| dc.description.abstract | Fantasy authors are freer in their creation than most writers who are bound by a commitment to realism and mimesis, freer even than those within other Speculative Fiction genres. Focusing on a cross-section of High Fantasy texts; The works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, George R.R. Martin, and N. K. Jemisin, I explore the fantasy worlds created in terms of how they relate to nature and the environment, to hierarchy and race, and to gender. Tolkien’s fantasy world, which has become the archetype, was built on medievalism and the idea of “going back” to an imagined past. These aspects shape the High Fantasy genre into one well suited to lush ecological narratives, yet they also create a tendency for worlds to be bound to a certain conceptualization of that imagined world of the past - recreating the institutions and hierarchies of that imagined past in terms of monarchy or autocracy, racial hierarchy, and patriarchy. Later writers like Le Guin, Martin and Jemisin thus choose to adapt, subvert, or wholly reject certain such archetypical elements to avoid the resulting socially conservative bent which we find in Tolkien. | eng |