Artigo Revisado por pares

Fantasizing It As It Is: Religious Language in Philip Pullman's Trilogy, His Dark Materials

2003; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.2003.0009

ISSN

1543-3374

Autores

David Gooderham,

Tópico(s)

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Resumo

Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, 1 has received enthusiastic reviews during the years of its publication; there have, however, been quite other responses from some religious groups. The problem has not been, as in protests about the Harry Potter books, with magic, but with "the Church," unmistakable in the text with its priests, cardinals, Consistorial Court and Magisterium. It is represented as a powerful and ruthlessly repressive organization, determined to root out sin and to control weak human beings for their own good at any cost. When this policy is put into practice by a kind of lobotomizing of the child population, these are just the texts which Roman Catholic churchmen, already troubled with charges of actual child abuse, could do without. More generally, Christian beliefs in God, the fall and the afterlife are all radically called into question, so that even those who effortlessly shrugged off fundamentalist fears about Harry Potter have found this case less easy to handle.

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