My thesis reflects an assessment of The Lord of the Rings centering on the idea of a structure of opposites. For each place, race, character and object in The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien included an element which serves as an antithesis. In addition, the style, pacing, and language of the work also contain antithetical pairs which continually engage and propel the reader to the work's conclusion. I contend that this deliberate pairing of opposing elements adds depth and verisimilitude to the work. Tolkien was an avid student of what his contemporaries would have called "fantasy" or "fairy tales." While dismissed by many scholars as juvenilia, Tolkien and his predecessors the trailblazing folklorists and philologists the Grimm brothers took these works seriously as both serious narratives and fragments of a time for which the historical record is spotty. In examining these Old English, Old Norse, Old Germanic and folkloric works, Tolkien built a professional reputation as a literary critic. He studied the formalist elements of these tales such as plot, diction, characterization and pacing the same way other literary critics studied contemporary or "mainstream" historical works. I contend that Tolkien's work as a critic informed Tolkien as a writer in form and structure. My thesis highlights the deliberately shaped formalist element of antithetical pairs of races, places, objects and characters. In addition, the narrative pacing and style of the works reflect and author concerned with a deliberate paring of polarities. As my thesis examine the text for elements of plot, setting, pacing and characterization I primarily approach Tolkien from a formalist and narratological standpoint. Many of the points I mention are not new; critics have noted in passing some of the elements before essays or books that focus on another method of criticism. However, I believe that in pulling together a final tally of Tolkien's structural polarities I can explain how a work derided at its publication by critic Edmund Wilson as "juvenile trash" has endured to become the best selling work published in England, aside from the Bible.

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This study examines a small body of 19th-century American literature about the Antarctic: Adam Seaborn's (pseud.) Symzonia (1820), Edgar Allan Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Peter Prospero's (pseud.) "The Atlantis" (1838-39), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Monikins (1835) and The Sea Lions (1849). These were written in a transitional phase in the history of the Antarctic. At the start of the period, the region was almost completely unknown. Towards the end of the period, however, the region had been mapped in its essence, and the existence of an Antarctic continent had been verified. For complex reasons, the region came into cultural focus in the U.S. during the 1820s to 40s, culminating in the first major American scientific expedition in 1838-42 to explore the South Seas and the Antarctic. The study is primarily historical, tracing ideas to their historical contexts in order to determine what these authors used the unknown space of the Antarctic for. These texts were written in imaginative response to contemporary notions of the Antarctic, which is reflected in the mode of representation. The literature is in the mode of speculative fiction-most of texts imagining a tropical, inhabited Antarctic-up until the region is explored, at which point it turns to realism. The texts fall into three categories: the utopian, liminal, and realistic. The utopian texts-Symzonia, The Monikins, and "The Atlantis"-are works of social criticism, using the blank space of the Antarctic to treat a diverse range of issues, including politics, evolutionary theories, race, and gender. Poe's "MS" and Pym represent the liminal category; they dramatize the anticipation of an imminent Antarctic discovery, narrating up to a point of revelation, only to stop short. The Sea Lions is the only realistic text, coming after the Antarctic is explored. Here the knowledge of the Antarctic has solidified into the environment we know today, but with religiously symbolical overtones.