Sylvia Kelso
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621730
- eISBN:
- 9781800341296
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621730.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter provides a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s later fantasy series The Sharing Knife to explore how the project reworks traditional narrative motifs and crosses genres to blur or ...
More
This chapter provides a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s later fantasy series The Sharing Knife to explore how the project reworks traditional narrative motifs and crosses genres to blur or mutate expectations and storylines. The chapter argues that the series is neither science fiction nor fantasy, but a hybrid based in fantasy whose setting fits early industrial society and the contours of the post-apocalypse. It draws on motifs of Western women’s writing, with a main female character, Fawn, in flight, but with settings (the road and the river) more commonly associated with the picaresque and, in particular, American road trip literature. The non-realist elements and the secondary world situate the novels as speculative fantasy fiction, only to diverge immediately and repeatedly from the modern fantasy norm.Less
This chapter provides a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s later fantasy series The Sharing Knife to explore how the project reworks traditional narrative motifs and crosses genres to blur or mutate expectations and storylines. The chapter argues that the series is neither science fiction nor fantasy, but a hybrid based in fantasy whose setting fits early industrial society and the contours of the post-apocalypse. It draws on motifs of Western women’s writing, with a main female character, Fawn, in flight, but with settings (the road and the river) more commonly associated with the picaresque and, in particular, American road trip literature. The non-realist elements and the secondary world situate the novels as speculative fantasy fiction, only to diverge immediately and repeatedly from the modern fantasy norm.
