By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) As a literary genre, fantasy is one of the oldest and most recent. Although modern fantasy only began to be recognised as a distinct genre in the late twentieth century, thanks largely to the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien and his imitators, its […]
Tag: Fantasy
10 of the Best Fantasy Poems
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Fantasy is at once a relatively recent and extremely ancient genre. Although it only became recognised as a distinct genre in the twentieth century thanks to writers like J. R. R. Tolkien and his followers, there’s a case for calling some of the oldest […]
A Summary and Analysis of Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Rule of Names’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Rule of Names’ is a 1964 short story by the American science-fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). Le Guin’s literary style is rightly praised as being several rungs above the usual style found in science fiction, and ‘The Rule of […]
The First Dark Doorstop Epic: J. V. Jones’s The Baker’s Boy
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews an early example of ‘gritty’ epic fantasy It was the late, great Terry Pratchett who observed that most modern fantasy is just rearranging the furniture in Tolkien’s attic. And many innovations within the genre have tended to use […]
The Dark Side of Fantasy: David Gemmell’s Wolf in Shadow
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle salutes the master of heroic fantasy and one of his most curious novels Like many people, I came to David Gemmell through Legend, his 1984 debut which would go on to become a classic of modern fantasy literature, and […]