Religion and Fantasy Literature

Code

ENGL4394

School

English

Level

4

Credits

N/A

Semesters

April Full Year UK, Full Year UK, January Full Year UK

Summary

This pod offers students the materials and approaches to investigate the relationships between religion (specifically Christianity) and fantasy literatures. Students gain the critical vocabularies to trace tropes and elements recognisable across literary and religious texts, and to understand the way fiction can articulate and reshape religious ideology. The pod centres on the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, exploring the ways Narnia and Middle Earth present different religious visions. It sets these authors in their historical and intellectual contexts, allowing for close focus on how their milieu affected their beliefs and their fiction. It provides a longer chronological perspective via a unit on the roots of fantasy tropes in the Bible, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim’s Progress. Students are encouraged to develop a critical approach to the embodiment of ideologies in fictional symbols, and to attend to the dialectic between the “real” and “supernatural” in fiction.

Target Students

Students registered on the School of English online masters scheme.

Assessment

• 100% Participation: Student Participation

Assessed by end of designated period

Educational Aims

Learning Outcomes

Perform close analysis of literary texts, relating elements such as style, symbols and tropes to historical, literary and generic contexts.

Critically discuss the ways religious and theological ideas are embodied, articulated and contested within fantastical fiction.

Apply critical concepts and models to fantasy fiction.

Demonstrate knowledge and skills acquired to the appropriate disciplinary and professional standard.

Assimilate and present subject-specific material in an appropriate format (assessed within the ‘Assessment Portfolio’ 1, 2 or 3).

Conveners

• Dr Jeremy Bloomfield