More or less educational

Martin Kuester

More or less educational. Literary Godgames in Anglophone Literature from Chaucer to Atwood

ISBN 978-3-86821-972-2, 150 S., kt., € 25,00 (2022)

(Schriftenreihe Literaturwissenschaft, Bd. 98)

This volume brings together thoughts and ideas about "godgames" the author gathered over many years and in various educational and academic contexts. The term godgame - or, most often, god game spelled in two words - appears quite regularly today in the context of computer games and science fiction and fantasy literature. What the author wants to show in this study is that such godgames, as defined by British novelist John Fowles, have existed for many centuries not only in the realm of fantasy literature and include many works that are central to the traditional literary canon(s). The godgame offers the chance of bringing together authors and works that have crept up at various points of my academic life and whose mention within the context of one single work of literary criticism might at first sight seem somewhat challenging: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Tempest, Milton's Paradise Lost, and nineteenth- and twentieth- or even twenty-first-century authors from North America and Britain such as Herman Melville, Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Innes and Ian McEwan - as well as films such as The Game (1997) and The Truman Show (1998), or even science fiction movies such as The Matrix.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)