| Summary: | This paper examines the figure of the hero in Quest Fantasy novels, George R. R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. It employs Frye’s taxonomy for the categorization of genres and Bakhtin’s seminal ideas on the Epic and the Novel as references to analyse the characterisation of the Quest Fantasy hero in selected Fantasy texts and compares them with two Heroic works, Beowulf and The Poetic Edda. This analysis is based on the premise that Fantasy fuses elements of the Epic and the novel in a dialogic tension that is manifest in the setting and in the characterisation of the hero. It starts by looking at the general understanding of the hero figure, especially in the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse tradition. It then discusses how shifts in the way contemporary Western societies understand the world requires a new view of the hero. This is followed by an analysis of the narrative chronotope and its effects on the characterisation of the Quest Fantasy hero, from its beginnings to its journey into the adventurous world.
|
|---|
