IMC 2016: Sessions
Session 231: Medievalisms in 21st-Century Fantasy
Monday 4 July 2016, 14.15-15.45
| Sponsor: | Tales After Tolkien Society |
|---|---|
| Organiser: | Helen Young, Department of English, University of Sydney |
| Moderator/Chair: | Lesley Coote, Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval & Early Modern Studies, University of Hull |
| Paper 231-a | Aching for Tiffany: Terry Pratchett's (Re)Visionary Witches (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Medievalism and Antiquarianism |
| Paper 231-b | Medievalisms in Urban Fantasy Television: Buffy to Lost Girl (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Medievalism and Antiquarianism |
| Abstract | What does 'medieval' mean in contemporary popular culture? J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, shaped as it was by his medieval scholarship, is a starting point but not the end of contemporary mass-market medievalisms. No work has done more to paint the broad brushstrokes than The Lord of the Rings, the foundational text of the modern popular fantasy genre. This session of papers, sponsored by the Tales After Tolkien Society (www.talesaftertolkien.org), explores the diversity of medievalisms in the multi-media genre which is fantasy. From Young Adult Literature to video games and urban fantasy television, the papers ask: what ideologies are filtered through the idea of the medieval past? How does the present inflect representations of the past? To what ends does the past enter the popular culture of the present? The session builds on work in two recently published collections from Cambria Press, which are also sponsored by the Society: Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms and The Middle Ages in Popular Culture. |