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The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.
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tolkien
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tom-shippey
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Tom Shippey |
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While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.
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tolkien
persistence
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Tom Shippey |
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The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representativ..
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Tom Shippey |
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Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had se..
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Tom Shippey |
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All seizures of power, no matter how 'strong or well-meaning' the seizers, will go the same way. That's what power does. Meanwhile, at exactly the same time as the publication of The William Golding was bringing out his fables, (1954), and (1955), the meaning of which Golding conveniently summarized for commentators in a later essay, 'Fable', in his collection : (Hot Gates, p. 87) So the English choirboys, marooned on an idylli..
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Tom Shippey |