Double Fantasy

Of the fifteen fantasy novel covers, there seems to be an implicit standard in employing Arthurian and medieval themes among most illustrators. The heavily romanticized rendering of the fantasy story as an archetypical tale with green dragons, enchanted weapons, and gratuitous cleavage operates as a genre identifier, similar to the burly-haired lumberjacks of romance novels. While it may seem detrimental for the genre to don a homogeneous veil, the purpose of collective identity remains. When…

Stephen R. Lawhead's science fiction and fantasy series “Bright Empries” seems to be like no other. Especially since it was written by him. Unlike most of Stephen R. Lawhead's work that deals with mixing mythology and historical events, “Bright Empires” does neither. Instead, they focus on humans going to other dimensions and what it would be like to visit worlds, not just countries, that were not their own. With the release of the fifth book in the series in 2014, called “The Fatal Tree”, the…

Young children are unable to fathom the difference between fact and fantasy and there are various factors that contribute to this theory. A study published in the journal, Cognitive Science, consists of children between the ages of five and six and their ability to identify the nature of the protagonist in three different stories: reality-based, fantasy-based, and religious-based was questioned (Corriveau, Chen, & Harris, 2015). The results indicated that children exposed to religion or raised…

But this book does not offer a single page of original and unpublished work. What then is the need, now, for such a book? (Beren and Lúthien 11) That, as a Danish prince once said, is the question. There are, indeed, no words of J. R. R. Tolkien here that have not already appeared in The Silmarillion or The History of Middle-earth, and there are many which have been left out. As Christopher points out in the preface, this particular tale changed dramatically over the years, becoming more and…

As discussed in class, we looked into Tolkien's mind to observe his ideas on how fantasy stories should function in order to create a successful “world” for a reader to dive into. In an essay “On Fairy Stories,” written by Tolkien, he describes to us what he believes makes a “fairy story,” a “fairy story.” One of these rules he describes is Escape and the ways a story can connect, not only within itself but, with the reader in order to create a total immersion between the reader and book. When I…

by Christopher Golden that has been renamed in current publication from its former name of Outcast. The first novel in the Magic Zero series of novels was Battle for Arcanum first published in 2013. With Christopher Golden a household name in the fantasy fiction genre and the series having already established itself under its former name, the novel achieved massive success upon publication. Even as the novel may be read as a standalone, it has some of the major characters from the titles in the…

Pontalis’s ‘structural understanding of fantasies as myths of origin’ and Freud’s ‘original fantasy’, Williams shows how all three genres explore enigmas of sexual desire, sexual difference and self. Pornography addresses sexual desire and its unknown origin, by creating a fantasy of the perfect moment where a seducer and the seduced may meet and share moments of pleasure ‘on time’. Unalike pornography, horror explores sexual difference through the fantasy of castration, which usually occurs…

instant hero regardless of the fact that a true hero is a product of their environment, not their mind. In Don Quixote’s fantasies, he wants to become a legend in his own time. Quixote’s private world of fantasies, which he has created from his library, is interlaced with the world of reality that he encounters. At many times, it involves people who are not aware of his fantasies; therefore, this causes a conflict between himself and those he interacts with in his adventures. Some people…

The narrator in the short story, “Araby” by James Joyce, resides not in a fantasy world full of dragons and wizards, but in a fantasy-like state of mind that is set on the theme of escape. Joyce describes North Richmond Street as, “... dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits…”(3); there is a reoccurring theme of darkness. The young narrator lives in this…

Fantasies provide an escape from the daily hassles of life. When one thinks of a fantasy, one may conjure up things like unicorns flying in the wind, elves dancing around a Christmas tree, or like the poem expresses, touching dragonflies and stars. All incidences are unreal, imaginative. Ernest Bormann, however, had another perspective on fantasy altogether. Fantasy is dimensionally acquired through dramatization and rhetorical vision. “Rhetorical vison is considered to be construction of a…