Based on myth? Check-in this case, the Welsh myths collected in The Mabinogion. Lloyd Alexander’s five-volume children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain, published between 19, at first seems like just the kind of old-fashioned fantasy series described above. Could we imagine a fantasy epic based instead on contemporary philosophy? On, say, existentialism? Turns out, that epic already exists. Even fantasy series conceived in opposition to the norms of the genre, like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, at most pull us up to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts of Milton and Blake and into a steampunk-inflected Victoriana. Lewis’s Narnia, or the Taoism of Ursula K. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and untethered to folklore or ancient religious traditions, like the Anglo-Saxon myths of The Lord of the Rings, the Christianity of C. What would a modern fantasy novel look like? I don’t mean one set in contemporary America, but one not beholden to the past: free from the vague medievalism of George R. To help us continue to pay our writers, please consider subscribing. This essay first appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly, Issue #8.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |