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Terry Pratchett's writing celebrates the possibilities opened up by inventiveness and imagination. It constructs an ethical stance that values informed and self-aware choices, knowledge of the world in which one makes those choices, the importance of play and humor in crafting a compassionate worldview, and acts of continuous self-examination and creation.
This collection of essays uses inventiveness and creation as a thematic core to combine normally disparate themes, such as science fiction studies, the effect of collaborative writing and shared authorship, steampunk aesthetics, productive modes of "ownership," intertextuality, neomedievalism and colonialism, adaptations into other media, linguistics and rhetorics, and coming of age as an act of free will.
List of contents
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Terry Pratchett's Ethical Worlds
Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin Leverett
Something That Gods Are: Acts of Creation in Terry Pratchett's Early Science Fiction
Kristin Noone
Conan the Nonagenarian: Beyond Hyborian Hypermasculinity with Terry Pratchett's Cohen the Barbarian
Mike Perschon
Carrot Ironfoundersson: Medieval Romance, Narrative Causality and the Ethics of Choice in Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards!
Emily Lavin Leverett
Self-Discovery, Free Will and Change: The Ethics of Growing Up in the Fantasy Novels of Terry Pratchett
Kathleen Burt
The Anglo-Saxon Ælf: Old English Influences in Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men and The Shepherd's Crown
Livia Bongiovanni
Constructing Identity Through Language in Discworld
Elise A. Bell
Rhetoricity of Discworld: Magic and the Ethics of Footnotes
Amy Lea Clemons
The Golempunk Manifesto: Ownership of the Means of Production in Pratchett's Discworld
Janet Brennan Croft
Neomedievalism and the Ethics of Colonization in Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth and The Long
Sadie E. Hash
Appendix: Works and Adaptations
About the Contributors
Index
About the author
Kristin Noone is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside; her dissertation links medieval romance, fantasy fiction, and popular culture studies. She publishes academic articles on fantasy and medievalism as well as short fantasy fiction.Emily Lavin Leverett is a professor of English at Methodist University in Fayetteville North Carolina. With her primary focus as Medieval English Romance--tales of adventure, magic, chivalry, faith, and fantasy, she also studies medievalism, the ways that the romances of medieval Britain have made their way into contemporary arts, specifically English author Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.
