FANTASY AS A MEANS OF INNER EMIGRATION IN THE WRITING OF HOPE MIRRLEES
Journal Title: Наукові праці. Серія "Філологія. Літературознавство" - Year 2018, Vol 316, Issue 304
Abstract
The article deals with the life and writing of the British writer Hope Mirrlees, as well as the reasons and specifics of her inner emigration. Mirrlees‟s writing has only recently gained literary scholars‟ attention but its appreciation is constantly growing. Drawing on the analysis of the recent Mirrlees scholarship and theory of fantasy the article examines Mirrlees‟s close relationship with the British classicist Jane Harrison and the influence of the latter‟s views on nature of Art, Religion and Ritual on the work of the writer; Harrison‟s death is considered to be a key factor of Mirrlees‟s inner emigration. Particular attention is paid to the writer‟s last novel Lud-in-the-Mist, labelled by Michal Swanwick as «a fantasy novel of ideas». Being written in the last years of Harrison‟s life, this novel is regarded in the article as Mirrlees‟s personal way of escapism, which allows her to seek reconciliation with death and the mundane through a multifaceted scrutinizing of the category of Faërie. Faërie in Mirrlees‟s writing is a synthetic category being «a perilous land» in JRR Tolkien‟s sense and an embodiment of beauty and terror, cruelty and tenderness, love and hatred, unconscious and fantastic, Dionysian ecstasy, sexuality and even perversion. In Mirrlees‟s version, the story about Faërie becomes a mystery of Life and Death, a story about the importance of ecstatic experience, but also about the danger that lies in uncontrolled ecstatic states. It can also be considered as her literary statement after which she ceased to write.
Authors and Affiliations
O. G. Filonenko
Keywords
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