Strictly Fantasy

Role-playing games seemed to appear of nowhere in the early 1970s and have been a quiet but steady presence in American culture ever since. This new look at the hobby searches for the historical origins of role-playing games deep in the imaginative worlds of Western culture. It looks at the earliest fantasy stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the fans--both readers and writers--who wanted to bring them to life, at the Midwestern landscape and the middle-class households that were the hobby's birthplace, and at the struggle to find meaning and identity amidst cultural conflicts that drove many people into these communities of play. This book also addresses race, religion, gender, fandom, and the place these games have within American capitalism. All the paths of this journey are connected by the very quality that has made fantasy role-playing so powerful: it binds the limitless imagination into a "strict" framework of rules. Far from being an accidental offshoot of marginalized fan communities, role-playing games' ability to hold contradictions in dynamic, creative tension made them a necessary and central product of the twentieth century.

Role-playing games seemed to appear of nowhere in the early 1970s and have been a quiet but steady presence in American culture ever since. This new look at the hobby searches for the historical origins of role-playing games deep in the imaginative worlds of Western culture. It looks at the earliest fantasy stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the fans--both readers and writers--who wanted to bring them to life, at the Midwestern landscape and the middle-class households that were the hobby's birthplace, and at the struggle to find meaning and identity amidst cultural conflicts that drove many people into these communities of play. This book also addresses race, religion, gender, fandom, and the place these games have within American capitalism. All the paths of this journey are connected by the very quality that has made fantasy role-playing so powerful: it binds the limitless imagination into a "strict" framework of rules. Far from being an accidental offshoot of marginalized fan communities, role-playing games' ability to hold contradictions in dynamic, creative tension made them a necessary and central product of the twentieth century.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, , course: English Philology, language: English, abstract: Who really was the man who wrote the “bible of fantasy” and what about his beautifully designed world of Middle-Earth? Aim of this work is to present the problem of good and evil in Tolkien's output. His work contributed to a number of fantastic novels, films and computer games in which we can find the motif of darkness and light. The first part of my work I will dedicate as a whole to the genre of fantasy. I will present a bibliography of the outstanding English philologist and writer. I will explain the importance of the fantasy genre and discuss the origins of his works, and how these books impact on other writers. This chapter will also contain the impact of fantasy on our dreams and what we really obtain while reading fantasy literature. In the second chapter I will start with Tolkien's biography. Then I am going to characterize the world which Tolkien presented in his works. Every character has to complete a specified mission and some of them are heroes. I will discuss major characters based on hero's journey, the term coined by Joseph Campbell. Relations between them mirror relations in the real world although distant. Tolkien created in his novels everything from geography, flora and fauna, human and superhuman races to complete histories, beliefs and traditions. In the third chapter I will analyze two concepts of the world of Middle-Earth that Tolkien has created in his novels, good and evil. They fit in literature's mainstream with universal messages, except that, all of considerations are a part of the fantasy genre convention. Each of these elements has many meanings in the works of Tolkien and acts as a symbol like the One Ring which will be fully described in my work.

Reading textbook series, organized by thematic units, utilizes award-winning, unabridged trade book literature to teach reading and language arts competency to students, grades K-6.

Relates in verse Ned's search for his lost cat through the pages of this book--from one to twenty-eight.