![]() ![]() Based on myth? Check-in this case, the Welsh myths collected in The Mabinogion. Lloyd Alexander’s five-volume children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain, published between 19, at first seems like just the kind of old-fashioned fantasy series described above. Could we imagine a fantasy epic based instead on contemporary philosophy? On, say, existentialism? Turns out, that epic already exists. ![]() Even fantasy series conceived in opposition to the norms of the genre, like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, at most pull us up to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts of Milton and Blake and into a steampunk-inflected Victoriana. Lewis’s Narnia, or the Taoism of Ursula K. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and untethered to folklore or ancient religious traditions, like the Anglo-Saxon myths of The Lord of the Rings, the Christianity of C. ![]() What would a modern fantasy novel look like? I don’t mean one set in contemporary America, but one not beholden to the past: free from the vague medievalism of George R. To help us continue to pay our writers, please consider subscribing. This essay first appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly, Issue #8. ![]()
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