Browsing by Subject "Fantasy"
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Item Open Access An ecocritical analysis of human–others and nature–others in popular animated fantasy series(Bilkent University, 2021-09) Altıok, RevnaThis thesis examines the representations of human-Others and nature-Others in popular animated fantasy series from an ecocritical perspective, and with an ecofeminist approach. The five animated series this thesis investigates, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018-2020), Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (2020), Disenchantment (2018-), Wizards (2020), and The Dragon Prince (2018-), while all being fantasy texts, have environmentally conscious stories that revolve around characters who are framed as Others in most societies. These marginalized Others, as expected from the fantasy genre, are not always presented as Others we know from our reality, but as mythical creatures and humanoids. Through a close reading of the character designs, settings, and the narratives of these five animated fantasy series, this study aims to explore and uncover new territories where the voices of both human-Others and nature-Others are heard and made clear.Item Open Access Esat Mahmut Karakurt`un roman(s)larında erkek kahramanlar(Bilkent University, 2006) Bozkurt, Senem TimuroğluEsat Mahmut Karakurt (1902-1977) was an influential writer of Turkish literature in the Republican period, especially with his romance, adventure, and spy narratives that reached a large female audience. After he published his first collection of short stories in 1926, Karakurt wrote a total of 16 novels until 1960. His novels, which were serialized first in newspapers, helped increase their circulation, and most volumes were reprinted eight to ten times. All Karakurt narratives were adapted at least once as screenplays. Because they are not considered “serious” literature, few analyses of popular romances are available in both Turkish and western literary studies, and the ones that exist are mostly devoted to women authors and their heroines. Therefore, this thesis aims both to revitalize the semi-forgotten novelistic romances of an influential author, and to fill a gap in romance studies by examining a male author’s approach to romance by analyzing his heroes. The thesis focuses on two of Esat Mahmut Karakurt’s novels, namely Allaha Ismarladık (Goodbye, 1936) and İlk ve Son (The First and the Last, 1940), although frequent references are made to the author’s other novels as well. The theoretical framework of the study is influenced by Tania Modleski’s and Janice Radway’s analyses that are guided by feminist and psychoanalytic considerations, as well as by John G. Cawelti’s work focusing on the structure of romance. In this three-part thesis, first, the physical, educational, and professional attributes, the relations of love, and the ideological discourses of the male characters in Karakurt’s novels are analyzed. It is observed that these heroes are often handsome bachelors in their thirties, successful at work, and fond of stylish clothing; their attitude towards women and love is distant; and they share a nationalistic and conservative worldview. Then, these common traits are discussed in the context of the generic qualities of romance and what they mean in terms of female readers’ fantasies.Item Open Access Fantasy films as a postmodern phenomenon(Bilkent University, 2011) Değim, İclal AlevThe aim of this research is to analyze the fantasy fiction genre films as a postmodern phenomenon. With various ways of looking into the texts, the study focuses on the narrative structure of the fantasy formations with a postmodern perspective. This thesis firstly investigates the fantasy genre films as a whole by conducting a research on the fantasy films database. From this point, the boundary of the definition for fantasy genre is argued. With using psychoanalysis along with Tolkienian and mystic way of looking into texts, this thesis finds connections to the postmodern features of these narrative structures. In this context the film Lord of the Rings (2001, Peter Jackson) is analyzed through these ways of looking into texts. Specifically the notions of time, historicism and subject were examined through postmodern theory. Thus, the features of the narrative structure indicate postmodern tendencies.Item Restricted A Monster Calls(2014-09-25) Ness, PatrickItem Open Access Orientalism in the Victorian Era(Oxford University Press, 2017) Kennedy, Valerie; Rabinowitz, P.Orientalism in the Victorian era has origins in three aspects of 18th-century European and British culture: first, the fascination with The Arabian Nights (translated into French by Antoine Galland in 1704), which was one of the first works to have purveyed to Western Europe the image of the Orient as a place of wonders, wealth, mystery, intrigue, romance, and danger; second, the Romantic visions of the Orient as represented in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and other Romantics as well as in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh; and third, the domestication of opium addiction in Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Victorian Orientalism was all pervasive: it is prominent in fiction by William Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling, but is also to be found in works by Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others. In poetry Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat is a key text, but many works by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning also show the influence of Orientalist tropes and ideas. In theater it is one of the constant strands of much popular drama and other forms of popular entertainment like panoramas and pageants, while travel writing from Charles Kingsley to Richard Burton, James Anthony Froude, and Mary Kingsley shows a wide variety of types of Orientalist figures and concepts, as do many works of both popular and children’s literature. Underlying and uniting all these diverse manifestations of Victorian Orientalism is the imperialist philosophy articulated by writers as different as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, supported by writings of anthropologists and race theorists such as James Cowles Pritchard and Robert Knox. Toward the end of the Victorian era, the image of the opium addict and the Chinese opium den in the East End of London or in the Orient itself becomes a prominent trope in fiction by Dickens, Wilde, and Kipling, and can be seen to lead to the proliferation of Oriental villains in popular fiction of the early 20th century by such writers as M. P. Shiel, Guy Boothby, and Sax Rohmer, whose Dr. Fu Manchu becomes the archetypal version of such figures.Item Open Access Shovels and swords: how realistic and fantastical themes affect children's word learning(Elsevier, 2015) Weisberg, D. S.; Ilgaz, H.; Hirsh-Pasek, K.; Golinkoff, R. M.; Nicolopoulou, A.; Dickinson, D. K.Research has shown that storybooks and play sessions help preschool children learn vocabulary, thereby benefiting their language and school readiness skills. But the kind of content that leads to optimal vocabulary learning – realistic or fantastical – remains largely unexplored. We investigate this issue as part of a large-scale study of vocabulary learning in low-income classrooms. Preschoolers (N = 154) learned 20 new words over the course of a two-week intervention. These words were taught using either realistic (e.g., farms) or fantastical (e.g., dragons) storybooks and toys. Children learned the new words in both conditions, and their comprehension knowledge did not differ across conditions. However, children who engaged in stories and play with a fantastical theme showed significantly greater gains in their production knowledge. Reasons for and implications of this result are discussed.