الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
Abstract
This thesis aims at reading George Raymond Richard Martin’s series of novels A Song of Ice and Fire from a postmodernist perspective that merges the political, the historical and the fantastic. In his book series, Martin has brilliantly interwoven a rich and expansive tapestry of a turbulent and contentious world, creating a world of an epic stature. In her book The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon states that “Historical meaning may …be seen today as unstable, contextual, relational, and provisional, but postmodernism argues that, in fact, it has always been so. And it uses novelistic representations to underline the narrative nature of much of that knowledge” (64). Thus, this thesis suggests that Martin’s book series relies on knowledge from the past in an attempt to make the readers aware of the challenges of their present and how the world around them is threatened by dangers that can never be defied unless people set aside their political differences and search together for a solution.
Despite several critical claims that regard the work as a mere epic fantasy with no historical basis, the thesis will attempt to highlight how Martin revamps specific incidents in his series of novels in relation to historical events and characters. Hence, the thesis seeks to analyse the literary representations of these events within the context of concepts of power relations and hegemonic struggles. It will also discuss how fantasy and magical realism are woven into the sequence of events in the narrative without jeopardising the realistic core of the series. The thesis will avail itself of the critical approaches by several postmodernist critics such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Linda Hutcheon, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Luis Leal.