Abstract:
Fantasy novel as a sub-genre of children’s literature has crossed over to the adult world
resulting in the rapid growth of adult fantasy fiction in the last ten years. George R.R.
Martins’ A Song of Ice and Fire, consisting of five volumes at present, is one example
of extremely popular adult fantasy fiction which has sold more than fifteen million copies
all over the world. But what is more remarkable is that A Song of Ice and Fire has
spawned a TV series called A Game of Thrones, as well as a comic book adaptation, a
card game, a board game, a role playing game and two video games. In other words, A
Song of Ice and Fire is available for consumption both as text and hypertext.
My paper sets out to investigate the text and hypertext of A Song and Ice and Fire with
a view to gaining a greater insight into the narrative elements common to both genres
of text and hypertext, making use of Conceptual Blending theory which offers a general
model of meaning construction in which a small set of partially compositional processes
operate in analogy, metaphor, counterfactuals and many other semantic and pragmatic
phenomena. In this theory, understanding meaning involves the construction of blended
cognitive models that include some structure from the input models as well as emergent
structures that arise through the process of blending
