Word: escapist
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...with friends and translate Icelandic sagas, Tolkien bore all this stoically. He worked away at other books (Silmarillion and Akallabeth, tales about the creation and early history of Middle-earth, to be published posthumously). But he did point out that literal-minded folk who object to fairy stories as escapist mistake the wartime escape of the deserter (bad) for the wartime escape of the prisoner (necessary and good). Fairy tales represent the latter, Tolkien continued, and correspond to the primordial human desire-in a world of poverty, injustice and death -for the "consolation of the happy ending." Tolkien even coined...
...three volumes of the Ring sold close to 500,000 copies in the U.S. Scholars and critics had at first admired his books, while tracing down literary influences that ranged from Buchan (the chases, the praise of friendship) to Beowulf. Then, with such popularity, the story was denounced as escapist fantasy, its success owlishly attributed to "irrational adulation" and "nonliterary cultural and social phenomena." Attempts to straitjacket Tolkien's story as contemporary allegory were updated too. In the '50s, critics averred, Sauron was really Joseph Stalin and fumbling, heroic Frodo was the West...
Since it arrives at a moment when escapist fare of quality is in desperately short supply, it is doubly welcome - perhaps triply so, since it marks the return after seven years' absence of a humane, marvelously accomplished and refreshingly modest director...
What was so compelling about the story of a Chinese peasant who rose to riches-actually through his wife's shrewd looting of a local rich man's house during a rebellion? Well, it was both uplifting and escapist literature for Americans harassed by tumbling stock prices, declining job opportunities and general disillusionment with a society that had disappointed them. Published in 1931, The Good Earth made Pearl Buck rich, and, at the relatively late age of 39, an instant celebrity...
...film's first third. From MacDougall to St. Mark's, from Washington Square to the Lower East Side... are the spots where high school girls go for experience, and college jazz artists (and sometimes real musicians) give it to them. Here also lies the East Coast seedbed of escapist counter-culturism and intellectual voyeurism--fit for an Abbie Hoffman (remember Abbie?) even more than for a Fritz. If Bakshi, unlike Crumb, speaks from such a milieu's heart, still that milieu indicts itself...