Diálogos mitopoéticos: fantasia subcriativa, reencantamento e construção de mundos ficcionais em J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis e Arthur Machen

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, scientific progress caused a ―disenchantment‖ of the world that led modern society to secularization at many spheres of human culture. In literary criticism, the effect of this demagification was noticeable mainly in the production and appreciation of works that were mimetic of natural reality, and consequently, in the marginalization of fantasy stories as an escapist art in the face of a new historical reality of scientific, political and social responsibilities. In this scenario J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were authors that contributed to the resurgence of this literary genre in the 20th century, resisting the spirit of that time through Mythopoeia as the author's sub-creative liberty, which, through the power of imagination, has legitimacy to create stories in a fictional microcosm with its own laws and internal consistency. Arthur Machen, author of horror stories in fin de siècle decadent literature, also played an important role in the development of fictional worlds that explore fantastic stories in an intrusive way, considering the atmosphere of the modern world in their fictional elaboration. Even with particularities in their literary constructions, the three have in common the construction of stories that involve a mythopoeic quality of symbolic perception of reality, a critique of the materialist reductionism of the world and a romantic tradition that evokes a metaphysical experience that is able to propel the character/reader to a journey at the face of a supernatural reality that is in alterity with the natural world. The objective of this thesis is to analyze the mythopoeic imagination in the fictional universes of The Great Return and The Terror, by Arthur Machen (2019, 2020), The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien (2019), and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (2017) in order to prove that, in the works of those authors, it is at the same time a critique of automating materialism and an invitation to re-enchant the world through literary imagination. The analysis will be guided by the theoretical perspectives of the authors in the essays On Fairy Stories by Tolkien, Hieroglyphics by Machen and An Experiment in Literary Criticism by Lewis.