Within the Door.pdf

2016

2012

This dissertation proposes a fantastical experience analogue to the historical experience proposed by Frank Ankersmit. It investigates how contemporary popular fantasy literature may provoke an experience of the fantastical within its readers, and serve to enrich the reader's experience of reality. After proposing this theory, this dissertation examines Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere as a case study. It concludes that the unique mixture of actual history with fictionalised and fantastical history serves to imaginatively transport its readers to a new realm.

2020

Neil Gaiman has won nearly every literary award available and is arguably the most famous of postmodern novelists. This study performs a cultural artifact analysis of his novels in order to explore the worldview embedded in his narratives.

Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, 2021

The worlds that children build in their minds may hold the child’s interest for a consistent period of time and evolve into full- fledged paracosms, or may last only for the duration of a single playtime. Studying a child’s fantasy world can be compared to mapping the uncharted terrains of the child’s psyche. Many parallel worlds have been recorded in the pages of fantasy literature for children. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, published in 2002, is one such book about a young protagonist’s adventures in a parallel world. This paper studies the parallel world of the eponymous protagonist as a paracosm to illustrate that this imaginary world can serve as effective means to understand the budding mind of Coraline.

New Horizons in English Studies, 2016

Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy novel Neverwhere revolves around some problematic aspects prevalent in the contemporary world, such as an iniquitous discrepancy between social classes or a problematic attitude to history. The artistic universes created by Gaiman are instrumental in conveying a complex condition of postmodern society. Although one of the represented worlds, London Above, is realistic and the other, London Below, is fantastic, both are suggestive of the contemporary social situation, citizens’ shared values and aspirations. Only when considered together can they reveal a comprehensive image of what the community accepts and what it rejects as no longer consistent with commonly held beliefs. The disparities in the representations of London Above and London Below refer to the division into the present and the past. The realistically portrayed metropolis is the embodiment of contemporary times. The fantastic London Below epitomises all that is ignored or rejected by London Above. The present study is going to discuss the main ideas encoded in the semiotic spaces created by Neil Gaiman, on the basis of postmodern theories. I am going to focus on how the characteristic features of postmodern fiction, such as the use of fantasy and the application of the ontological dominant, by highlighting the boundaries between London Above and London Below affect the general purport of the work.

Caietele Echinox

Ars Aeterna, 2021

The paper focuses on the phenomenon of urban fantasy with a particular interest in the topos of a city, which assumes great significance as a thematic and motivic element in the subgenre. The authors touch upon the relation between (sub)genre and topos/topoi in general, but also more specifically, between urban fantasy and the city, regarding the urban area as a distinct setting with a specific atmosphere, character or genius loci. Within this frame, the paper seeks to exemplify the aforementioned relations through an interpretative study of Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, which breathes life into the London underground scene. London Below comes to personify, literally, the vices of London Above via the use of anthropomorphic strategies. Moreover, the spatial peculiarities of the novel not only contribute to the creation of the fantastical atmosphere but they also function as a vehicle of social critique and a constitutive element of the protagonist’s transformation.

According to certain theories, Postmodernism makes a conscious use of the cyclical nature of mythical narrations in response to the anxieties of fragmentation and isolation of the self. Hence, Postmodernism, through its own mechanisms and techniques, offers reconceptualizations of the mythical strucutre applied to the contemporary social conditions. The aim of this article is to analyse how Neil Gaiman consciously employs a mythical structure in his first novel, "Neverwhere" (1996), and how he subverts the final aim of this pattern. My contention is that "Neverwhere" is a postmodernist novel whose structure follows the cyclical pattern of the Campbellian monomyth. But the cyclical nature of the myth is utterly transformed in the novel.