Helen Young
Helen Young is a Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. Helen completed a Bachelor of Arts/Creative Arts (Hons I) in English and Creative Writing at the University of Wollongong (2002), and a PhD in English at the University of Sydney (2007) exploring postcolonial elements of Middle English romance, and was published as a book in 2010. Helen has taught in English, Cultural Studies and Communications, and also worked as a researcher in education and nursing.
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Books by Helen Young
The introduction is available via Google Books, and ebook and hardcover editions via Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Race-Popular-Fantasy-Literature-Interdisciplinary/dp/1138850233
For copyright reasons it cannot be made available through academia.edu
From advertisements to amusement parks, themed resaturants, and Renaissance fairs twenty-first century popular culture is strewn with reimaginings of the Middle Ages. They are nowhere more prevalent, however, than in the films, television series, books, and video games of speculative genres: fantasy and science fiction. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies and George R. R. Martin’s multimedia Game of Thrones franchise are just two of the most widely known and successful fantasy conglomerates of recent decades. Medievalism has often been understood as a defining feature of fantasy, and as the antithesis of science fiction, but such constructs vastly underestimate the complexities of both genres and their interactions. “Medieval” has multiple meanings in fantasy and science fiction, which shift with genre convention, and which bring about their own changes as authors and audiences engage with what has gone before in the recent and deeper pasts.
For several decades after medievalism was established as a field of legitimate scholarly enquiry in the 1980s and 1990s, popular culture iterations were largely viewed with some suspicion if not outright disdain. The twenty-first century, however, has seen growing recognition of the importance of what has been termed the “neomedieval”: medievalisms which playfully reimagine the past rather than attempting historically accurate re-creation.
Science fiction and fantasy, with their necessarily impossible worlds, are perhaps the ultimate in neomedievalism. Earlier volumes have examined some of the ways in which contemporary popular culture re-imagines the Middle Ages, offering broad overviews, but none considers fantasy, science fiction, or the two together. The focused approach of this collection provides a directed pathway into the myriad medievalisms of modern popular culture. By engaging directly with genre(s), this book acknowledges that medievalist creative texts and practices do not occur in a vacuum, but are shaped by multiple cultural forces and concerns; medievalism is never just about the Middle Ages.
Studies of genres, moreover, often focus on a single medium—fiction, film, or television. Each section, and some individual chapters in the volume explores at least two, reflecting the multimedia nature of contemporary popular culture in general and genres in particular. By exploring the way medievalist discourses travel and shift across media within connected genres, the volume explores some of their internal complexities.
Studies of popular genres illuminate social and cultural trends and concerns, while medievalisms reveal far more about the milieu in which they were created than they do about the Middle Ages. By exploring how popular genres develop, pulling on and being pushed by changing approaches to “the medieval,” this collection sheds light on twenty-first century popular culture’s dynamic and at times conflicting moves, and those of the society which creates and consumes it. Individual chapters take diverse approaches, both synchronic and diachronic, some offering detailed case studies and others broader reviews of themes and trends. The variety enables a detailed picture of the complexities of fantasy and science fiction medievalisms to emerge.
The first section explores the reception of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the two chapters together demonstrate that fantasy’s “Tolkienian” medievalism is not that of a single author, but of many readers and creators making and remaking it in different media. The second shows that the dark and dirty medievalism of Game and Thrones and the subgenre of gritty fantasy is complex and at times contradictory. It illustrates the impact of market trends and forces on popular culture texts and the ways they are understood to engage with the past. The third section demonstrates that medievalism has been at the heart of science fiction since the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1960s, and illustrates that use of medieval material and reference points connects it with fantasy as much as it separates the two genres. The final chapter shows that in the twenty-first century, fantasy definitions of medievalisms are expanding to include more than just references to the European Middle Ages which have long been conventional in the genre.
Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms will be of much interest to scholars of fantasy and science fiction, and of medievalism.
Studies of popular culture medievalisms have not, to date, examined the interconnections of the two in any organized fashion, yet genre is a major framework structuring representation, production, consumption, and the making of meaning in popular culture. The conventions of any genre shape, even if they do not entirely circumscribe, what is possible in any constitutive creative work—this is as true of medievalism as it is of any other element—while genres themselves are shaped by the anxieties of the society which creates them. Given that a high proportion of today’s popular culture medievalisms are filtered through genre, this volume’s exploration of their interconnections sheds light not only on the nature of both, but on social issues and identity constructs of the present cultural moment.
Rather than focusing on the medievalism of a single genre, this volume puts multiple genres in dialogue and considers both medievalism and genre to be frameworks from which meaning can be produced. Chapters in it explore works from a wide range of genres—children’s and young adult, historical, cyberpunk, fantasy, science fiction, romance, and crime—and across multiple media—fiction, film, television, video games, and music. The range of media types and genres enable comparison, and the identification of overarching trends, while also allowing comparison of contrasting phenomena.
As the first volume to explore the nexus of medievalism and genre across such a wide range of texts, this collection illustrates the fractured ideologies of contemporary popular culture. The Middle Ages are more usually, and often more prominently, aligned with conservative ideologies, for example around gender roles, but the Middle Ages can also be the site of resistance and progressive politics. Exploring the interplay of past and present, and the ways writers and readers work engage with them demonstrates the conscious processes of identity construction at work throughout Western popular culture. The collection also demonstrates that while scholars may have by-and-large abandoned the concept of accuracy when considering contemporary medievalisms, the Middle Ages are widely associated with authenticity, and the authenticity of identity, in the popular imagination; the idea of the real Middle Ages matters, even when historical realities do not.
Papers by Helen Young
Mr Trick's aside might be a comment not just on Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sunnydale but on fantasy worlds in general; they are widely thought of as almost exclusively of the "Caucasian persuasion," lacking racial diversity in characters, themes, and structures and being exclusively concerned with white, Western culture. Indeed some works, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and film adaptations of it directed by Peter Jackson, have been accused of outright racism (Chism, "Race"). Charges of racism, and defenses against them, form a significant part of the scholarly literature and public discussions of representations of race in fantasy worlds (e.g., Rearick; Kirkland). A common perception is that most fantasy, like its sister genre science fiction, rarely addresses issues of racism and that minority readers are often not interested in it because it generally pays lip-service at best to such questions (Westfahl 72). Popular fantasy, however, often generates its narrative trajectory from encounters between different cultures and species. Further, its worlds are commonly populated by different, often mutually suspicious or inimical species such as elves, dwarves, humans, and goblins. Such generic features strongly suggest that an investigation of representations of racial and cultural difference might be illuminating.
Read more: http://periodicals.faqs.org/201009/2224380021.html#ixzz1jqRyTGQ3
The introduction is available via Google Books, and ebook and hardcover editions via Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Race-Popular-Fantasy-Literature-Interdisciplinary/dp/1138850233
For copyright reasons it cannot be made available through academia.edu
From advertisements to amusement parks, themed resaturants, and Renaissance fairs twenty-first century popular culture is strewn with reimaginings of the Middle Ages. They are nowhere more prevalent, however, than in the films, television series, books, and video games of speculative genres: fantasy and science fiction. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies and George R. R. Martin’s multimedia Game of Thrones franchise are just two of the most widely known and successful fantasy conglomerates of recent decades. Medievalism has often been understood as a defining feature of fantasy, and as the antithesis of science fiction, but such constructs vastly underestimate the complexities of both genres and their interactions. “Medieval” has multiple meanings in fantasy and science fiction, which shift with genre convention, and which bring about their own changes as authors and audiences engage with what has gone before in the recent and deeper pasts.
For several decades after medievalism was established as a field of legitimate scholarly enquiry in the 1980s and 1990s, popular culture iterations were largely viewed with some suspicion if not outright disdain. The twenty-first century, however, has seen growing recognition of the importance of what has been termed the “neomedieval”: medievalisms which playfully reimagine the past rather than attempting historically accurate re-creation.
Science fiction and fantasy, with their necessarily impossible worlds, are perhaps the ultimate in neomedievalism. Earlier volumes have examined some of the ways in which contemporary popular culture re-imagines the Middle Ages, offering broad overviews, but none considers fantasy, science fiction, or the two together. The focused approach of this collection provides a directed pathway into the myriad medievalisms of modern popular culture. By engaging directly with genre(s), this book acknowledges that medievalist creative texts and practices do not occur in a vacuum, but are shaped by multiple cultural forces and concerns; medievalism is never just about the Middle Ages.
Studies of genres, moreover, often focus on a single medium—fiction, film, or television. Each section, and some individual chapters in the volume explores at least two, reflecting the multimedia nature of contemporary popular culture in general and genres in particular. By exploring the way medievalist discourses travel and shift across media within connected genres, the volume explores some of their internal complexities.
Studies of popular genres illuminate social and cultural trends and concerns, while medievalisms reveal far more about the milieu in which they were created than they do about the Middle Ages. By exploring how popular genres develop, pulling on and being pushed by changing approaches to “the medieval,” this collection sheds light on twenty-first century popular culture’s dynamic and at times conflicting moves, and those of the society which creates and consumes it. Individual chapters take diverse approaches, both synchronic and diachronic, some offering detailed case studies and others broader reviews of themes and trends. The variety enables a detailed picture of the complexities of fantasy and science fiction medievalisms to emerge.
The first section explores the reception of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the two chapters together demonstrate that fantasy’s “Tolkienian” medievalism is not that of a single author, but of many readers and creators making and remaking it in different media. The second shows that the dark and dirty medievalism of Game and Thrones and the subgenre of gritty fantasy is complex and at times contradictory. It illustrates the impact of market trends and forces on popular culture texts and the ways they are understood to engage with the past. The third section demonstrates that medievalism has been at the heart of science fiction since the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1960s, and illustrates that use of medieval material and reference points connects it with fantasy as much as it separates the two genres. The final chapter shows that in the twenty-first century, fantasy definitions of medievalisms are expanding to include more than just references to the European Middle Ages which have long been conventional in the genre.
Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms will be of much interest to scholars of fantasy and science fiction, and of medievalism.
Studies of popular culture medievalisms have not, to date, examined the interconnections of the two in any organized fashion, yet genre is a major framework structuring representation, production, consumption, and the making of meaning in popular culture. The conventions of any genre shape, even if they do not entirely circumscribe, what is possible in any constitutive creative work—this is as true of medievalism as it is of any other element—while genres themselves are shaped by the anxieties of the society which creates them. Given that a high proportion of today’s popular culture medievalisms are filtered through genre, this volume’s exploration of their interconnections sheds light not only on the nature of both, but on social issues and identity constructs of the present cultural moment.
Rather than focusing on the medievalism of a single genre, this volume puts multiple genres in dialogue and considers both medievalism and genre to be frameworks from which meaning can be produced. Chapters in it explore works from a wide range of genres—children’s and young adult, historical, cyberpunk, fantasy, science fiction, romance, and crime—and across multiple media—fiction, film, television, video games, and music. The range of media types and genres enable comparison, and the identification of overarching trends, while also allowing comparison of contrasting phenomena.
As the first volume to explore the nexus of medievalism and genre across such a wide range of texts, this collection illustrates the fractured ideologies of contemporary popular culture. The Middle Ages are more usually, and often more prominently, aligned with conservative ideologies, for example around gender roles, but the Middle Ages can also be the site of resistance and progressive politics. Exploring the interplay of past and present, and the ways writers and readers work engage with them demonstrates the conscious processes of identity construction at work throughout Western popular culture. The collection also demonstrates that while scholars may have by-and-large abandoned the concept of accuracy when considering contemporary medievalisms, the Middle Ages are widely associated with authenticity, and the authenticity of identity, in the popular imagination; the idea of the real Middle Ages matters, even when historical realities do not.
Mr Trick's aside might be a comment not just on Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sunnydale but on fantasy worlds in general; they are widely thought of as almost exclusively of the "Caucasian persuasion," lacking racial diversity in characters, themes, and structures and being exclusively concerned with white, Western culture. Indeed some works, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and film adaptations of it directed by Peter Jackson, have been accused of outright racism (Chism, "Race"). Charges of racism, and defenses against them, form a significant part of the scholarly literature and public discussions of representations of race in fantasy worlds (e.g., Rearick; Kirkland). A common perception is that most fantasy, like its sister genre science fiction, rarely addresses issues of racism and that minority readers are often not interested in it because it generally pays lip-service at best to such questions (Westfahl 72). Popular fantasy, however, often generates its narrative trajectory from encounters between different cultures and species. Further, its worlds are commonly populated by different, often mutually suspicious or inimical species such as elves, dwarves, humans, and goblins. Such generic features strongly suggest that an investigation of representations of racial and cultural difference might be illuminating.
Read more: http://periodicals.faqs.org/201009/2224380021.html#ixzz1jqRyTGQ3
Brian Attebery’s model of fantasy as a “fuzzy set” of texts sitting nearer or further from the centre of genre is by far the most long-lasting definition of the genre, remaining influential more than 20 years after it was first offered (Attebery, 1992). As a way of conceiving of genre in textual terms, and of conceptualizing fantasy as a distinct genre, the model is extremely useful. It is, however, limited when issues beyond these are interrogated. Who places a text in the centre or periphery? What are the networks of influence and which individuals and groups are involved? Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, discussing science fiction and drawing on Rick Altman’s work on film and genre, have argued that “genres are…fluid and tenuous constructions made by the interactions of various claims and practices by writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents” (Bould & Vint, 2009, 48). This paper argues that a new model for conceptualizing not only fantasy, but other popular genres, is needed, one which takes into account more than the merely textual and enables exploration of the culture associated with a genre, one which enables us to question not only where texts sit in the ‘fuzzy set’ of fantasy, but who places them, how, and why. Such questions are extremely significant to contemporary speculative genres as cultural struggles over gender and race interlock and overlap in texts, fan communities on- and off-line, in professional organizations like SFWA, and among authors and editors.
This paper draws on the concept of ‘genre culture,’ from popular music studies (e.g. Atton, 2012) , a formulation which places textual practices within a wider set of social processes that include not only fantasy conventions, but the behaviours of authors and audiences, the ideological arguments that circulate around the texts and the meaning and location of fantasy within a political economy. It builds on this concept using Actor Network Theory, developed by Bruno Latour and others (e.g Latour, 2005), to account for the role played by communication media – such as blogs and fan-forums – and textual media from – books to games to films – in connecting Bould and Vint’s “discursive agents.” The paper works towards a model of genre-culture which can provide a framework for exploring not only textual but community practices, not only conventions but habits, and can help account for the networks of influence which shape Attebery’s ‘fuzzy set’ at both its centre and edges.
References
Attebery, B. (1992). Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Atton, C. (2012). Genre and the cultural politics of territory: the Live Experience of Free Fmprovisation. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(4), 427–441.
Bould, M., & Vint, S. (2009). There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction. In Reading Science Fiction (pp. 43–51).
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The paper then turns to examples of fantasy works in which Australia and its people do make significant appearances to examine how they represented, using the works of Australian author Kylie Chan and US author Naomi Novik as examples. Although Novik sets an entire novel in early nineteenth-century Australia, both construct it as peripheral to the main action of their multi-volume series. It may be a place of exile or retreat, but it is nonetheless a backwater, on the fringes of the action at best. Australia, even when present, thus exists as a non-place in fantasy works with temporal settings ranging from the medieval to the modern.
This paper explores the association between 'medieval' and 'European' in reference to the conventions of the fantasy genre.
Although science fiction is more commonly associated with the anxieties of a purportedly post human age through stock figures such as cyborgs and robots, , fantasy works are often also deeply concerned with what can be considered essentially human. The monster-human dichotomy is often deployed, with emotion serving to blur the edges between the two sides, or at times even allow crossover. How important are emotions to contemporary notions of “the human”? Are particular kinds of emotions that are exclusively “human”? Can the right feeling make a monster human? This explores the answers to such questions found in popular culture texts such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Robin Hobb’s Rain Wild Chronicles, comparing and contrasting them with the model offered by Caliban.
Western popular culture has a marked tendency to repress memories of colonization and to ignore its uncomfortable legacies. Postcolonialism is aligned with high culture – with Magic Realism rather than Fantasy – and is widely considered a marginal issue, chiefly the concern of minorities, when it is considered at all. Critical engagement with European imperialism is, however, an identifiable trend in fantasy works from the past ten years. This paper offers a sample of such texts, including the work of Terry Pratchett, Naomi Novik’s ongoing Temeraire series, and the Dragon Age video-game franchise. It examines common strategies they use to challenge history and genre convention – from offering multiple, contradictory world-views to representations of race as a cultural construct – and identifies resonances with postcolonial theory.
Influenced by the science-fiction sub-genres Alternate History and Steampunk, the great majority of these texts turn away from the Middle Ages as their source of inspiration and look rather to the nineteenth-century. This paper traces connections between fantasy medievalism and racism, and their implications for engagements with colonialism in text and metatext, exploring fan-forums, author’s blogs and genre-journalism as well as novels and games. It sheds light on what the Middle Ages mean to producers and consumers of fantasy, and suggests that the turn to modernist rather than medievalist settings is a response to both received history and genre convention. By engaging with received history and genre convention in critical ways, these texts work to remember colonialism and recognise its continuing effects in contemporary society and culture, shifting such problematic topics from the periphery to the centre. "
This paper will examine the ways England and the English are represented in the chronicle of Piers Langtoft (c. 1308) through a lens of contemporary postcolonial theory. The chronicle rejects the purgatorial ‘five wound’ model of repeated invasion that dominated historiographic discourse in England both before and after Langtoft wrote, seeking to portray past invasions – particularly the Norman Conquest – as transitions rather than breaches in the history of England and the English. This paper argues that Langtoft’s constructions of race and place evoke continuities of hybridity in ways that directly and deliberately assert the validity of English political and cultural identity. It focuses on two episodes – the coming of the Angles and the Norman Conquest – with a particular interest in Langtoft’s adaptation of his sources and addition of original material. Although Langtoft’s construction of English history and identity did not dominate later works – his direct translator Robert Mannyng of Brunne (1338) did not take up his approach – the twenty still extant manuscripts demonstrate the contemporary reach of his work. The chronicle offers significant insight into one approach to Englishness as an historically contingent identity in the later Middle Ages.
The paper begins with a brief consideration of some of the sources for Tolkien’s orc to illuminate the origin of the genre’s conventions and demonstrate their inextricable link to the often monstrous Saracens in the western literature of the Middle Ages. It will then consider works which engage with those conventions directly, including Stan Nicholls’ Orcs trilogy, and Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals. The paper argues that orcs have represented a useful, but often problematic Other. Tolkien himself was troubled by his own creation: were they corrupted humanity? Could they ever be anything other than ‘evil’? Where had they come from and what ought their fate be in a world of triumphant ‘good’? These types of questions are taken up in the later texts this paper explores; I argue that orcs are, in some cases at least, becoming less monstrous and more human.
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