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Human Myth-Making and Divine Creativity
Andrew Shamel
Published online:

07 November 2024

Print publication:

21 November 2024
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How do stories change the way we see both ourselves and the world? That question is the starting-point of this accomplished new contribution to narrative theology. Dr Shamel addresses what he calls mythopoieic fantasy: the fictionalised myth-making occupying those twilight borderlands between contemporary secularity and a religious worldview. Exploring key writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, and J. K. Rowling, the author argues that the mythic turn of popular culture signals an ongoing hunger for something 'more': more dense, more present, more 'real'. For Dr Shamel, mythopoieic fantasy and Christian theology represent the same human impulse: a desire to participate in the divine. Despite the avowed secularity of many authors of fantasy literature, the creativity of their mythic fictions reveals something of the theological character of all human making. The stories we tell in order to encounter the world as meaningful, argues Dr Shamel, in fact emerge within a theological horizon.

9 - Ishiguro and Genre Fiction
from Part II - Literature, Music, and Film
- By Doug Battersby
Edited by Andrew Bennett, University of Bristol
Book:

The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro

Published online:

16 March 2023

Print publication:

23 March 2023, pp 138-151
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Summary

Across his oeuvre, Ishiguro has imaginatively reworked a host of literary and artistic genres, from the debts to the gothic tradition in A Pale View of Hills to the science fiction thematics of Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun. At the same time, he has expressed ambivalence and even hostility towards the genres his novels draw on, prompting polemical responses from such influential writers of genre fiction as Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood. This chapter sheds light on Ishiguro’s distinctively equivocal relation to genre fiction by examining how his four most recent novels self-consciously engage with and exploit the genres of detective, dystopian, fantasy, and science fiction.

Conventions, Originality, Reproducibility
Kim Wilkins
Published online:

11 July 2019

Print publication:

08 August 2019
- Element
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Young adult fantasy (YA fantasy) brings together two established genres - young adult fiction and fantasy fiction - and in so doing amplifies, energises, and leverages the textual, social, and industrial practices of the two genres: combining the fantastic with adolescent concerns; engaging passionate online fandoms; proliferating quickly into series and related works. By considering the texts alongside the way they are circulated and marketed, this Element aims to show that the YA fantasy genre is a dynamic formation that takes shape and reshapes itself responsively in a continuing process over time.