Mr. Underhill wrote:

Using historical, eco-critical, and postcolonial frameworks, and such theorists as Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway and Edward Said, this book explores Tolkien's employment of particular generic tropes including medievalism, fantasy, and the interplay between image and text to highlight, and at times correct, his contemporary socio-political epoch and its destructive relationship with the wider world.

Ya...that's going to be a hard pass for me on this one.

??

"Mapping Middle-earth surveys how Tolkien frames cartography as an inherently political act that embodies a desire for control of that which it maps. In turn, it analyses harmful contemporary engagements with land that intersect with, but also move beyond, cartography such as environmental damage; human-induced geological change; and the natural and bodily costs of political violence and imperialism."

This will be reviewed in Tolkien Studies, I imagine, and the reviewer will have conscientiously read it. I don't know if there will be many more readers of Tolkien who will actually read this book, which sounds like a tendentious deployment of foregone conclusions.

If anybody does get this book, would love to see a review.

Mapping Middle-earth is presumably derived from the author's doctoral thesis, which can be read as a pdf through the Edinburgh Research Archive site. A download link ("View/Open") is near the foot of the page.

Wayne

Findegil wrote:

Mapping Middle-earth is presumably derived from the author's doctoral thesis, which can be read as a pdf through the Edinburgh Research Archive site. A download link ("View/Open") is near the foot of the page.

Wayne

Thank you Findegil

Activism masked as scholarship by the usual cryptic self-confirming vocabulary.....as parody it would have had merit.

Findegil wrote:

Mapping Middle-earth is presumably derived from the author's doctoral thesis, which can be read as a pdf through the Edinburgh Research Archive site. A download link ("View/Open") is near the foot of the page.

Wayne

I was gonna say.. it sounds to me like someone is trying to pay off some student loans with their thesis.

In which it is claimed that Tolkien needs to be politicized in order to be taken seriously. And here all this time I thought the apolitical nature of the legendarium accounts for much of its enduring and nearly universal appeal. Just goes to show: what do I know?

This is another instance demonstrating that Tolkien's fiction is in the process of being recognized by the wider academy as 'literature'. There will be much more.

Aelfwine wrote:

In which it is claimed that Tolkien needs to be politicized in order to be taken seriously. And here all this time I thought the apolitical nature of the legendarium accounts for much of its enduring and nearly universal appeal. Just goes to show: what do I know?

I spend some time on Twitter and I've seen the politicising of Tolkien in the last few years become quite a big deal within the groups who value those areas. It's a whole new area of Tolkien studies now which I suspect many of us here will zone out from. I don't wish this or any other book ill, I just won't be paying it attention as it doesn't speak to my own reasons for reading Tolkien.