Sterner Stuff; Sansa Stark and the System of Gothic Fantasy

Contests the suggestion that Sansa Stark, a character in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is a weak and indecisive by analyzing her in relation to William Patrick Day’s system of Gothic fantasy. While Sansa is indeed physically passive, she manages to retain her own identity in a challenging literary environment. This physical passivity allows her to assert herself intellectually, analyzing and indicting the misdeeds and abuses she suffers. This combination of passive and active attributes precisely instantiates the skill set of the detective, a species of literary being developed from the Gothic fantasies Day analyses, and makes Sansa a crucial, and surprisingly empowered, element of Martin’s literary engine

“To fly is more fascinating than to read about flying”: British R.F.C. Memoirs of the First World War, 1918-1939

Literature concerning aerial warfare was a new genre created by the First World War. With manned flight in its infancy, there were no significant novels or memoirs of pilots in combat before 1914. It was apparent to British publishers during the war that the new technology afforded a unique perspective on the battlefield, one that was practically made for an expanding literary marketplace. As such former Royal Flying Corps pilots created a new type of war book, one written by authors self-described as “Knights in the Air”, a literary mythology carefully constructed by pilots and publishers and propagated in the inter-war period through flight memoirs. [excerpt

Medievalism: New discipline or scholarly no-man’s land?

The term ‘medievalism’ refers to how people have, since the fifteenth century, conceptualised the thousand years of history preceding that date. The study of medievalism is therefore not about the Middle Ages per se, but rather the ways in which the medieval period has been imagined in the centuries since it ended. Yet the field’s origins date from as recently as the 1970s. Medievalism Studies is thus still finding its feet and must consequently deal with some existential questions about its scope and remit, its methodological underpinnings, its implications for how history is periodised, and its relationship with more established disciplines. It also faces criticisms of Anglo-centricism as well as hostility from some historians thanks to the doubts its practitioners raise over established delineations between scholarly and creative depictions of the medieval period. Nonetheless, this new field offers a much-needed challenge to the calcified disciplinary boundaries that shape academia today