Why the handbag is as mighty as the sword

With Moominmama - who turns 80 this year - Tove Jansson created a hero who wields a handbag instead of a sword

In 1989, the science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin published The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In it, she notes that many stories depend heavily on a hero with a sword or weapon as a central object, while bags seem boring and insignificant.

Le Guin argued against the idea of weapons being the most important tool in a novel. Novels themselves are not “sword-shaped”, she suggested, but bags of ideas bundled together. It might be unexpected to link Le Guin to Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories. But Moominmamma is a perfect example of the kind of hero Le Guin was imagining.

Read the full story at Times2.

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