scholarly journals TRANSFORMATION OF TRADITIONAL FANTASY CHARACTERS IN JOE ABERCROMBIE’S ‘THE FIRST LAW’ TRILOGY

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-98
Author(s):  
Elizaveta A. Ivanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Characteristic Feature ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Character Development ◽  
Fantasy Literature ◽  
Fantasy World ◽  
Adventure Fiction ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
Realistic Image ◽  
Chivalric Romance

Joe Abercrombie is a prominent contemporary British author famous for working in such a currently popular branch of fantasy as grimdark. The characteristic feature of Abercrombie’s novels is a conscious play with conventions, traditions and clichés of classical fantasy. This article is devoted to analysis of some central figures of Abercrombie’s The First Law trilogy: infamous warrior Logen Ninefingers, young nobleman Jezal dan Luthar, inquisitor Sand dan Glokta, and Bayaz, First of the Magi. The study aims to reveal, through comparison with classical models, how the mentioned characteristic feature of Abercrombie’s books manifests itself at the level of character development. The analysis shows that for creating his characters Abercrombie employs classical archetypes (a wise mentor, a young protagonist on a long journey to find treasure), which have roots, as much as fantasy literature itself, through adventure fiction and chivalric romance, in the fairy tale and mythos. However, in distinction from the authors of classical fantasy such as J.R.R. Tolkien and his numerous less talented followers, Abercrombie fills the characters who impersonate those archetypes in his works with psychological content that is not in accord with or even contradicts their traditional plot functions. Moreover, the writer changes and transforms the meaning of those functions, thus creating a complex, shadowy realistic image of his grimdark fantasy world instead of an optimistic fairy-tale one typical of earlier fantasy books. Abercrombie’s characters are not only realistic and impressive, they are built upon a three-element structure, more complex than that of characters in classical fantasy, which demonstrates the development of this kind of literature in general.

ONLY STAYING THE COURSE REALLY MATTERS

2021 ◽  
pp. 60-70
Author(s):  
Tatiana Yurchenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
New Novel ◽  
Adventure Fiction ◽  
Associative Connection ◽  
First Time ◽  
Positive Character ◽  
Critical Reviews

This article addresses the peculiarities of genre, style and personages of V. Sorokin’s new novel «Doctor Garin» (2021) with the reference to the latest critical reviews. It is stressed that «Doctor Garin» is the first writer’s experience in the adventure fiction and that because of this fact his novel for the first time has both the happy ending and a protagonist with positive character traits. Also the genres of romance, fairy tale, menippea and even stealth are mentioned as having some features in common with Sorokin’s novel. A special attention is paid to the associative connection with Russian literature.

scholarly journals How Does Male Readership Impact Character Portrayals in Contemporary Young Adult Adventure Novels?

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Goncea ◽  
Denise Greenwood
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Fantasy World ◽  
Adventure Fiction ◽  
Character Portrayals ◽  
Adventure Novels ◽  
Traditional Roles

Adventure fiction has traditionally followed a male protagonist in their search for selfhood and saviorhood. In the case of contemporary adventure fiction, authors are likely to follow the conventions of the adventure story in order to fit the genre’s stereotypes, which in turn reinforce gender stereotypes. This research paper discusses how contemporary young adult adventure novels typically perform within society’s narrowly defined perception of male readership. While the novels attempt to perpetuate powerful female roles, the male characters fit the fantasy of traditional, male adventure stories. After analyzing traditional stories such as Paradise Lost and Beowulf and modern novels such as Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, I conclude that there are disparities between the portrayal of male and female characters: from the main hero to the minor characters to the antagonists, young adult adventure novels tend to follow traditional tropes in order to satisfy male readers. Even if the authors subvert the patriarchal tropes by adding female heroines or helpful minor characters, the overall work of literature creates a fantasy world that reinforces the traditional roles and desires expected of young boys. In time, these portrayals could encourage male readers to act patronizingly or dismissively toward girls and women.

Climbing the Virtual Minbar of Cyberspace

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Varisco
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
The Real ◽  
Brothers Grimm ◽  
Fantasy World ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Wilhelm Grimm

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, so that I may climb the golden stair.BROTHERS GRIMM FAIRY TALEAs an avowedly secular anthropologist who studies Islamic cultures, what better way to orient myself than a fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm. As the story of Rapunzel is spun, a young maiden is trapped in a tower by a wicked witch and forced to let down her golden hair for the old dame to climb. One day along comes a prince, who with the best of intentions tries to free the girl but is pushed out of the tower by the witch and blinded by thorns. In the children’s version the couple is eventually reunited and lives happily ever after. In the real world ever before us there are seldom such happy endings. As scholars of Islam, institutionally holed up in the Ivory Tower of Academic Isolation, there are not many opportunities to let down our doctored hair and allow our golden voices to escape the classroom. One such opportunity, seemingly out of a fantasy world not even imagined by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, is opened up by the Internet.

scholarly journals THE FIRST SCREENING OF ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1903)

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
EKATERINA V. SALNIKOVA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Fantasy World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Almost All

The article is dedicated to the British silent film Alice in Wonderland by Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth, which was found and restored in 2010. The 12-minute film was unusually long for early cinema. Almost all of the survived credits annotate several short scenes at once, showing their interconnection or, conversely, apartness from each other. This suggests that some scenes were sold not separately, but as a series of scenes united by a credit. Structurally, each fragment of the film, consisting of 2–3 scenes, is similar to one episode of series. Therefore, the origin of the principles of seriality in cinema can be associated with film adaptations of fairy-tale stories. The concept of space demonstrates the inner duality of the Wonderland. The private part of it looks like an English landscape garden, while the space of the Queen and her entourage is designed as a classicist regular park. In his adaptation (2010) of Carroll’s fairy-tale, Tim Burton will further unfold the theme of duality and conflict inside the Wonderland. In the 1903 film adaptation, Alice was played by May Clark, a grown-up girl who worked at the Hepworth studio. The dreamlike nature of the screen reality is emphasized by the restraint of the amateur performers’ play and the unobtrusiveness of the fantastic, when the screen fantasy world is both similar and different from the everyday life. The marriageable age of the heroine and some of the scenes that look like Alice’s “going through the torments” make us interpret the action as the embodiment of her unconscious. The magic garden, where a young girl is so eager to get, a symbol of the desirable joys of an adult life, becomes a nightmare for Alice. The film was released in the same year as the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was established, and it merged into an era of revision of Victorian ideals and rejection of the perception of women in line with patriarchal values. Tim Burton’s film, created in the era of the new emancipation and reconsideration of gender, largely corresponds to the first screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, presenting the Victorian world as a generalized image of a society that suppresses the individual and naturally provokes protest.

Theological Views of Clive Staples Lewis in the Late Period of the Writer’s Work

2019 ◽  
Vol 131 (10) ◽  
pp. 436-444
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Efimova ◽  
Natalia Shekhireva ◽  
Lyubov Nesterova ◽  
Viktoria Lopatinskaya ◽  
Elena Abramtseva
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Late Period ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Chronicles Of Narnia ◽  
Fantasy World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lecture Courses

The relevance of the study is due to the fact that it attempts to analyze the artistic features, genre identity and the issues addressed in one of the most significant and monumental works of Clive Staples Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia written in the late period of the writer’s work (1950–1956). In this regard, the purpose of this article is to consider the fantasy world of C. S. Lewis and the traditions of the English literary fairy tale, the genre of fantasy as a semantics-forming genre, as well as the moral issues through the prism of the Gospel values, which are fundamental in understanding the characters of the heroes. The leading approaches to the study of this problem are the comparative method, the method of philological and philosophical analysis, the dialectical and deduction method, which allow to analyze in detail The Chronicles of Narnia as a work of art in all its genre, ideological and philosophical diversity. The article presents a detailed analysis of Clive Staples Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. It is revealed that this work represents a special synthesis of a number of genre structures, such as a parable, a fairy tale, and the genre of fantasy. It is substantiated in the paper that fantasy acts as the main genre structure, since it ‘generalizes’ the parable and the fairy tale, the reality and the fantasy world. The article shows that it is fantasy, as a synthesis of various genre elements, that ensures the unity of the ‘world’s dual nature’: the writer’s world, the country where he and his characters live, and the fictional country. The spiritual evolution of Lewis’ characters is accomplished through overcoming temptations, fear, indifference, and betrayal. The humaneness of Lewis’ moral position is manifested in the fact that he believes that God and his life-giving power is present in the life of every person, and the Joy of man is to meet with God. The materials of the article are of practical value for philologists, philosophers and theologists, and can also be used in lecture courses of “History of Foreign Literature of the XX Century” as well as “History of English Literature of the XX Century”, in lecture courses in cultural studies, history of philosophy of science, history of philosophy of religion, and in the teaching of theology.

scholarly journals COMICS AS A TRANSMEDIAL PHENOMENON: FROM A PRINTED TO A DIGITAL MEDIUM

2021 ◽  
Vol XII (35) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Victoria Yefymenko
Keyword(s):  
Characteristic Feature ◽  
Spatial Structure ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
High Angle ◽  
Digital Medium ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Page Layout ◽  
Fast Growing ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Digital Narratives

Comics have recently attracted the increased attention of theorists as a very dynamic and fast-growing genre. A characteristic feature of contemporary comics is their transmediality, i.e., exceeding the boundaries of the printed page and transforming to digital narratives. Transition to a digital medium gives a number of advantages, including the possibility of using different display modes, deeper immersion in the fictional world, greater degree of interactivity. This paper examines comics, which are adaptations of the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, identifies intertextual references and modifications of the comics versions. Intertextual references can be traced at the level of comics titles, names of the characters and their characteristics, semi-quotes, which paraphrase the original texts, besides, comics have a different temporal and spatial setting, they extend the scope of the storyworld. Particular attention has been paid to the page layout, such comics-specific features as panels, frames, speech balloons, speed lines, emanata, and onomatopoeic words. Print and digital comics are analysed using narratological and multimodal approaches. The analysis includes such narratological issues as narratorial and nonnarratorial strategies of representation, the temporal and spatial structure of a narrative, internal and external focalisation, as well as focalisation-marking devices (the eyeline match, the over-the-shoulder shot, the high-angle shot). A comic is a multimodal narrative, combining several modes, mainly visual and verbal. The aural mode is represented in comics by linguistic and visual signs, e.g., jagged borders of a speech balloon or the size and boldness of letters. Special attention has been given to the interaction between visual and verbal modes, in particular to the text-image relations. Our analysis has identified such types of the text-image relations as specification, exemplification, and enhancement. Comics have recently attracted the increased attention of theorists as a very dynamic and fast-growing genre. A characteristic feature of contemporary comics is their transmediality, i.e. exceeding the boundaries of the printed page and transforming to digital narratives. Transition to a digital medium gives a number of advantages, including the possibility of using different display modes, deeper immersion in the fictional world, greater degree of interactivity. This paper examines comics, which are adaptations of the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, identifies intertextual references and modifications of the comics versions. Intertextual references can be traced at the level of comics titles, names of the characters and their characteristics, semi-quotes, which paraphrase the original texts, besides, comics have a different temporal and spatial setting, they extend the scope of the storyworld. Particular attention has been paid to the page layout, such comics-specific features as panels, frames, speech balloons, speed lines, emanata, and onomatopoeic words. Print and digital comics are analysed using narratological and multimodal approaches. The analysis includes such narratological issues as narratorial and nonnarratorial strategies of representation, the temporal and spatial structure of a narrative, internal and external focalisation, as well as focalisation-marking devices (the eyeline match, the over-the-shoulder shot, the high-angle shot). A comic is a multimodal narrative, combining several modes, mainly visual and verbal. The aural mode is represented in comics by linguistic and visual signs, e.g., jagged borders of a speech balloon or the size and boldness of letters. Special attention has been given to the interaction between visual and verbal modes, in particular to the text-image relations. Our analysis has identified such types of the text-image relations as specification, exemplification, and enhancement.

scholarly journals The Originality of the Comic in the Prose of Venedict Marth

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 407-416
Author(s):  
E. A. Denisova
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Characteristic Feature ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
The State ◽  
Chinese Poetry ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Loss Of Self ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
French Novel

Venedikt Mart is the pseudonym of the poet and writer Venedikt Nikolaevich Matveev (1895–1937). He was born and lived in Vladivostok until 1920, where he published his poems in local newspapers and magazines, published his first collections in the printing house of his father, who was a writer and local historian Nikolai Amursky (Nikolai Petrovich Matveev), (1865–1941). Venedict Mart became famous for his futuristic poems and translations of Japa- nese and Chinese poetry. The collection “At the Love Crossroads of Fads” (1922) is a clear mockery of precision culture. The reference to the long-gone culture of past centuries is comical in that V. Marth’s pretentiousness of vocabulary and immoderate hyperbolism of short stories is stronger than in any French novel created by a writer-precision. The heroes’ love explanations take an unexpected turn, in which romantic stories are resolved in a comic manner. In June 1917, in St. Petersburg on Krestovsky Island, V. Mart wrote the book “Emerald Worms”. In one of the main refrains of the text: “You smile and Your smile will remain here on Earth – in March to enchant the autumn people...”, the author’s self-irony is noticeable, since in the book “You” means “Genius of the Cosmos” who reaches Immortality – this means that his works live forever. In the phrase “You stay in March,” the author cleverly uses the fact that his pseudonym coincides with the name of the month. This game with the reader is a characteristic feature of the entire work of the writer. In V. Mart’s prose of the late 1920s – early 1930s, an educational orientation and adherence to the “state order” are visible. The 1932 story “Dere – a Water Wedding” combines several artistic directions. Some fragments of the text are stylized like a fairy tale story. V. Mart confronts this artistic direction with the literature of fact, thereby creating a comic effect through which the author expresses the catastrophic nature of the process of loss of self-identification of a small people under the influence of the “new way of life”. In the collection “At the Love Crossroads of Fads” creates a comic effect through sheer mockery of precision culture. Here V. Mart uses fabulous motives, which he will extensively use in his prose. In the book “Emerald Worms” absurdity and the author’s self-irony are the main methods of the comic. Since the end of the 1920s, being under the supervision of the police and squeezed by the censorship framework from the explicit forms of the comic, V. Mart turns to hidden irony, which is read more at the stylistic level, for example, a deliberate combination of literary genres far from each other in one work.

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