Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T15:34:03.270Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Fantasy, Language and the Shaping of Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2023

Matthew Sangster
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Get access

Summary

This chapter considers how Fantasy is rooted in language’s ability to describe things that do not exist, arguing that this same ability is crucial for constructing the value systems that allow human cultures to operate. In intervening in conversations about meaningfulness and identity, Fantasy plays with heady stuff, but by explicitly parading its impossibility, it creates productive and revealing abstractions that can both playfully and critically interrogate received norms and languages of power. Fantasies ask whether the world we have made through language is the one we want, holding open imaginative spaces for alternatives that are by turns utopian, dystopian, revealingly similar and radically different. Key works discussed in this chapter include Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Plato’s Republic, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Books, Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×