Game of Thrones is famously inspired by the Middle Ages - but how "authentic" is the world it presents? This volume offers different angles to the question. One of the biggest attractions of George R.R. Martin's high fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and by extension its HBO television adaptation, Game of Thrones, is its claim to historical realism. The author, thedirectors and producers of the adaptation, and indeed the fans of the books and show, all lay claim to Westeros, its setting, as representative of an authentic medieval world. But how true are these claims? Is it possible to faithfully represent a time so far removed from our own in time and culture? And what does an authentic medieval fantasy world look like? This book explores Martin's and HBO's approaches to and beliefs about the Middle Ages and how those beliefs fall into traditional medievalist and fantastic literary patterns. Examining both books and programme from a range of critical approaches - medievalism theory, gender theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, andrace theory - Dr Carroll analyzes how the drive for historical realism affects the books' and show's treatment of men, women, people of colour, sexuality, and imperialism, as well as how the author and showrunners discuss these effects outside the texts themselves. SHILOH CARROLL teaches in the writing center at Tennessee State University.
Reviews
This study highlights the difficulties of escaping certain assumptions and generalizations. The result is a fascinating tension between medievalism and cynical modernism, and, whatever his sources, an understanding that Martin's plot lines and motifs attempt to work against or undercut medieval romance structures and its neomedieval descendants in order to create a believable world. * FOLKLORE *
Carroll's book is a useful addition to scholarship on the Game of Thrones phenomenon and how Martin's medievalism is conceived on the page and then adapted and popularized for twenty-first century audiences, and to medievalism and the fantasy genre more generally. * PARERGON *



Book Information
ISBN 9781843844846
Author Shiloh Carroll
Format Hardback
Page Count 214
Imprint D.S. Brewer
Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd