Advent 7 Non-Fiction

I'll let you in on a very badly kept secret. The bibliography in my doctoral thesis runs to thirty pages. I haven't read every page of everything cited. I know, shocking isn't it. I don't speak for all academics when I say this but my guess would be that I speak for a majority. The way things work is that your first port of call when faced with a learned text is the index to check for direct references to the item you are researching. This is only the same as the way one uses legal texts when advising on a topic. It's not cheating.

Anyway, I mention all of this because as part of my reading this year I pulled a critical text off the dusty shelf and read it from start to finish. The lucky text was Lucie Armitt's Fantasy Fiction: an Introduction. This one doesn't get a mention in the aforementioned thesis, rather it was acquired for a module on the degree course. It's surprisingly readable if a little on the dry side. I was going to quote a pseudish passage about homoeroticism in Lord of the Rings, but that sort of thing is too easy a target for the cynical. Oh and we should say that Armitt has a point about Tolkien. No, here is a nice take on how fantasy fiction justifies its place in Genre Studies and the wider world of literary criticism:

There is no more pertinent or influential question in the current field of fantasy than the question of the role genre plays in it. We have established fantasy, here, as the type of writing that questions what happens beyond the horizon, but in doing so we remain defined by that boundary, even in the act of crossing it. In effect, the boundary marks the point at which the worlds begin and end - the Primary World versus the Secondary World, the point at which sleep becomes dream. In realism we never reach those boundaries, and so are less conscious of their presence. As a result the realist world gives the illusion of being boundless, but only because we never get the chance to test its limits.