Resumen de The Heroine’s Journey: Epic Fantasy and Female Representation in Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019)
From its origins in Greek myth to Tolkien’s reinvention of its prototypical features, the genre of epic fantasy has been mostly male-dominated. The objective of this paper is to examine the subversion of these prototypical features as it takes place within Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019). To do so, the paper begins by discussing the traditional features of the hero’s journey, as well as those of the heroine’s journey as outlined by Maureen Murdock and Valerie E. Frankel; it then moves on to discussing two of Shannon’s female characters against this context, in terms of the roles they play and whether (and how) they adapt to the expected tradition of epic fantasy. This analysis hopefully serves to exemplify the possibility of renewal within such a canonized genre, especially as regards the fictional representation of identities which have, thus far, been relegated to secondary positions.
