Summer brief

I did some background research on 3 of the authors.

Reading about Angela Carter was very interesting. She has been described as the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell and JK Rowling among others. Carters best known work and the one that interests me the most is 'The Bloody Chamber'. The book contains alternative versions of well known fairy tales giving them a "exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition." Her versions are "subversively dark and sensual". I enjoy creating alternate versions of existing stories changing the fell or message from the original, I find it interesting to see how small changes can completely alter the focus of a concept. Carter did not see the stories in 'The Bloody Chamber' as different versions of the original fairy tales, she was aiming to decipher the already existing latent content within them. This idea is important to illustration when trying to find the important information in a project, it is often easy to try depict all the information in a subject without capturing the message behind it.

Neil Gaiman's work often combines contemporary fiction, historical drama and legend. I have been reading and listening to gaiman's interviews both by himself and with other authors, they are thought provoking and demonstrate how much thought and research he puts into his work and how he views the world around him. Though his work varies greatly there are recurring themes and motifs throughout. His work whether it be a novel or a comic series often contain ideas self imprisonment, the necessity of stories, men inflicting harm on women, parents damaging their children, the cycle of birth,death and rebirth and dreams. His comic series 'Sandman' contains bold characters whose appearance can change quite dramatically but he uses a few constants to maintain their identity. I would like to experiment with these characters and see how much they can be changed and still be recognisable.

Ursula Le Guin was described by the New York Times as "America's greatest living science fiction writer". I like the way she uses imaginary worlds to explore ideas such as religion, gender and politics, ideas that are clearly very important to her. In several of Le Guin's works she addresses "the present dominant socio-political American system as problematic and destructive to the health and life of the natural world, humanity, and their interrelations." I am a huge fan of Studio Ghibli so was very interested to read that in the early 1908's Hayao Miyazaki asked permission to create an animated adaptation of Earthsea but was turned down by Le Guin who had not heard of his work at the time. The film was eventually directed by Miyazaki's son but Le Guin was not happy about changes made to the moral sense of the story. She said "Evil has been comfortably externalized in a villain", Le Guin writes, "the wizard Kumo/Cob, who can simply be killed, thus solving all problems. In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic questions."