What is it about Middle-Earth and its inhabitants that has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world? And why does Tolkien's visionary creation continue to fascinate and inspire us eighty-five years after its first publication? Beginning with Tolkien's earliest influence—and drawing on key moments from his life, Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century is an engaging and vibrant reinterpretation of the beloved author's work. Not...

Death and Immortality in Middle-earth: Proceedings of The Tolkien Society Seminar 2016 J.R.R. Tolkien deplored allegory and rejected any suggestion that The Lord of the Rings has an inner meaning or message. In reading back the tale, however, he became aware of a dominant motif: 'The real theme for me is… Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race "doomed" to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the...

Science Fantasy blends science fiction AND fantasy, so it tends to be bolder and more highly colored than pure science fiction. In the middle of the last century, the British magazine SCIENCE FANTASY created its own distinctive strains of fantasy narrative, most famously by such writers as Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, Michael Moorcock, and Thomas Burnett Swann, among others. This book looks closely at the whole trajectory of that...

"The most enjoyable work on Tolkien I have read in many years" Christina Scull Aragorn. Strider. King. Ranger. He is one of the most famous and celebrated characters in the history of popular literature. But, how much do you really know about the man? This book is a biographical study of Aragorn, covering his ancestry, pre-birth prophecies, the various stages of his life, and his death early in the Fourth Age. There is particular emphasis on the struggles...

This volume of proceedings contains papers from the largest and, perhaps, most diverse Tolkien Society Seminar to date. Following a much-contested Call for Papers, 'Tolkien the Pagan? Reading Middle-earth through a Spiritual Lens' explores Tolkien's complex use of religious ideology, the readers' approach to their beloved fictional world via unusual spiritual and philosophical channels, and how Middle-earth almost became a faith unto itself.

The papers focus on the theme of worldbuilding in fantasy and science fiction, in all its forms, in different media. Featuring papers from Ricardo Victoria-Uribe and Martha Elba González- Alcaraz, Allen Stroud, Sarah McPherson, Sébastien Doubinsky, Cheryl Morgan, Peter Garrett, Eugen Bacon, Octavia Cade, Enrico Spadaro, Tatiana Fajardo, Claire Burgess, Ellen Forget, Kevin Cooney, Jyrki Korpua, Rachel Jones.

Poetry and Song in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien: proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 2017. J.R.R. Tolkien regarded himself 'chiefly as a poet' (Carpenter, The Inklings, p. 29) and the importance of poetic diction and its most potent form, song, provides a powerful leitmotif to his mythological universe. Following the publication of Tolkien's two verse works: The Lay of Atrou and Itroun (2016) and Beren, and Luthien (2017), the Tolkien Society...

One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera—a recent subgenre movement of science fiction—is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and...

The culture we live in shapes us. We also shape the culture we live in. Stories we tell play critical roles in this shaping. The heart of cultural transmission is how stories and the way we shape knowledge come together and make a novel work. How do they combine within the novel? Genre writing plays a critical role in demonstrating how this transmission functions. Science fiction and fantasy illustrate this through shared traditions and understanding,...

The New Ray Bradbury Review is designed principally to study the impact of Bradbury's writings on American culture and is the chief publication of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies-the archive of Bradbury's writings located at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. Like its pioneering predecessor, the one-volume review published in 1952 by William F. Nolan, The New Ray Bradbury Review contains articles and reviews about Bradbury but...