Rise of the New Weird, a Dissertation Topic

Although I won't be going on to graduate school right after my undergraduate degree is done, due to growing responsiblities, I still want to get my Master's degree eventually. I know exactly what I wish to write for a topic - the significance of the New Weird movement in terms of modern fantasy - which I have been steadfastly studying in my free time. Part of the idea is inspired by figures like McLuhan, who pioneered the way we re-conceive old myths in a modern world. In light of some research, I discovered one of my favourite authors, China Miéville was leading a war against Tolkienesque fantasy. He wanted a revolution, which he, among many other modern fantasy writers, are waging, harrowing the archaic vision of Tolkienesque fantasy unawares. The idea is to trace the skeins of the New Weird movement, its precepts (revolutionary forms of art, literature and film e.g. Surrealism, Futurism,) and their literary forefathers (Lovecraft, Dunsany, Marinetti, Ernst, Peake), to outline what it stands for, and what it stands to re-define in fantasy. I want to study some influential pieces of literature, tracing its developments from medieval romance to modern fantasy, studying each of their revolutionary ways of re-defining romance, from its medieval inception (12th-15th), to Gothic (18th-19th), to Weird (early 20th), to Post-War / Tolkienesque (mid-20th), to New Weird (late 20th/early 21st), most importantly the strangle-hold of Tolkienesque fantasy.

Romance, as a literary genre, is chiefly concerned with the role of the past, and its haunting manifestations in the present. The critic, Geraldine Heng, in her study of medieval romance, locates its origins in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. Heng studies the “skeins of magical narratives” (Heng 4) woven into this influential, pseudo-historical book written in the twelfth century, examining what she insists is a safe, original allegory that confronts a great historical trauma in its narrative. The shocking acts of cannibalism committed by the Crusaders in 1098, in turn, become linked as a founding, poetic metaphor with a British legend and a language of military conquest, or colonization. This particular moment is quite significant as it marks the foundation of one of the most influential myths for our times, the King Arthur legend. Later this legend will develop in the hands of the twentieth century writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, who will make a traditional, yet, equally innovative vision of past romance anew for the modern world. Until the rise of the New Weird reformation led by China Miéville, a Luther to the Romish Tolkien, the Oxford dean holds an important, popish role in our cultural vision of modern romance aka fantasy literature for half a century.