Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781137518378)

This book reveals the unique contribution made by the three founding fathers of British fantasy-Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien-to our culture's perennial reassessment of the meanings of time, death and eternity. It traces the poetic, philosophical and theological roots of the striking preoccupation with mortality and temporality that defines the imagined worlds of early fantasy fiction, and gives both the form of such fiction and its ideas the attention they deserve. Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien raise some of the oldest questions in existence: about the limits of nature, human and divine; cosmic creation and destruction; the immortality conferred by art and memory; and the paradoxes and uncertainties generated by the universal experience of transience, the fear of annihilation and the desire for transcendence. But they respond to those questions by means of thought experiments that have no precedent in modern literary history.
This book has won the '2021 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award' for Myth and Fantasy Studies.


Author: Anna Vaninskaya
ISBN-10: 1137518375
ISBN-13: 9781137518378
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Language: English
Published: 01/28/2020
Pages: 262
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.30h x 6.10w x 0.90d