Thinking About Genre

I’m currently working on a paper for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference at the University of Sydney in early December. It’s partly an attempt to solidify, and articulate, some of the ways I’ve been thinking about fantasy as a genre in this project. Being from a literary studies background means I come to it from a perspective which depends very heavily on texts, and on critical theory about them. This is problematic – it’s widely acknowledged that fantasy is more tricky than most genres to define this way. Or at least that critics have struggled to do so, which isn’t necessarily the same thing. Right from the beginning of this project I knew that just doing textual analysis wasn’t going to be sufficient to really understand all the different ways in which race and fantasy intersect – I’ve always planned to talk to authors and fans and have spent a lot of time this year reading blog posts, fan forums etc.

Reading and thinking around fan studies has been useful for me lately. Even if fantasy fans haven’t been the subject of a major work (yet, it’s in my head for when the current project ends), science fiction fans have always been a significant topic. I’m thinking of Celia Bacon-Smith and John Tulloch here, although there are plenty of others. What I’m finding most helpful at the moment though, is work on popular music genres. Jason Toynbee’s term ‘genre-culture,’ from Making Popular Music (2000) offers a framework for thinking about genre as a process that is socially constructed, not a fixed category. Studies of popular music also tend to take into account or at least acknowledge the role played by marketing and publishers, as well as fans and artists. Literary critics of fantasy – even those who defend it – tend to make derisive comments about boy wizards and vampires and have little else to say about the mass-market side of things. And as Steven Erikson pointed out in the New York Review of Science Fiction earlier this year, scholars have a tendency to fixate on Tolkien, but there’s far more to the genre, even to genre fiction, than that. It seems likely to me that a disjunction between critical engagement and what’s actually being written and read, is one reason it’s so difficult to taxonomies fantasy. Form and content necessarily depend on what is written, published and read, particularly in a genre that is as popular as fantasy at the moment.

Worth the Trip

For the past two days I've been at the International Society for Studies in Medievalism conference in Canton, Ohio. By the time I get home I will have spent more time in transit between here and Sydney than I was actually at the conference, but I feel like it was worthy the trip. I've had a habit of jut missing major conferences that are themed perfectly for my work - and were important to it. I began my Phd on postcolonialism in Middle English romance a year or two late to go to a conference here in the USA on postcolonialism in the Middle Ages. The 2010 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was themed Race and Fantasy, and was just at the start of my thinking about my current project, before I'd put in my first funding application, let alone had the second succeed. The conference I've just been at was themed Medievalism(s) and Diversity. It would have been hard to come up with a theme that worked better with what I've been doing this year.
I gave a paper titled " 'Yo! It's the Middle Ages': Talking about Race in the Fantasy Genre." I looked at the ways fantasy fans claim that the 'real' Middle Ages (European of course) were exclusively white: no diversity (racial or any other kind) allowed. It's not a completely new theme for my work obviously, although in this paper I looked mainly at various thread on the Bioware Social Network. Dragon Age is an interesting example because the game has been both criticised for not having enough diversity, and praised for its inclusiveness and attempts to address themes around prejudice. If Bioware aimed to please everyone they failed (surprise), but they did get people talking (and flaming each other) about diversity - in terms of gender and sexuality as well as race - as well as privilege and the assumptions both players and the wider community make about fantasy RPGs and the their fans.
There were some really interesting parallels between what I was talking about and another paper in my session: Elizabeth Emery from Montclair State University speaking on 'Goblets, Tankards and the Green Fairy: Inclusion and Exclusion in the "Medieval" Cabarets of Belle Époque Paris.' Both then and now, the 'real' Middle Ages were constructed to suit the needs and desires of particular contemporary groups, in ways that often had little if anything to do with historical fact. The 'medieval' has been more about feeling than fact for centuries apparently.
I've come away from the conference with at least four different ideas for research and publication that I didn't have when I got here, which is the other reason it's been worth the trip. I'm just about to leave for the first flight in my journey home, oping I can remember any, or even all of them, by the time I get there.

Medievalism and Colonialism Revisited

In the past few days I’ve been revisiting a topic I’ve written on before: the connections – or lack of them – between medievalism and colonialism in fantasy. I’d originally thought it was a negative correlation, that works which explore and critique processes and practices of colonialism don’t, for various reasons, do it in conventionally medievalist settings. I’m giving a paper next week at Melbourne University and it’s made me rethinking this. In the paper I’m talking (briefly) about 5 works/ groups of work which have colonialism and its legacies as a theme: Terry Pratchett’s Nation; Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy; Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series (having grown up loving C. S. Forester and Anne McCaffrey I love this amalgam of the two); N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy, and the Dragon Age game franchise (I read the narrative of elven slavery to humanity as distinctly linked to colonialism).

The first three are all set in analogues of the nineteenth century; Pratchett and Novik use Alternate Worlds and Hobb a secondary world that is very clearly and deliberately inspired by the heyday of European imperialism. Sailing ships and guns are the forefront of technology in these worlds, not swords and castles. All three engage with colonialism (I’m using this a an umbrella term, the details in each vary) as it’s happening, in the narrative present. The other two use pre-industrial worlds. Dragon Age has a reasonably conventional fantasy setting: ‘Europe in the Middle Ages’, while Jemisin’s is distinctly non-European and is more a fall of empire and the aftermath thereof than the conventional fantasy ‘epic struggle against evil.’ Both of these works are interested in the long-term social and cultural impacts of colonisation, and in both the actual process happened long ago. Even with pre-industrial settings, and a medievalist one at that, colonialism still can’t happen in the Middle Ages.

I think there’s more than one reason for this. For a start authors (and I include game-makers here) who are interested in social justice and critiquing European colonialism in any form are also, I’d suggest, more likely than others to shy away from cookie-cutter ‘sort of the Middle Ages’ settings – or not be drawn to them in the first place. Critiquing colonialism, or history at all, isn’t that common in a genre known for its nostalgic tendencies, and perhaps breaking one convention is connected to breaking others. But there’s more to it than that, and it goes back to something else I’ve written about before: the influence of Alternate History.

So far as I can tell there is, quite simply, no Alternate History story where the nexus event which changes the path of history happens before Columbus’ arrival in America in 1492. This implies that the Middle Ages are too far back, too different to today, for any change in the past to alter our present. The texts I’m talking about here are trying to imagine, or at the least imply, a more just future for their worlds, but the Middle Ages – fantastical or not – are too far removed for that implication to carry weight, so setting inspired by the more recent past are needed. This works for the pre-industrial settings as well. Both reference empires fallen from former glories, and the temptation is to read these are referring to the Roman Empire because of the pre-industrial present of the narratives. Both can just as easily invoke the British Empire, and the ways that both engage with contemporary issues stemming from that aspect of history suggests that they do. 

A slight departure

I haven't blogged here much lately, but I'm not completely absent from the internet. Today I have a guest post "Caliban: On the Edge of Humanity" appearing at 'Performing Humanity,' an Early Modern blog. The post is about the humanity - or otherwise - of Caliban in The Tempest and the ways Shakespeare is influenced by medieval material. It's a departure from my usual time-periods, but is part of what I've been thinking about for a conference paper I'm giving at a conference on Shakespeare and Emotions in a couple of months. That paper will look at Caliban as an emotional model for hybrid figures in modern fantasy, not just in works that reference him explicitly like Tad William's Caliban, but more broadly. Hybrids are a staple of all kinds of fantasy - from Elrond Half-Elven in Lord of the Rings on - and Caliban with his combination of rage, fear, and love for his island with its "noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not" (The Tempest, III, 2, 148-9) is an literary antecedent for many of them.

Game of Thrones, Authenticity, and Mass-Production

Today I’ve been trying to write an abstract for a roundtable on Game of Thrones at a conference next year. It’s about the idea of authenticity, something I’ve written about before, but a topic which gets bigger and bigger every time I do. Fantasy is obviously not authentic in some ways – the whole point is that it’s not this world, or its history – and scholars of medievalism often aren’t interested in it for that reason. But consumers are, and producers are. It’s struck me that there are multiple layers of authenticity surrounding the novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, and the TV spin-off and all the other franchise material as well. Most of them are interconnected, and most of them have something to do with ‘the medieval’ if not the Middle Ages.

The writing process is constructed as authentic in contrast – or challenge – to the mass-market habits of a lot of genre fiction. George Martin writes at his own pace, sometimes to the incredible frustration of fans and no doubt his publishers, so the story seems to be told organically, rather than simply being churned out for the sake of best-seller after best-seller, all timed for release just before the Christmas sales rush or the summer-reading lists. Even the massive sales are constructed, at least in their origin story, as non-commercial. I’ve read a few different versions about how Martin struggled to find a publisher, how it the first novel was sold by independent bookshops and gained popularity by word-of-mouth. All of this creates an aura of authenticity in a world where big business drives consumer decisions about what is good, what is read, what is in.

None of this is immediately obviously connected to the Middle Ages, however, I think the fact that the books – and their spin-offs – are so closely linked to the pre-modern era is important. Whatever its origins were, the whole franchise is now a substantial part of popular, mass-produced modern contemporary culture. And in that culture, there is value in appearing to be outside it. Just think of all the ‘artisan bakeries’ and ‘traditional insert foodstuff here’; as a culture we are soaked in the constructed, the mass-produced, so we value things we think - or are told - are real, authentic. We’re prepared to pay more for them, but they also have symbolic meaning to us, and we often use them to create out own identities, whether it’s being the person who buys the artisan sourdough not the packet white bread form the supermarket, or whether it’s being a ‘real’ fan of a ‘real’ TV show. The medieval aura of Game of Thrones adds another dimension to those kinds of tendencies because the Middle Ages were by definition pre-modern, and therefore pre-mass-production.

Tales After Tolkien update

A quick update on the session I'm organising for next year's International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. Professor Carol L. Robinson from Kent State University will be moderating. I've also extended the deadline for abstracts etc to 10th September to give people a little extra time.
My email was given incorrectly on the original listing on the conference website - the '.au' was missing from the end. It's now been fixed there, but just in case, the correct address is: helen.young@sydney.edu.au

Here are the full details:


[UPDATE] Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Twenty-First Century Fantasy Literature, Extension of deadline.

Panel at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo. May 9-12, 2013 http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

Organizer: Helen Young

Moderator: Carol L. Robinson

For a work of contemporary fantasy literature to be compared with those of J. R. R. Tolkien can be either compliment or condemnation; the juxtaposition might suggest a major, original contribution to the genre or imply a work is merely derivative. Yet if Tolkien had one of the first words on fantasy and medievalism he did not have the last. Author Steven Erikson recently described himself and other writers of epic fantasy as “post-Tolkien” in The New York Review of Science Fiction and lamented the tendency of some scholars to not realise that “we’ve moved on.” This panel seeks papers which explore the ways in which twenty-first century fantasy literature deploys ‘the medieval’ with all its relics, forms and incarnations. Papers may or may not directly contrast and compare with Tolkien’s practice. The panel asks, for example, how contemporary trends in technology, society, politics, and culture intersect with and influence contemporary writers, readers, and critics in their re-imaginings of medieval material. Are there shifts in the genre as a whole? Tolkien drew largely on the European Middle Ages as do his imitators; is this changing as Eurocentric views become increasingly problematic and the world is ever more globalised? How do technological developments and the explosion of multi-media fantasy products including film, television and video-gaming engage with literature? How do representations of race, gender, and class intersect with medievalism in contemporary fantasy? Is the idea of an ‘authentic’ Middle Ages important? How do writers research the past and approach their sources? Papers which address these or any other topic related to the theme of the panel are invited. They might address short stories, novels, comics and graphic novels, series, authors and/or their oeuvres, or the genre as a whole, as well as adaptations for or from film, tv, gaming, and fandoms including fan-fiction.

Please send a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper, a brief biography, and a conference Participant Information Form (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html) to the organizer, Dr Helen Young by Monday 10th September 2012. Abstracts etc are best emailed to Helen.young@sydney.edu.au.

Alternate History, Historical Fantasy, and Alternate Worlds

In some of my earlier posts I used the term ‘alternate history’ rather loosely. As a technical term, AH revolves “around the basic premise that some event in the past did not occur as we know it did, and thus the present has changed” (Hellekson, 2000, 247). It’s usually considered a science fiction genre, and, as Hellekson also points out “concerns itself with plausible relationships” (247). It also has, as Amy Ransom points out a “scientifical approach to mimesis”(Ransom, 2010, 260). Draconic intervention in the Napoleonic Wars – as in Naomi Novik’s books – doesn’t fit.

Magic, mythology and anything else outside the mundane world – except sometimes time travel – are outside the bounds of the genre.

AH extrapolates forward from a changed event, or series of events – a Nazi victory in World War II or victory by the South in the American Civil War are the most common divergences. Books like Novik’s extrapolate backwards from the present, asking what would have had to be historically different for the present to be altered. That they employ ‘the fantastic’ to do it doesn’t necessarily make the process less logical. As I said in my earlier post about Novik’s books, dragons make European militaries comparable with those of the rest of the world, resulting in much altered attempts at imperialism particularly in Africa, South America, and Australia. If AH asks ‘what if,’ Novik’s question is a ‘what would’ have altered the history of western expansionism around the globe.

Books that intertwine history with fantasy elements in various ratios and combinations are often, not very imaginatively, labelled Historical Fantasy – although this is more a term used by publishers and audiences than scholars. Novik’s Temeraire is currently at the top of the Goodreads Popular Historical Fantasy list, ahead of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. Guy Gavriel Kay features in the top 20, as does Diana Gabaldon, Cassandra Clare and George R.R. Martin. Historical Fantasy is really only useful as a very broad term – there are major differences between these works. Jo Walton’s article "What is historical fantasy?" on Tor.com is indicative of its very broad application as well (Walton, 2009). Moreover, scholars of fantasy don’t tend to define it, although they use it. There’s no definition in John Clute and John Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy for example (Clute & Grant, 1999).

Ransom offers Historical Fantasy as a term for works like Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan (which she invokes as an example) or Novik’s which differ from AH in that “more than one event and the plausible extrapolation of its consequences must be altered; rather everything must change” (275). I’d suggest that Historical Fantasy is a very problematic term to adopt from a critical standpoint because it is already used so widely, and in such varied ways, by publishers and audiences. John Clute lamented the tendency of publishers to mis-use ‘Epic Fantasy,’ saying that the term “has lost its usefulness” (Clute & Grant, 1999, 319), and this sort of problem is endemic in fantasy criticism – even in the difficulties of defining ‘fantasy’ itself. For Historical Fantasy to be critically useful, it would need to be disentangled from commercial and popular usage.

I would suggest that Alternate World has more potential to be useful in delineating fantasy which engages with (by altering) a specific aspect of the real world’s past, often although not always with the intent of critiquing both that past and the present. In the kinds of works I’m thinking of, something about the world is different – whether its sentient dragons or real magic or myriad other options – and this changes the course of history as we know it. This draws on the critical history of the term. Clute, drawing on Brian Stableford in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction offers this in his definition: “an alternate world is an account of our world as it might otherwise have been” (21). Clute excludes works like Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula because they intervene in and “violate” history, although as I haven’t read the book I’m not sure if I’d agree on that distinction (more on this at a later date). Alternate World resonates with AH in productive ways: it invokes the thought experiment questions that underpin AH, suggesting that an Alternate World is more than mere revisionism or nostalgia, and it can be used to separate out some of what it lumped together under the banner of Historical Fantasy.

Clute, J., & Grant, J. (1999). The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit.

Hellekson, K. (2000). Toward a Taxonomy of the Alternate History Genre, Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 41(3), 247–256.

Ransom, A. J. (2010). Warping Time: Alternate Histories, Historical Fantasy, and the Postmodern uchronie quebecoise. Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 51(2), 258–280.

Walton, J. (2009). What is historical fantasy? Tor.com. Retrieved August 2, 2012, from http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/07/what-is-historical-fantasy-anyway