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Full-Text Articles in Religion
Hope And Wonder In The Wasteland: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction As Tolkienian Fairy Story, Alfredo J. Mac Laughlin
Hope And Wonder In The Wasteland: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction As Tolkienian Fairy Story, Alfredo J. Mac Laughlin
Journal of Tolkien Research
J. R. R. Tolkien’s four functions of fantasy stories, as developed in his Andrew Lang lecture “On Fairy Stories” (1939), have become a key conceptual tool for discussing human beings’ attraction to fantasy stories, particularly when attempting to push the analysis beyond the literary into the aesthetic, and beyond the aesthetic into the existential. Applying this interpretive key to an analysis of the expanding genre of post-apocalyptic fiction reveals that post-apocalyptic stories, despite superficial differences, are surprisingly close to fairy stories in their aesthetic core and orientation, and that post-apocalyptic stories are well-suited to fulfill—albeit with their own distinctive aesthetic …
Binding With Ancient Logics: The In/Per/Sub-Version Of Faërian Drama In The Cabin In The Woods, Janet Brennan Croft
Binding With Ancient Logics: The In/Per/Sub-Version Of Faërian Drama In The Cabin In The Woods, Janet Brennan Croft
Journal of Tolkien Research
Faërian Drama is a term developed by J.R.R. Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy-stories,” which he describes as plays which the elves present to men, with a “realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism,” where the viewer feels he is “bodily inside its Secondary World” but instead is “in a dream that some other mind is weaving” (63-64). Smith of Wootton Major is a prime example from his own writing; other examples of the genre include Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and the movie Groundhog Day. When we read or view a work containing an example of …