Approximating the realist and fantasy modes through "Framley Parsonage" and "Tooth and Claw".

• Main Author: Loh, Vanessa Ya Shi.
• Other Authors: Tamara Silvia Wagner
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/50550
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In investigating the relations between Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw (2003) and its Victorian predecessor, Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1861), this paper will demonstrate how the apparently disparate modes of fantasy and realism may be said to share the same fundamental principles.The choice of the texts makes this undertaking particularly interesting as Tooth and Claw is categorised within the fantastic mode because it literalises a particular element from its realist predecessor, Framley Parsonage. The scope of the paper will then aim to be at once broad, in making comments on the realist and fantasy genres while also narrowing its focus in interrogating these concepts through the chosen fictions. This paper attempts to go some way in answering these questions: The ‘realist,’ or rather, the ‘real,’ and the ‘fantastic’ appear to be diametrically opposed concepts, but are they so different when manifested through literary texts? What are the formal differences between the realist and the fantasy novel? What does the fantasy genre bring to the Victorian framework? How does a reading of a contemporary reworking alter our perspective of its predecessor?