Here's an excerpt:
When I emailed with Richard Utz, a medievalist who teaches in the School of Literature, Media, and Communications at Georgia Tech, about the role of authenticity in medieval-inspired entertainment, he identified these details as a foundation of credibility on which to build a myth. "To help suspend disbelief about where the [Medieval Times] castle is and how artificial it looks, a 'real' anchor of the 'true' family connection is used to assist audiences at feeling a 'true' alterity,” he wrote. In this way, authenticity itself, in even small doses, becomes a standard feature of fantasy.
The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
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