Starting from Babylon to Greece, India and other parts of the old world, the symbol of the serpent occurred constantly in the myth, culture and religion of man. Mediterranean deities are represented carrying a snake in one or both hands. In addition, the serpent’s knowledge was associated with the wisdom of the gods. The serpent is one of the oldest symbols of female power. Woman and serpent together were considered holy in ancient Arabia, since both seemed to embody the power of life. Serpents were considered immortal because of their ability to renew themselves by shedding their old skins, while woman’s procreative attributes made her seem immortal. Raja Alem’s novel Fatima: A Story of Arabia (2002) is concerned with this mystic relationship. The heroin is a semi-illiterate woman who has the ability to cross over the human domain into the reptile world. She is a woman-serpent. This paper will use the cultural approach to explore the mysterious relationship between woman and serpent as presented in the novel. The focus will be on how the image of woman-serpent has developed and metamorphosed from ancient Arabian age into modern times, shedding lights onto historical facts and cultural innuendoes. Key words: Serpent; Goddess; Arabian woman; Pre-Islamic religion; Arabian Peninsula

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A New Reading of the Serpent Myth in the Ancient and Modern Arab Culture

Works of Epic Fantasy often have the reputation of being formulaic, conservative works that simply replicate the same tired story lines and characters over and over. This assumption prevents Epic Fantasy works from achieving wide critical acceptance resulting in an under-analyzed and under-appreciated genre of literature. While some early works do follow the same narrative path as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Epic Fantasy has long challenged and reworked these narratives and character tropes. That many works of Epic Fantasy choose replicate the patriarchal structures found in our world is disappointing, but it is not an inherent feature of the genre. Other possibilities exist. This study uses the figure of the magical woman—a character found throughout Fantasy literature—to investigate the ways in which works of Epic Fantasy challenge, modify, or discard patriarchal narratives that work to contain powerful magical women characters. In order to investigate the ways in which works of Epic Fantasy are reworking patriarchal narratives and challenging generic conventions, this study first looks to the genre of Epic Fantasy itself, tracing its inauguration as a widely recognizable, marketable genre through the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. In order to investigate new and compelling imaginings of the magical woman, this study analyzes a number of types and approaches to Epic Fantasy including: Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls, and N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy. This study finds that the magical woman, while often powerful in her own right through her access to magic, is often constrained by narrative and generic expectations. It is only when these structures are modified, or discarded, that powerful magical women characters are not subsumed beneath patriarchal narratives.

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Questing Feminism: Narrative Tensions and Magical Women in Modern Fantasy

This thesis uses some of the key texts of the ‘romance revival’ of the late nineteenth century to develop a theory of the Man Alone, and to explain its significance in both literary and cultural terms. A historicist approach is used to counter a tendency amongst critics to overlook some of the more commercially successful texts of the period in favour of their less ‘popular’ but more ostensibly ‘artistic’ fin-de-siecle or early modernist contemporaries. The study centred on an analysis of novels by four of the most influential authors of the period – Conrad, Kipling, Stevenson and Wells – as well as a selection of their essays and short stories. This was accompanied by a period of archival research studying the original publication context of the source material, and also contemporary press coverage of some of the issues raised. It was discovered that the Man Alone fulfilled two functions in romance fiction, notably in examining the destabilisation of traditional assertions of identity that resulted from Britain’s imperial experiences, and also in dramatising the shift from theology to science as the authorising discourse of British society that happened in the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The Man Alone can thus be argued to be critical to the popular interpretation of the major political and philosophical shifts of late nineteenth century society. The romance revival itself, therefore, should be read as having played a formative role in the emergence of a Modernist literary culture, with Stevenson, Kipling and Wells playing significant roles alongside Conrad in this process.

The Man Alone in British Colonial and Scientific Romance 1886-1904

Unlike his great predecessor H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon never wrote an essay on the genre of the scientific romance or about the influences on his own imagination. Wells's career endured long enough for him to see a collected edition of his works and numerous reissues of separate texts. Sometimes he contributed Forewords to such later editions, but one of themÂ—a 1933 omnibus of his best-known scientific romancesÂ—prompted a retrospective Preface surveying his entire achievement in what he called \"my fantastic stories\" (240). Although there is some self-disparaging revisionism as Wells, approaching seventy, looks back over his shoulder at books written mostly in his thirties, the Preface to The Scientific Romances is important as a record of his thoughts about his literary genealogy, as an account of intentions and aspirations, and as a compact Wells's Rules of Order designed to help the reader of fantastic fiction \"to play the game properly\" (241). ' If Wells downplayed the artistic and social value of the \"playful parables\" of his younger days, he was still careful to outfit himself with a distinguished and selective pedigree. He claimed descent from Apuleius,

Olaf Stapledon and the Idea of Science Fiction

Romancing the Anthropocene: H. G. Wells and the Genre of the Future

H. G. Wells's literary criticism

Science-Fiction Studies

Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature@@@Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells

Robert M. Philmus

Papers

H. G. Wells's literary criticism

Science-Fiction Studies

Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature@@@Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells