Date of Award

2022

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

J. Jennifer Jones

Abstract

To Scale Dragons comprises two essays on fantasy and a fantasy manuscript, which together form a critical-creative study of fantasy as a cross-media genre of art. In the first essay, “Fantasy as Hypernatural Art: A Look at the Genre’s Chthulucentric Coalescence,” I provide a theoretical foundation for fantasy as art, looking to key developments in the history of fantasy and fantasy criticism to propose a new set of core properties for fantasy as a fuzzy set, à la Brian Attebery, and defend an understanding of fantasy as the art of constructing and conveying immersive hypernature. In particular, I argue that J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth sequence, serving as the genre’s keystone, helped to usher fantasy away from anthropocentrism and towards chthulucentrism. In the second essay, “Encounters Beyond Story: Poetry in The King of Elfland’s Daughter as an Illustration of Fantasy as Art,” I take the first essay’s theoretical understanding of fantasy and apply it to a close reading of Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, demonstrating the ways in which Dunsany’s poetic style eschews the notion that fantasy is best understood primarily as a form of story. The full-length manuscript, Things Lost, represents my effort to put my theoretical understanding of the genre into creative practice. In this fantasy, readers venture to the distant city of Vanguard, following a young boy from familiar Earth and a wizard from a faraway realm as they work together to prevent the emergence of an existential threat from ages past.

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