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Pseudo-historical Fantasy Novels as the Imaginations for Resistance —An Analysis of Masaki Yamada’s Early Works—

park kitae 1

1교토대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This research involves an analysis of the aspects of resistance and imagination in the early works of Masaki Yamada, including God Hunting, Maitreya War and Glacier People. The key concepts for the analysis were “daily life” and “extraordinariness.” In God Hunting, Yamada’s religious imagination, the hero’s imagination about a better world and people’s imagination in the real world such as occult were used. In Maitreya War, religious imagination and pseudo-historical imagination were combined. In addition, the hero who symbolized the concept of extraordinariness defended the world by fighting the enemy, the other symbol of the same concept. Finally, in Glacier People, a bloodsucking subspecies of human being based on the imagination of the Gothic Romance genre was used as the symbol of extraordinariness. And the characteristics of the subspecies were reasonably explained through pseudo-scientific imagination. By analyzing these novels, it was found that various imaginations had joined or coexisted to support pseudo-historical fantasy novels of the 1970s, and had also affected later generation novels since the 1980s. Furthermore, the elements and methodologies appearing in Yamada’s early works were also found the later generation novels which were written since the 1980s. A strong combination of resistance and imagination was shared through generations of the pseudo-historical fantasy novels. As “the imaginations for resistance,” Yamada’s works contributed to “the renewal” of pseudo-historical fantasy novel genre, the literary flow that was created by Ryo Hanmura, Kazumasa Hirai and Futaro Yamada. In this sense, it can be said that Yamada’s early works played a role as a bridge between the 1970s and later eras.

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