A land ruled by a helpless old king is laid to waste by a sea monster, to whom one young person after another is offered to be devoured, until the lot falls to the king's daughter: at that point the ...hero arrives, kills the dragon, marries the daughter, and succeeds to the kingdom, (quoted in Altmann, 145) The central inquiry of Altmann's article is whether Aerin is simply "a male quest hero in drag"; has McKinley, in fact, really fulfilled her plan to write "books that didn't require her to be untrue to her gender"? ...Menolly twice saves the small dragons' lives; she develops personal agency only when she leaves home and is forced by desperate circumstances to preserve and protect the lives of infant dragons. Furthermore, she communicates with them through thought and music, and the fire-lizards begin to accompany her when she sings. ...Menolly makes the nurturant connections Gilligan identifies as psychologically necessary for girls- but with dragons rather than people. The dragon-sayer girls are not passive models who stay home and wait for men to rescue them; rather, this type of female hero who "does things" uses communication, nurturance, and protective love as means to achieving personal agency and the development of self-knowledge, confidence, and competence.
The earliest and best-known argument for stylistics was made in 1 986 by Roger Fowler who argues the need for literary scholars to draw upon linguistics for a systemic methodology and for theoretical ...support to avoid an assumption of the discipline of literature that has never been proven: that the language, the style of writing, used in those texts identified as literary by literature faculty is somehow special and bears no relation to ordinary language. Since linguistics as a discipline does not "value" any sub-set of a language, spoken or written, as more worthy of study than any other, stylistics as a method can be used to analyze any text, fiction, non-fiction, or poetic.
Through the main characters and the plot of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien shows us this truth: without the divine virtues of faith, hope and charity, the moral virtues cannot stand against the ...powers of evil that surpass the capabilities of man's nature to resist; but with the divine virtues, there comes also a divine victory.
Translation techniques favoured by Tolkien in rendering Beowulf and other medieval poetry into modern English. J. R. R. Tolkien was a prolific translator, although most of his translation work was ...not actually published during his lifetime, as occurred with the greater part of his fiction. He never did any serious translation from modern foreign languages into English, but rather devoted himself to the task of turning Old English and Middle English poetry into something that could be readily understood by speakers of the modern idiom. His largest and best-known published translation is of the anonymous 14th Century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was published posthumously with two other translations from Middle English in the volume Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (Allen & Unwin 1975). The translation of Middle English texts constitutes the bulk of his output in this field, both in the above volume and in the fragments that appear in his lectures and essays. However, his heart really lay in the older, pre-Norman form of the language, and particularly in the greatest piece of literature to come down to us from the Old English period, the epic poem Beowulf.
Joe R. Christopher starts us off with a detailed examination of each poem in Spirits in Bondage, using the young poet's "Matter = Nature = Satan" equation (as expressed in his letters to his friend ...Arthur Greeves) to explore the underlying themes of Lewis's not just pre-conversion, but pre-theism "cycle of lyrics." Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, by John Beversluis; Faith and Choice in the Works of Joss Whedon by K. Dale Koontz; Fritz Leiher, Critical Essays, edited by Benjamin Szumanskyj; Myth and Magic: Art According to the Inklings, edited by Eduardo Segura and Thomas Honegger; From Narnia to A Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and CS. In addition to the referees on the Mythlore Editorial Advisory Board, I would also like to thank Anne C. Petty for her assistance with this issue. -
