Ashes, War, and a Broken Earth: The Systemic Role of Education in Fantasy Literature (2024)

Undergraduate: Abigail Welch

Faculty Advisor: Cynthia Current
Department: English and Comparative Literature

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Building on fantasy literature's origins as social commentary, this project aims to increase the scholarly relevance of such literature by highlighting its applicability to actual-world systems through world-building. Drawing on education's power as a social system, this paper explores the collapse of educational institutions in Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes series, R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War trilogy, and N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth trilogy. The author adapts possible worlds theory into a theory of "parallel worlds," arguing that the ramifications of these collapses reveal the power of educational institutions in resisting or upholding oppressive systems in the actual world. The analysis focuses on the way oppression manifests in fantasy literature in the individual and through world-scale constructs of the material and supernatural. Ultimately, the paper reveals that autonomous high fantasy worlds act as case studies for the actual world in which educational institutions are so pivotal to society that their power cannot be disregarded. If educational spaces are not actively advocating for liberation, they are by default upholding oppressive systems.