Le ciel, l’un des espaces de la « fantasy »
The Topos of the Sky in Fantasy Literature

Summary/Abstract: This essay attempts to compare the imaginary of air and the mythopoeia of utopian/dystopian lands in the sky as represented in fantasy fiction. According to Tolkien, the fantasy story configures a secondary world based on the reader’s secondary belief formed through reading. This sub-created world is often grounded on earth; even outer-space fantasy still depicts a world set in another planet. Nevertheless, the mythopoeia of a floating island remains a recurrent space in fantasy since Swift’s creation of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). This mythopoeia extends to other media such as animation and video games as in Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) and the video game BioShock Infinite (2013). Placing emphasis on the archetypal image of Laputa, the present study treats this airborne fantasy space from three vantage points: antigravity vis-à-vis utopia of air; utopia existing with time; and utopia to dystopia.

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