| My thesis examines how Patricia McKillip, Robert Holdstock, and John Crowley exemplify what I term the labyrinth-polder story; each creates a distinct fantastical labyrinth sequestered from the larger world that combine trials of time, space, memory, and imagination to enact transformation upon the characters. Fantasy studies is a relatively young field and much work remains to explore the genre’s various narrative types. Mikhail Bakhtin provides a useful tool for defining new narrative subcategories with his theory of the chronotope, which invokes both time and space to influence and fashion both theme and form within a story. Chronotopes account for the way recognizable genre fragments (characters, timing, etc.) intermix in a specific time and space. My study catalogues and evaluates narrative echoes across my chosen texts to define the chronotope of fantasy labyrinths, which uses a limited space to portray vast stories about identity and personal transformation.
Key Words: fantasy, labyrinth, polder, chronotope, Bakhtin, McKillip, Kingfisher, Holdstock, Mythago Wood, Lavondyss, Crowley, Little, Big. |