negates certain tropes common to the genre as part of the author’s wider intentions for writing. I contextualize Lindsay by comparing him to several authors of his time who also worked in the mode of fantasy, then explain how the generic traits of the novel are handled unconventionally to promote Lindsay’s personal philosophy. I explore Lindsay’s treatment of the basic generic traits of the hero and his quest, the imaginary world, and …

Fantasies Of Race And Place: White Nationalist And Alt-Right Undercurrents In Fantasy Roleplaying Games, Mark Hines

Theses and Dissertations--English

Representations of fantasy settings in roleplaying games often draw upon understandings of the medieval and early Renaissance world. This dynamic often extends to racial politics in such worlds. For the contemporary roleplaying game, this often means that game mechanics are built around race, species, or gender. Often, players interpret such mechanics as a means of bioessentializing race or practicing stereotypes rooted in Eurocentric morality and values.

This thesis examines the underlying rhetoric and implicit stakes by which race in fantasy worlds overlaps with the rhetoric and proposed stakes of White Nationalist and Alt-right actors. As fantasy roleplaying games, and especially …