A Cultural Interpretation Of Stephen King's Fantasy Novel The Dark Tower

"Modern master of horror fiction"Stephen King is most proud of his fantasy novel The Dark Tower. He had spent more than 30 years to complete it. The novel focused around Roland's quest to nattate the plot. The Dark Tower has rich content, complex plot, distinctive character, vivid description. This epic fantasy novel helps Stephen King get great wealth, at the same time it also made him won the supreme glory– the U.S. National Book Foundation Award for outstanding contribution to American literature.As a popular novel, The Dark Tower gave the audience an unprecedented thrill experience, but as a serious novel, it also involves some philosophical thinking of life, including many western important theme. For academics, no matter in philosophy, social history, linguistics or in psychology, religious studies, cultural studies, it is worthy of study.After summarizes the development of the fantasy literature, this paper sum up five themes from the contents of the whole novel: the call for hero, the conflict between good and evil, spiritual salvation, eternal pursuit. Then analysis and research these five themes, contrast the historical and current situation of society where the author lived, use the theory of cultural criticism to sum up the novel's social ideology as well as its popular causes. Process as follows:1. Introduction. Fantasy literature has been more popular abroad for half a century, but in our country, because of the introduction of fantasy novel is very late, so there is still a lot of space for review and analysis. As a best-selling fantasy novel, the reasons for The Dark Tower being touted was that the author's deep concern about the destiny of mankind. Cultural criticism is an external study theory for text analysis, it can reveal the underlying social ideology of the fiction. This paper uses the cultural criticism theory to analyze and research the novel, for the sake of reveal the deep cultural connotations.2, Fantasy literature and The Dark Tower's inheritance and evolution for the fantasy literature. The development and prosperity of fantasy literature have a process, this chapter traces the history of fantasy literature, summarizes the common features of this literary genre, epitomize The Dark Tower's inheritance and evolution for the fantasy literature.3, The Dark Tower's cultural implication. The chapter is to make a top priority in this paper. It has use the cultural criticism theory to interpret the five themes which abstracted from the whole novel. Thus sum up the fiction's social ideology.4. Conclusion. Sum up the social and cultural value of the fiction and find the main reason of its popularity.