Fantasy

I

Introduction

Fantasy, form of literature that describes the impossible and makes little or no attempt to achieve realistic effects. Instead, fantasy seeks to please or to terrify the imagination.

II

The Antiquity of Fantasy

According to the Argentine writer, Bioy Casares, fantasy is “as old as fear”. Certainly, fantasy pre-dates realistic fiction. The ancient Sumerian Gilgamesh Epic is a fantastic fiction. The ancient Egyptian Westcar Papyrus is a collection of magical tales. The Roman writer Apuleius’s Golden Ass, written in the 2nd century ad, deals with metamorphosis and magic. Such medieval texts as La Divina Commedia by Dante, Le Morte d’Arthur (1469-1470) by Thomas Malory, and Le Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris all deal with the marvellous, the supernatural, and the monstrous. Similarly, the story collections of pre-modern, non-European cultures such as the Indian Ocean of Stories and the Arab Thousand and One Nights are predominantly collections of fantastic tales.

III

Origins of the Genre

The origins of fantasy as a genre of Western literature, as distinct from realistic or mainstream literature, can be traced back to the 18th century, when such Gothic novels as The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe started to exploit certain bizarre and supernatural themes that were to be taken up again and again by later writers of fantasy. Additional sources of inspiration came from research into medieval ballads in England and elsewhere, from Antoine Galland’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights into French (1704-1717) and from the publication and study of European folk and fairy tales. Stock themes in fantasy literature, as it has developed from the 18th century until the present day, include doppelgängers, mirror worlds, diabolic pacts, alternative histories, magical quests, the invasion of reality by dreams, and monstrous hauntings. Early masterpieces of fantasy literature include the orientalist fantasy, Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, the Polish aristocrat Jan Potocki’s farrago of tales within tales, The Saragossa Manuscript (published fragmentarily 1804-1814), and the collections of short stories published by the German E. T. A. Hoffmann in the early decades of the 19th century.

While the Gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown was probably America’s earliest author of fantasy, and Nathaniel Hawthorne produced stories such as “Young Goodman Brown” that were certainly fantastic, Edgar Allan Poe was the greatest of America’s early fantasy writers in both prose and poetry. In addition Poe can be seen as an early pioneer of both horror literature and science fiction. In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries it becomes increasingly difficult, even impossible, to make clear distinctions between the various genres, but probably horror and science fiction are best considered as sub-genres within the very wide genre of fantasy fiction. In the 19th century Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll playfully experimented with language and logical paradox. (In these and in many other cases it is often difficult to draw the bounds between adult fantasy and that written for children.) Other writers like Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, and William Morris made more serious use of fantasy in the service of Christian ethics and allegory. This trend continued into the 20th century, notable examples being the G. K. Chesterton novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and the Narnia cycle of novels for children by C. S. Lewis.

IV

Modern Trends

In modern times, American and British writers have tended to predominate in the production of fantasy for a mass market. European writers and Latin American writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Michel Tournier have tended to produce works that are more literary and more intellectual and which sometimes draw upon Expressionist or Surrealist ideas and imagery. Magic realism, a type of fantasy in which weirdly extravagant events are narrated in a deadpan realistic style, has been dominated by Latin Americans, most notably Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. However, European writers, such as the Angela Carter, Milan Kundera, and Sylvie Germain have also produced work in this sub-category of fantasy.

A broad distinction can be made between low fantasy and high fantasy. In low fantasy the fantastic breaks into the real world and changes certain aspects of it, as for instance in the Franz Kafka story “Die Verwandlung” (1915; “The Metamorphosis”, 1937), in which a man wakes up to find himself transformed into a beetle. In high fantasy, on the other hand, a complete alternative world has been imagined, often in considerable detail. The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) by J. R. R. Tolkien is one of the best-known examples of high fantasy. Together with the series of novels by Robert E. Howard devoted to the adventures of Conan the Barbarian, Tolkien’s trilogy has provided one of the main sources of inspiration for the subsequent development of the mass-market sub-genre of fantasy known as “Sword and Sorcery”. In recent years Terry Pratchett and Iain Banks have produced outstanding parodies of the clichés that abound in this sub-genre. However, the Gormenghast trilogy (1946-1959) by Mervyn Peake and The Once and Future King (1958) by T. H. White are outstanding examples of high fantasy that avoid such clichés.