Worldquake Trilogy: Dragon's Green; The Chosen Ones; Galloglass
- Submitting institution
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The University of Kent
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 8439
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Canongate Books Limited
- ISBN
- 9781782117025
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The Worldquake Sequence comprises three novels and is a total of 265,000 words long. The novels were written over a period of five years. Considerable time was spent researching classic children’s literature, and exploring the influence of CG Jung and Joseph Campbell (among others) on adventure narratives. The novels take place in a post-technological alternate universe; it took a great deal of time and effort to do the ‘world-building’ required for this. The Worldquake Sequence has over a hundred characters and significant time was spent constructing them. The current planning ‘bible’ for the series is over fifty pages long.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Worldquake Sequence is a series of ‘middle-grade’ novels for children between 9- and 12-years-old, but also suitable for older readers and adults. The first three books are Dragon’s Green (78,000 words), The Chosen Ones (90,000 words) and Galloglass (97,000 words). The series totals 265,000 words so far, and has taken five years to write.
The novels draw on considerable research into classic children’s literature and folklore theory; and significant engagement with the work of CG Jung, Joseph Campbell, Vladimir Propp, Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Bruno Bettelheim.
The novels tell of Effie, an eleven-year-old ‘true hero’. She and her friends ‘epiphanise’ (a term borrowed from James Joyce) and use their magical skills to promote wisdom, truth and justice. The novels’ storylines concern individual identity; the role of reading, literature and arts in personal development; and wider philosophical and ethical concerns about belief, the environment, technology and the agency of animals.
Further themes include the tension between individual and collective responsibility, and the ethics of violence. Thomas has drawn on her research on the concept of ‘Flow’ in sports, Vedantic philosophy, botany, music theory and literary criticism to create the system of magic in the books. The novels include references to the works of Beethoven, Katherine Mansfield and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others.
Formally, Thomas experiments with a third-person, past-tense narrator reminiscent of ‘classic’ children’s fiction and develops it into a free indirect style that encompasses the points of view of children, adults, villains, animals and supernatural entities like the Luminiferous Ether.
Like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, these books explore what it means to be a hero. Like Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, these novels offer a new way of approaching the concept of ‘story’ and considers how women and girls can take heroic roles in patriarchal ‘adventure’ narratives.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
