{"id":30712,"date":"2008-12-04T21:59:51","date_gmt":"2008-12-05T02:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/?p=30712"},"modified":"2008-12-04T22:03:01","modified_gmt":"2008-12-05T03:03:01","slug":"dr-dimitra-fimis-tolkien-book-launch-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/2008\/12\/04\/30712-dr-dimitra-fimis-tolkien-book-launch-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr Dimitra Fimi’s Tolkien Book Launch Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> Claire<\/strong> writes: I wanted to let you know about the launch last Friday (28th November) of Dr Dimitra Fimi’s new book Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits<\/em><\/strong>, published by Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n

The launch was held at Cardiff University, where Dimitra is an associate lecturer. First a good number of university staff, current and former students of Dimitra’s, family, friends, guests and media representatives gathered in one of the university’s lecture theatres. Dimitra was introduced and gave a half-hour talk on her book. She explained that it’s an exploration of the evolution of Tolkien’s mythology within the framework of its cultural and historical context. <\/p>\n

Dimitra went on: \u201cMy book is a new analysis of Tolkien’s mythology, looking at his creative vision from the perspective of cultural history. My main research question was how Tolkien’s fiction fits with the cultural and historical milieu of the period he was writing. I wanted to examine Tolkien’s work not as a peculiar and idiosyncratic one-off in 20th-century fiction, but as an integral part of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s high time that academia starts looking at “genre” fiction, like fantasy, SF, crime fiction, etc, in a more serious way, as cultural products of their times and as important factors in the development of literary tastes in the 20th and 21st centuries. I hope that my book contributes to this new trend of re-evaluating in a serious scholarly way “genre” fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n