AustLit

'Representing rape as wrong, and not avoiding the violence of it, has been the focus of many feminists' work for the past forty years. Various rape theorists have provided deconstructive analyses of how legal and media genres, as well as romance novels and feature films, shape how rape is understood and what it can mean. Fantasy literature is one more culturally powerful genre in which rape is narrated, but this genre has been largely neglected by theorists, and there is certainly room for more analysis of how rape is represented in fantasy fiction, given that the genre is widely read and popular-and, like other popular genres, has some power to reinforce and naturalise, or to challenge, rape culture. Moreover, as fantasy literature is often associated with frivolous escapism, it may be in a position to insidiously reinscribe patriarchal assumptions about sexual violence. If fantasy literature is not taken seriously, if its sexist affirmations of rape culture are dismissed as symptoms of a retrograde genre, then the processes by which it perpetuates rape culture go unchallenged. While most scholarly works about fantasy literature, feminist and otherwise, have surveyed a large number of texts, if we are to take fantasy literature seriously, a closer textual analysis is required. Paying close attention to the way language and narrative structures used by fantasy literature interact with rape narratives in non-feminist fantasy texts, helps elucidate some of the ways narrative can operate to depoliticise representations of sexual violence.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.