Fantasy literature has a long history of including a wide array of non-human characters, each more fantastical than the other. But can these characters also be used to question anthropocentric beliefs or are their portrayal just a way to reinforce those ideas? Because fantasy literature, especially earlier examples in the fantasy canon, tend to include a lot of allusions to religion in general and Christianity in particular, is the question more complex than it first might seem. This thesis therefore aims to examine the portrayal of non-human characters in the works of one of the last 25 years most bestselling fantasy authors, Philip Pullman. It’s a well-known fact that Pullman isn’t a fan of organized religion, which sometimes is very noticeable in his trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000). The trilogy includes several kinds of non-human characters and one of the most central aims of the thesis is to examine how these portrayals relate to the undermining or reproduction of anthropocentric ideas. Because Pullmans alternative theology is so central to the trilogy’s narrative, it will also play a part in my examination. / Denna uppsats är en undersökning av de icke-mänskliga karaktärer som figurerar i Philip Pullmans fantasytrilogi His Dark Materials (1995–2000). Litteratur inom fantasygenren har en lång historia av att inkludera en stor mängd av icke-mänskliga karaktärer, den ena mer fantastisk än den andra. Kan dessa karaktärer användas för att problematisera den antropocentrism som genomsyrar det västerländska samhället eller är deras gestaltande endast exempel på hur dessa föreställningar reproduceras? Eftersom fantasy, speciellt äldre exempel, ofta har allusioner till religion i allmänhet och kristendom i synnerhet, är frågan mer komplex än den först verkar. Pullman är känd för sin kritik av organiserad religion och i His Dark Materials skriver han fram en alternativ teologi. Denna uppsats undersöker således inte bara gestaltningen av de icke-mänskliga karaktärerna och hur de relaterar till eventuell problematisering och/eller återskapande av antropocentriska normer, utan också den roll Pullmans teologi spelar i relation till detta. I slutändan är också förhoppningen att denna uppsats kan visa hur litteratur, och framför allt den som faller inom fantasygenren, kan vara ett verktyg för att diskutera och problematisera antropocentriska föreställningar.

This dissertation follows a collection of agentive objects around and through the networks of humans and nonhumans in four disparate works of English literature: the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, William Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders, and Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. Applying the emergent discourses of object-oriented analyses, I posit the need for a critique that considers literary objects not as textual versions of real-world objects but as constructs of human imagination. What happens when we treat nonhuman or inanimate objects in literature as full characters in their own right? What work do nonhumans do to generate the story and the characters? How does our understanding of the human characters depend on the nonhuman ones? Most importantly, what motivates the agency of the fictive nonhuman? I argue that in this particular collection of texts, nonhuman agency stems from authorial nostalgia for the Garden of Eden: a time long past in which humans, nonhumans, and God existed in perfect harmony. Each text preserves this collective memory in a unique way, processing the myth as the author's cultural moment allows. The Dream of the Rood chapter uncovers the complex network of mirrors between the poet, the fictive Dreamer, the True Cross who speaks to the Dreamer, and the reader(s) of the poem. I use Jacques Lacan's stages of psychosexual development to trace the contours of this network, and I demonstrate how the poet's Edenic vision takes the form of an early medieval feast hall in heaven in which God presides over a banquet table like Hrothgar over Heorot. The Rape of Lucrece chapter posits that a series of domestic actors (weasels, wind, door locks) join with various "pricks" in the poem in an attempt to protect Lucrece from her rapist, Tarquin. Through these objects, I investigate the limits of women's speech and its efficacy before concluding with a consideration of the poem's Edenic vision, a Humanist paradise-on-earth, in the guise of the Roman Republic. The next chapter follows a shorn section of hair through The Woodlanders as it performs various functions and is assigned responsibility and power by several different human characters in the novel. The hair acts within a network of "man-traps" that illustrate the dangers of human artifice in an industrial era, and it reveals to readers Hardy's certainty that we will never reclaim Eden in our postlapsarian world. Finally, I navigate the fantastic worlds of His Dark Materials with the aid of three powerfully agentive objects: a golden compass, a subtle knife, and an amber spyglass. The first and second, I insist, resist not only their user's intentions but also their author's, because they are imbued with so much life and power that the narrative cannot contain them. The spyglass, by contrast, performs exactly as it was designed to do, and reveals the secret of the perfectly symbiotic world of the creatures called mulefa, who model for us a very contemporary new Eden that is populated by hybrids, sustained by materialism and sensuality, and presided over by earthly individuals rather than an omniscient Creator. Pullman's trilogy brings us back to the Garden but insists that our fallen state is our triumph rather than our tragedy.

While the theatrical works of Jules Verne have gathered some critical attention over recent years, the text of the Voyage à travers l’Impossible has remained an obscure space in the author’s oeuvre or deemed unworthy by Vernian scholars. Jules Verne has predominantly been seen as a writer of adventure novels whereas the fantastic elements in his work have commonly been overlooked by critics. This thesis examines the ways in which the Voyage à travers l’Impossible amalgamates ideas that are representative not only of the Vernian work in general but also of the pre-freudian spirit of the nineteenth century. By viewing the play within the context of theatrical fantasy, this thesis opens up new paths of analysis in the genre. Part of this endeavour consists of a comparison with a seemingly disparate text: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which, similarly to Verne’s play, facilitates an exploration of the function of fantasy both in literary and theatrical terms as it was first adapted for the stage in 2003. During the course of this thesis I offer an analysis of the trilogy and proceed to cover new ground by comparing this to an analysis of the adapted text. For the purpose of my examination I establish a connection between the two texts by regarding the Voyage à travers l’Impossible and His Dark Materials as dominated by the literary motif of initiation according to the model introduced by Vernian specialist Simone Vierne. I subsequently interweave an array of theories on fantasy, psychoanalysis, topography and the body as part of my analysis of the literary fantastic. Texts by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, Irène Bessière, Mircea Eliade, Judith Butler and Vernian critics such as William Butcher are amply used in my readings of Verne and Pullman before I proceed to examine their relevance to the theatrical experience of the fantastic. An analysis of the adaptation of His Dark Materials offers the opportunity for fresh critical insights by creating new perspectives on the function of fantasy in its fluctuation from page to stage and vice-versa. It is through these different perspectives that I revisit old questions and introduce new ones such as the difference between fantasy and the fantastic, their regressive or progressive character, the modification of ii fantastic elements on the passage from the literary to the theatrical and from pre-modernism to post-modernism. Basing my analysis on stories of initiation, I suggest that fantasy evades exclusive association with either progress or regress and only remains faithful to the notions of passage and blurring of frontiers.

This thesis project examines Philip Pullman’s controversial trilogy, His Dark Materials (1995-2000), and its relationships in theme and content to John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667). Though Pullman has publicly discussed the influences of Paradise Lost on his trilogy, very little academic work has been published examining the similarities and differences between the two. Specifically, I analyze the paradigms of gender, family, and authority as they are represented by each text. I contrast Pullman's Lyra to Milton's Eve, drawing conclusions about the inherent meanings and differences in the two female protagonists and, consequently, the narrative worlds surrounding them. References cited include works examining His Dark Materials, Paradise Lost, and children's literature.

This thesis examines and explores the process of coming of age in successful fantasy fiction series, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novel and its prequel The Hobbit, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. In particular, it is suggested that the huge popularity of fantasy stems from the fact that it provides a representation of human agency significantly at odds with the everyday experience of an increasingly bureaucratized and financially-determined world. Analysis shows how fantasy texts provide a universal model that help younger readers to understand the process of maturity as individuation and entry into the intersubjective social world. The central protagonists of such texts have to learn to master concepts such as seeing oneself in the other through intersubjective dialogues, objectifying one’s self in the world, and coping with their own battles, in the process of finding their way to maturity. This fictional “quest” or “journey” provides a model for readers to assess their own realities and actions, which in turn has the effect of changing their understanding and enabling them to critique their own lives. It is demonstrated how these classic and widely translated works of fantastic literature, which reach a huge crossover readership, may be understood in terms of parallel transformational stages such as confusion, inattentional blindness, fear, courage and various attempts of learning the need for moderation. Overall, this analysis, comprising the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, education, behavioural economics, sociology, media, and history, explores the processes of transformation and maturation within fantasy literature. At the same time, the case for fantasy literature’s uniqueness in its capacity to reveal the mechanisms of human agency is substantiated within a theoretical framework.

Historians disagree on the reasons the Populist Movement and labor failed to achieve a political coalition. Some find the cause in a backward-looking Populist ideology that imagined solutions to the problems of rapid industrialization could be found in a yeoman republic. According to this view, rank-and-file Populists neither understood nor had sympathy with the problems facing workers in the mass industries of the late twentieth century. Others see Populism as a progressive movement that accepted industrialization but sought to bring it under government control so that its material advantages would benefit all citizens, especially the producer classes of farmers, laborers, and small businessmen. These historians blame the failure of a coalition to develop on the immaturity of the labor movement; it was not intellectually or organizationally advanced enough to appreciate Populists’ shared interests with workers or to accept their offer of a coalition. Richard Hofstadter and Oscar Handlin are key scholars in the first school; Lawrence Goodwyn and C. Vann Woodward are acknowledged spokespersons for the second. This study attempts to address the coalition issue by examining the responses of Populist and Republican newspapers to the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Pullman Strike of 1894. These strikes were selected because both were notorious for their violence and bloodshed and both elicited armed government intervention on behalf of business. Newspapers were examined around the time of the strikes to gain a sense of local Populist sympathy with labor and of its commitment to a political coalition of farmers and workers. Populist response was compared to opinions expressed in Republican newspapers to determine if significant ideological differences existed between the Parties. Reviewing newspapers throughout the state and for events that occurred two years apart served as a check on regional and chronological variations. In all, over 400 newspaper editions were reviewed. The study’s findings solidly support to the perspective that depicts Populism as actively seeking a coalition based on a realistic understanding of labor’s position in an industrial economy. Universal editorial stances in favor of labor also advance the position that this was an authentic grass-roots expression and not simply a reflection of national leadership ideology. All Populist newspapers called for a political coalition of farmers and laborers. Populist response was markedly different than Republican. With a few exceptions, Republican newspapers took the side of capital. Further, this investigation revealed no evidence of desire to return to an imaginary yeomen republic in Populist newspapers. The study also examined the newspapers for instances of anti-Semitism and nativism associated with Homestead and Pullman. There was little evidence of either. While this might not be surprising with regard to anti-Semitism since the strikes did not revolve around issues of banking or credit, it is significant with regard to nativism. Anti-foreigner sentiment was often associated with strikes and with the importation of cheap, European labor. If nativism infected the Populist Movement, as is claimed by many historians who see it as a reactionary movement that practiced status politics, it should have been reflected in the pages of these newspapers. Its absence raises questions about negative conceptualizations of the Movement. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept, of History.

Zugl.: Magisterarbeit

Just as memory pervades our everyday lives, it pervades the lives of the characters and readers of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Acts of recall or recollection occur in almost every chapter as the characters in these novels devote much of the present to keeping in touch with some aspect of the past. Memory is integral to Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, highlighting the following problematic questions: Who are we and how do we relate to the past? How is what we wish for the future grounded in the past and the present? Memory is at the core of constructivism, the active construction of reality by the individual through the use of mental activity. In this thesis I maintain that the central protagonists in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, Harry Potter and Lyra Belacqua, actively construct their "selves" from memories and narratives – their own and those of others – just as the novels' readers negotiate their own identities in the world outside of the novels. The constant recalling of the past to confirm and amply one's present creates a complex web of remembering and forgetting, assimilating and discarding, which we attempt to explicate through the use of culturally appropriate metaphors. The thesis comprises three chapters that correlate memory with genre, narrative, and technology respectively. I commence the thesis by exploring the idea of genre as collective memory. I position Harry Potter and His Dark Materials within the genre of heroic fantasy and examine how the monomyth provides readers with the memory triggers they require to decode the structure of these texts. The novels conform to and yet manipulate the preconceived patterns present in the heroic or "high" fantasy genre, where narrative, memory and identity are all linked by the desires of the stories' participants. Chapter Two applies Freud's concept of Nachtraglichkeit, which supposes the process of memory is one of incessant reconsideration or "retranslation", the reworking of memory traces in the light of later knowledge and experience. This conceptualisation of memory is compared to the common, but less productive, tendency to describe memory through objectifying metaphors, such as the idea that memory works analogously to a photograph. Chapter Three addresses how knowledge and experience in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials are furnished by prosthetic memory devices, such as photographs, the Pensieve, the alethiometer and the Amber Spyglass, “that permit us to transcend "raw" biological limits – for example, the limits on memory capacity or limits on our auditory range” (Bruner, Acts of Meaning 34). The novel's protagonists are then armed with these devices in trying to make sense of the landscapes they inhabit. Ultimately, we are all story-tellers (for better or for worse), weaving our self-narratives from material gleaned from the collective memories and prosthetic memory devices of the society we belong to, our own experiences, and the tales of others, trying to achieve the uniformity of consciousness and an awareness of the connection between the actions and events of the past, and the experience of the present, which are fundamental to a sense of individual identity.

This thesis investigates quantum physics narratives for non-physicists, covering four interlocking modes of writing for adults and children, fictional and nonfictional, from 1900 to the present. It brings together three separate scholarly fields: literature and science, science fiction, and science communication. The thesis has revealed parallels between the approaches to quantum physics in these disparate narratives that have not been addressed before, shedding new light on the mutual influences between science and narrative form. The thesis argues that similar narrative tropes have been employed in popular science writing and in fiction across all age groups, changing non-physicists' ideas of quantum physics. This understanding differs significantly from the professional understanding of quantum physics, as I establish by means of a series of case studies, including popular science books for adults by Alastair I.M. Rae, George Gamow and Robert Gilmore; popularizations for children by Lucy and Stephen Hawking, Russell Stannard, and Otto Fong; children's fiction by Philip Pullman and Madeleine L'Engle; and fiction for adults by Greg Egan, David Walton, Blake Crouch, and Iain Pears. An analysis of authors who wrote for various audiences or in multiple genres, such as Fred Hoyle, Stephen Hawking, and Ian Stewart, shows how the same concerns and conflicts surface in a wide range of stories. Quantum physics is not yet fully understood; the Copenhagen, conscious collapse, many-worlds and other interpretations compete for both scientific and public acceptance. Influential physics communicators such as John Gribbin and Brian Cox have written popularizations in which they express a personal preference for one interpretation, arguing against others. Scientific conflict, which tends to be omitted from university teaching, is thus explicitly present in popularizations, making it clear to the reader that quantum physics is in a constant state of flux. I investigate the conflicts between Fred Hoyle and George Gamow, and Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind, to see how they undermine the alleged objectivity of science. The interplay between the different stories of quantum physics shows how the science not only shapes the stories: the stories shape the science, too.

This thesis is an examination of the effects of translation into French and of adaptation for the stage, in English, on the dialogue of Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights (published in North America as The Golden Compass). The study focuses on the speech of Lyra, the novel’s protagonist, in terms of both its linguistic qualities and the functions it supports within the novel and the trilogy of which it forms part, His Dark Materials. The study aims to identify the ways in which not just the linguistic surface of fictional speech is affected by translation and adaptation but also the degree to which the roles played by the dialogue in the source text are reflected or transformed in the different versions. The unusual research design, involving a comparison of the effects of interlingual translation and intermedial adaptation on the same text, consists of two main elements. In the first quantitative section, the relative incidence of three variables is measured for the purposes of identifying how features of spoken style and non-standard variation are treated. This analysis is followed by a detailed qualitative evaluation of a small number of dialogue passages that exemplify the key linguistic features and likely textual functions of Lyra’s speech in the novel. The passages concerned are compared with equivalent stretches of dialogue in the French translation and the theatrical script. The study finds evidence to suggest that Pullman uses dialogue in support of characterisation, plot, and also ideological and intertextual concerns. All of these aspects are affected, in subtle but significant ways, by the different decisions made by the translator and the dramatist in respect of Lyra’s speech. The study also finds that aspects of both user-related and situation-related variation in fictional speech may be worthy of further research.