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Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling, and Meyer. By Lykke Guanio-Uluru. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
If one had to distill the central thesis of Lykke Guanio-Uluru's extremely rich and complex book into one sentence, it might be this: Excavating the values expressed by a work of literature is an enormously complex task that requires careful attention not only to the conscious choices made by a story's cast of characters, but also to revelations provided by the work's aesthetic features. For example, the selection of focalizer(s) (one, two, many), recurrent symbols (trees, shape-shifters, blood), and even the adjectives used to describe a landscape all carry weight in inviting readers to trust or distrust a narrator, or to find a world, and its values, appealing or repellent.
Guanio-Uluru singles out for analysis the sprawling fantasy texts of J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, and Stephenie Meyer in part because of their enormous recent popularity, which "makes their reflection (or refraction) of cultural values relevant to understanding contemporary Western society" and suggests "that their formative ethical influence is significant, perhaps globally" (1). The sheer scale of the texts under examination (some seven thousand pages in all), and the daunting volume of critical literature that they have already generated, make close ethical examination of them a herculean task. Guanio-Uluru adds further challenge by situating each text within the framework of James Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative, as well as by drawing on the concepts of contemporary philosophical ethical theory-consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics-in order to understand their normative commitments. As if this were not enough, she also invokes religiously based worldviews-Old Norse, Judeo-Christian, Mormon-to help unpack...