Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages

Jane Chance is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Rice University, USA.

• Preface and Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages?; J.Chance & A.K.Siewers A Postmodern Medievalist; V.Flieger The Medievalist's Fiction; G.Nagy Tolkien, Dustsceawung, and the Gnomic Tense; J.R.Holmes The Reanimation of Antiquity and the Resistance to History: Macpherson-Scott-Tolkien; J.Hunter Archaism, Nostalgia, and Tennysonian War in The Lord of the Rings; A.Lynch Pastoralia and Perfectibility in Tolkien and William Morris; C.N.Scoville English, Welsh, and Elvish; D.Dawson Fantastic Medievalism and the Great War in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and David Jones's In Parenthesis; R.Long Tolkien's Cosmic-Christian Ecology; A.K.Siewers Fear of Difference, Fear of Death; B.McFadden Tolkien and the Other; J.Chance Similar but not Similar; T.Nasmith Tolkien in New Zealand: Man, Myth, and Movie; M.N.Stanton Bibliography Contributors Index

"The reconsideration and further development of commentary on the disparate sources of, influences on, and analogues to LotR that I have summarized here make Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages a worthy addition to the canon of Tolkien scholarship." - W.A. Senior, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts "The outward appearance of this nicely designed volume spells 'quality' - and indeed, fair is not foul (though, as we all know, not all that is gold glitters ...). The overall quality of the essays assembled in this collection is quite high and the two editors did a good job in dividing the fourteen papers into four parts - the medieval in postmodern Middle-earth, Middle-earth and Victorian medivalism, modern ideologies in Middle-earth, and visualizing medievalism in Middle-earth ... To sum up: the collection is an interesting example of what happens when medievalists (most of them anyway) read modern theories and apply them to Tolkien's work." - Hither Shore