Classes will focus on the relationship between the stories and print culture (particularly newspapers and illustrated magazines), criminology, and dominant social and political preoccupations of the age. The course will also examine the stories in their context as having inspired one of the first manifestations of a mass fan culture across various media, art forms, and cultures around the world. This fan culture proliferates to this day: classes will examine such phenomena as Victorian letter-writing campaigns; popular rewritings and visual representations in various forms; cartoons; film and television; and anime. Drawing on the works of several of the most prolific 20th-century fantasy authors, it examines how the experience of global conflicts shaped the creation of secondary worlds informed by the Middle Ages in the works of such authors as J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, and George R.R. Martin. This course provides important scholarly and cultural context for studying these works in relation to warfare and medievalism in fantasy literature. In so doing, it explores the complex relationship between real-life conflict and literature that has continued to shape popular culture to the present day.
Classes will focus on the relationship between the stories and print culture (particularly newspapers and illustrated magazines), criminology, and dominant social and political preoccupations of the age. The course will also examine the stories in their context as having inspired one of the first manifestations of a mass fan culture across various media, art forms, and cultures around the world. This fan culture proliferates to this day: classes will examine such phenomena as Victorian letter-writing campaigns; popular rewritings and visual representations in various forms; cartoons; film and television; and anime. Drawing on the works of several of the most prolific 20th-century fantasy authors, it examines how the experience of global conflicts shaped the creation of secondary worlds informed by the Middle Ages in the works of such authors as J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, and George R.R. Martin. This course provides important scholarly and cultural context for studying these works in relation to warfare and medievalism in fantasy literature. In so doing, it explores the complex relationship between real-life conflict and literature that has continued to shape popular culture to the present day.
