Tom Shippey

"The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey's classic work, now revised and expanded in paperback explores J.R.R. Tolkien's creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien's professional background led him to write The Hobbit and create a timeless charm for millions of readers. He argues convincingly that the source of Tolkien's inspiration lay not just in his love of fable but in his love of language. While examining the foundations and literary structures of Tolkien's most popular work, The Lord of the Rings, in rich detail, Shippey also discusses the contribution of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales to Tolkien's great myth cycle, showing how the more "difficult" books can be fully appreciated. He goes on to examine the remarkable twelve-volume History of Middle-earth, written by Tolkien's son and literary heir Christopher Tolkien, which traces the creative and technical processes by which Middle-earth evolved."--Jacket.

The fifteen essays collected in Hard Reading argue that science fiction has its own internal rhetoric, relying on devices such as neologism, dialogism, semantic shifts, the use of unreliable narrators. It is a “high-information” genre which does not follow the Flaubertian ideal of le mot juste, “the right word”, preferring le mot imprévisible, “the unpredictable word”. Science fiction derives much of its energy from engagement with vital intellectual issues in the “soft sciences”, especially history, anthropology, the study of different cultures, with a strong bearing on politics. Both the rhetoric and the issues deserve to be taken much more seriously than they have been in academia, and in the wider world. Hard Reading is also a memoir of what it was like to be a committed fan, from teenage years, and also an academic struggling to find a place, at a time when a declared interest in science fiction and fantasy was the kiss of death for a career in the humanities.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays in honour of Leslie Workman, the founder of Studies in Medievalism. Scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia examine the phenomenon of medievalism from the perspectives of history, politics, scholarship, art, and literature.