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.

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Syftet med uppsatsen är att belysa hur olika grupper framställs och förhåller sig till varandra vid kulturmöten på grundval av deras etnicitet i en skönlitterär fantasyserie och hur detta kan bidra till att upprätthålla eller problematisera koloniala maktrelationer som den västerländska kulturella normen. I denna studie analyseras fantasybokserien The Earthsea Cycle och de grupper som befolkar dess fiktiva värld: det hardiska och det kargiska folket. Med hjälp av bland annat begreppet den Andre, som syftar till att beskriva de som avviker från den egna gemenskapen, ämnar studien uppmärksamma vad som explicit förmedlas genom exempelvis karaktärsbeskrivningar och händelseförlopp samt synliggöra mer implicita mönster och strukturer i bokseriens framställning av de olika grupperna. Studiens resultat visar att relationen mellan de olika grupper i The Earthsea Cycle till stor del präglas av en dikotomi. Grupperna definieras i förhållande till varandra och framstår således som motpoler. Genom synen på den Andre och de egenskaper som tillskrivs respektive grupp är det möjligt att likna de fiktiva grupperna vid motsatsförhållandet mellan Occidenten och Orienten. Detta förhållande utmärks således även av en hierarkisk struktur till följd av att det orientaliskt kodade folket över lag attribueras vad som framstår som sämre egenskaper som outvecklat, våldsamt och irrationellt, i enlighet med redan befintliga stereotypa föreställningar. Detta folk underordnas följaktligen en kultur som tillskrivs en västerländskt kodad karaktär, vilken innefattar karaktärsdrag som fredlig, förnuftig och progressiv.

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No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of English, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-69).

Ursula K Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) because she wanted to explore the limitations of gender and sexuality in a way that reflected the ongoing epistemic changes in her society. She created the Gethenians, an ambisexual, androgynous species that live most of their life without an assigned sex, making their entire society lack the concept of gender. Le Guin writes in her essay “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” (1988) that she wanted to erase gender to find out what was left. This essay will examine how the themes of gender and sexuality are explored in the Left Hand of Darkness, questioning if gender was actually erased. It is Le Guin’s linguistic choices and assumption that androgyny is masculine that assigns male gender to the Gethenians, without them having a biological sex. This renders the female experience invisible, creating a severe imbalance between the male and female part of them. However, by using Genly Ai - one of the main narrators, a male character from Terra (Earth) - gender is still presented as something fluid and non-binary, even though the Gethenians are generally perceived as more masculine. Sexuality, on the other hand, is more fluid and open, presenting a completely different idea than the norm present in the world of the reader. On Gethen, sexuality is celebrated when it is controlled and separate from everyday life, contrary to the celebration of a constant, masculine and aggressive view on sex. In conclusion, The Left Hand of Darkness presents the reader with a safe and comfortable version of androgyny, ultimately leaving many readers wanting more from the thought experiment. / Ursula K Le Guin skrev Mörkrets Vänstra Hand (1969) eftersom hon ville undersöka de begräsningar som är associerade med kön och sexualitet på ett sätt som reflekterade de pågående epistemiska förändringarna i samhället. Hon skapade folket Gethenians, en ras av människor som är androgyna och ambisexuella vilket gör att de lever majoriteten av sina liv utan kön i ett samhälle där konceptet genus inte existerar. Le Guin skriver i sin uppsats ”Is Gender Necesarry? Redux” (1988) att hon ville radera genus för att ta reda på vad som finns kvar. Denna uppsats kommer att utforska hur två teman, genus och sexualitet, hanteras i Mörkrets Vänstra Hand, samt ifrågasätta huruvida genus faktiskt blev raderat. Det är, i slutändan, Le Guins lingvistiska val och antagande att androgynitet är maskulint som ger Gethenierna ett manligt genus, även om de saknar ett fysiskt kön. Detta gör att den kvinnliga upplevelsen blir helt osynlig och skapar en tydlig obalans mellan den feminina och den maskulina sidan av dessa varelser. Dock, genom användningen av Genly Ai - en av berättarna, en manlig karaktär från Terra (Jorden) - så presenteras kön fortfarande som någonting icke-binärt och diffust. Sexualitet å andra sidan, presenteras som mer öppet och naturligt i jämförelse med normerna som existerar i läsarens värld. På Gethen är sexualitet firat när den är kontrollerad och en separat del av livet, i motsats till normen som firar en konstant, maskulin och aggressiv version av sex. Sammanfattningsvis presenterar Mörkrets Vänstra Hand läsaren med en trygg och bekväm version av androgynitet, vilket gör att många läsare vill få ut mer av/känner att något saknas i tankeexperimentet.

ABSTRACT Ursula K. Le Guin is an American author of novels, short stories, poems, children's books, and essays; she predominantly writes science fiction and fantasy. Le Guin first began publishing in the 1960s and continues her work today including speaking engagements in and around her home in Portland, Oregon. Her most recent publication is The Real and Unreal: Selected Stories (2 vol) from 2012. Le Guin is particularly known for her books set in the Hainish Universe. These short stories and novels comprise what is sometimes referred to as the Hainish Cycle and discuss various themes of gender, ecology, religion, and politics. The universe is believed to be seeded from and governed principally by the world known as Hain. The Hainish global government undergoes a transformation from its original iteration as the imperial League of All Worlds into the more cosmopolitan peace-keeping Ekumen and while the publication chronology of the works and the internal chronology of the universe differ there is a notable political evolution from the League to the Ekumen. By studying the characters of Raj Lyubov, Genly Ai, and Havzhiva from the novels The World for World is Forest (1972), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) this paper will examine assumed cultural understandings regarding themes of empire, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, and governance by building on the criticism of James W. Bittner and David M. Higgins. I will utilize the theoretical science fiction frameworks of Steve Shaviro and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. in conjunction with Michael Ignatieff's theory Empire Lite to demonstrate Le Guin's capacity to continually envision new parameters for alien contact and negotiation and explain how her work in world building and character development challenges readers to question existing concepts of empire through the evolution and exhaustion of two systems of global governance.

The literary utopia is often accused of being an outmoded genre, a graveyard for failed social movements. However, utopian literature is a surprisingly resilient genre, evolving from the static, descriptive anatomies of the Renaissance utopias to the novelized utopian romances of the late nineteenth century and the self-reflexive critical utopias of the 1970s. The literary utopia adapts to the needs of the moment: what form(s) best represent the fears and desires of our current historical period? In this dissertation I perform a close reading of three exemplary texts: John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). While I address topics specific to each text, my main focus is on the texts’ depictions of utopia and their spatialized narrative forms. In Stand on Zanzibar Brunner locates the utopian impulse in three registers—the political/bureaucratic, the technical/scientific, and the human(e)—and explores how their interplay constitutes the utopian space. In Always Coming Home Le Guin renovates the classical literary utopia, problematizing its uncritical advocacy of the “Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist-West” but preserving much of the older utopia’s form. In Cloud Atlas the networked narrative structure reflects and enables the heterogeneous, non-hierarchical, and processual utopian communities depicted in the novel. In these science fictional works the spatialized techniques of juxtaposition, discontinuity, and collage —commonly associated with a loss of historical depth and difference—are used to create utopian spaces founded on contingency and human choice. I contend that science fiction is a historical genre, one that is invested in representing societies as contingent historical totalities. Science fiction’s generic tendencies modify the context that a spatialized narrative form functions in, and in changing the context changes its effects. By utilizing a spatialized narrative form to embody a contingent practice, Brunner, Le Guin, and Mitchell cast the future—and the present—as historical, as something that can be acted upon and changed: they have provided us with strategies for envisioning better futures and, potentially, for mobilizing our visions of the future for positive change in the present.

High Fantasy is extremely popular, with publication and sales of High Fantasy titles outnumbering Science Fiction for thirty years, yet Fantasy is less respected by reviewers of the Speculative Fiction genre. One reason for this is that High Fantasy often fails to adequately address culturally or politically significant issues. Respected Science Fiction writers, such as Octavia Butler, on the other hand, use the issues such as discrimination and persecution on the basis of race and gender. In my exegesis I explore the ways in which High Fantasy has explored the problems of discrimination and persecution. In my novel, The T'En Exiles, I create a world populated by differently abled races. The ' ordinary ' people resent and fear the gifted people, who are less numerous and marginalised. Among the gifted there are those who are aware of mystical powers and those who can manipulate them; because of this a strict hierarchy has evolved. There is also a divide between the genders because the power of the females is expressed differently to that of the males. In The T'En Exiles I use the device of cognitive estrangement, a technique common in both Fantasy and Science Fiction, to examine discrimination and persecution. In particular in terms of how it affects individuals. In the exegesis I examine the ways in which issues of discrimination and persecution are dealt with in contemporary High Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the ways in which a more comprehensive and sensitive treatment of these issues in High Fantasy can address some concerns about the marginalisation of the sub-genre.