Sarah J. Mass's "Throne of Glass" and the evolution of female characters in the high fantasy genre

Details

Supervisors

Arblaster, Paul

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale

Abstract

This thesis will analyse three high fantasy series: "The Chronicles of Narnia" by C.S. Lewis, "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien and "Throne of Glass" by Sarah J. Maas. While Lewis and Tolkien are still the two most famous authors of the genre, Maas’s popularity increases every day and she is becoming one of the most well-known contemporary female authors. Her singularity is that her series focuses mainly on female protagonists, offering a large panel of them and demonstrating how such characters can evolve throughout the story. Although the two fathers of the genre already had important female characters, there is a significant evolution between them and Maas’s. In order to study this evolution, "Throne of Glass" will be compared to "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Lord of the Rings". Moreover, it will be necessary to analyse the different characters; take the influence of feminism on the novels and the evolution of high fantasy literature into account to have an accurate representation of the three series. Thus, the research question of this master dissertation is: How did female characters in high fantasy literature evolve from the 1950s to nowadays?