Fantasia e busca mítica na ficção 'New Weird' de China Miéville

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate how China Miéville's novel Perdido Street Station (2000) subverts typical plot-structuring conventions of literary fantasy, especially those related to the mythical quest adventure derived from Joseph Campbell's concept of monomyth. Perdido Street Station is considered the seminal novel of the New Weird, a movement or subgenre that emerged during Britain's Boom of genre fiction at the beginning of the 21st century. Its features include a concern with the potential for social and political criticism of genre fiction, the blurring of the boundaries between science fiction, fantasy and horror and the subversion of formal and thematic conventions of these genres, promoting both a return and a renunciation. We will demonstrate how certain aspects of modern fantasy derived from Tolkien's tradition are displaced in Perdido Street Station, such as the duality of good and evil, the “eucatastrophic” ending which regenerates the world and the hero's divine transformation. These shifts alter stages of the traditional narrative structure of fantasy, opening the novel to the possibility of a critical thinking of our reality.