Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, as well as a work in this genre.[1]
Its roots are in oral traditions, which became fantasy literature and drama. From the twentieth century, it has expanded further into various media, including film, television, graphic novels, manga, animations, and video games.
The expression fantastic literature is also often used to refer to this genre by the Anglophone literary critics.[2] [3] [4] [5] An archaic spelling for the term is phantasy.[6]
Fantasy is distinguished from the genres of science fiction and horror by the absence of scientific or macabre themes, although these can occur in fantasy. In popular culture, the fantasy genre predominantly features settings that emulate Earth, but with a sense of otherness.[7] In its broadest sense, however, fantasy consists of works by many writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from ancient myths and legends to many recent and popular works.
Many works of fantasy use magic or other supernatural elements as a main plot element, theme, or setting.[8] Magic, magic practitioners (sorcerers, witches and so on) and magical creatures are common in many of these worlds.
An identifying trait of fantasy is the author's use of narrative elements that do not have to rely on history or nature to be coherent.[9] This differs from realistic fiction in that realistic fiction has to attend to the history and natural laws of reality, where fantasy does not. In writing fantasy the author uses worldbuilding to create characters, situations, and settings that may not be possible in reality.
Many fantasy authors use real-world folklore and mythology as inspiration;[10] and although another defining characteristic of the fantasy genre is the inclusion of supernatural elements, such as magic,[11] this does not have to be the case.
Fantasy has often been compared to science fiction and horror because they are the major categories of speculative fiction. Fantasy is distinguished from science fiction by the plausibility of the narrative elements. A science fiction narrative is unlikely, though seemingly possible through logical scientific or technological extrapolation, where fantasy narratives do not need to be scientifically possible.[9] Authors have to rely on the readers' suspension of disbelief, an acceptance of the unbelievable or impossible for the sake of enjoyment, in order to write effective fantasies. Despite both genres' heavy reliance on the supernatural, fantasy and horror are distinguishable from one another. Horror primarily evokes fear through the protagonists' weaknesses or inability to deal with the antagonists.[12]
See main article: History of fantasy.
See main article: Early history of fantasy. While some elements of the supernatural and the fantastic were a part of literature from its beginning, fantasy elements occur throughout ancient religious texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.[13] The ancient Babylonian creation epic, the Enûma Eliš, in which the god Marduk slays the goddess Tiamat,[14] contains the theme of a cosmic battle between good and evil, which is characteristic of the modern fantasy genre.[14] Genres of romantic and fantasy literature existed in ancient Egypt.[15] The Tales of the Court of King Khufu, which is preserved in the Westcar Papyrus and was probably written in the middle of the second half of the eighteenth century BC, preserves a mixture of stories with elements of historical fiction, fantasy, and satire.[16] [17] Egyptian funerary texts preserve mythological tales,[15] the most significant of which are the myths of Osiris and his son Horus.[15]
Myth with fantastic elements intended for adults were a major genre of ancient Greek literature.[18] The comedies of Aristophanes are filled with fantastic elements,[19] particularly his play The Birds,[19] in which an Athenian man builds a city in the clouds with the birds and challenges Zeus's authority.[19] Ovid's Metamorphoses and Apuleius's The Golden Ass are both works that influenced the development of the fantasy genre[19] by taking mythic elements and weaving them into personal accounts.[19] Both works involve complex narratives in which humans beings are transformed into animals or inanimate objects.[19] Platonic teachings and early Christian theology are major influences on the modern fantasy genre.[19] Plato used allegories to convey many of his teachings,[19] and early Christian writers interpreted both the Old and New Testaments as employing parables to relay spiritual truths.[19] This ability to find meaning in a story that is not literally true became the foundation that allowed the modern fantasy genre to develop.[19]
The most well known fiction from the Islamic world is One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), which is a compilation of many ancient and medieval folk tales. Various characters from this epic have become cultural icons in Western culture, such as Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba. Hindu mythology was an evolution of the earlier Vedic mythology and had many more fantastical stories and characters, particularly in the Indian epics. The Panchatantra (Fables of Bidpai), for example, used various animal fables and magical tales to illustrate the central Indian principles of political science. Chinese traditions have been particularly influential in the vein of fantasy known as Chinoiserie, including such writers as Ernest Bramah and Barry Hughart.[20]
Beowulf is among the best known of the Old English tales in the English speaking world, and has had deep influence on the fantasy genre; several fantasy works have retold the tale, such as John Gardner's Grendel.[21] Norse mythology, as found in the Elder Edda and the Younger Edda, includes such figures as Odin and his fellow Aesir, and dwarves, elves, dragons, and giants.[22] These elements have been directly imported into various fantasy works. The separate folklore of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland has sometimes been used indiscriminately for "Celtic" fantasy, sometimes with great effect; other writers have specified the use of a single source.[23] The Welsh tradition has been particularly influential, due to its connection to King Arthur and its collection in a single work, the epic Mabinogion.
There are many works where the boundary between fantasy and other works is not clear; the question of whether the writers believed in the possibilities of the marvels in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight makes it difficult to distinguish when fantasy, in its modern sense, first began.[24]
Although pre-dated by John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River (1841), the history of modern fantasy literature is usually said to begin with George MacDonald, the Scottish author of such novels as Phantastes (1858) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872); the former is widely considered to be the first fantasy novel ever written for adults. MacDonald was a major influence on both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.[25] The other major fantasy author of this era was William Morris, an English poet who wrote several novels in the latter part of the century, including The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Well at the World's End (1896).
Despite MacDonald's future influence with At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Morris's popularity with his contemporaries, and H. G. Wells's The Wonderful Visit (1895), it was not until the 20th century that fantasy fiction began to reach a large audience. Lord Dunsany established the genre's popularity in both the novel and the short story form. H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs began to write fantasy at this time. These authors, along with Abraham Merritt, established what was known as the "lost world" subgenre, which was the most popular form of fantasy in the early decades of the 20th century, although several classic children's fantasies, such as Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, were also published around this time.
Juvenile fantasy was considered more acceptable than fantasy intended for adults, with the effect that writers who wished to write fantasy had to fit their work into forms aimed at children.[26] Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote fantasy in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, intended for children,[27] although his works for adults only verged on fantasy. For many years, this and successes such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) created the circular effect that all fantasy works, even the later The Lord of the Rings, were therefore classified as children's literature.
Political and social trends can affect a society's reception towards fantasy. In the early 20th century, the New Culture Movement's enthusiasm for Westernization and science in China compelled them to condemn the fantastical shenmo genre of traditional Chinese literature. The spells and magical creatures of these novels were viewed as superstitious and backward, products of a feudal society hindering the modernization of China. Stories of the supernatural continued to be denounced once the Communists rose to power, and mainland China experienced a revival in fantasy only after the Cultural Revolution had ended.[28]
Fantasy became a genre of pulp magazines published in the West. In 1923, the first all-fantasy fiction magazine, Weird Tales, was published. Many other similar magazines eventually followed, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; when it was founded in 1949, the pulp magazine format was at the height of its popularity, and the magazine was instrumental in bringing fantasy fiction to a wide audience in both the U.S. and Britain. Such magazines were also instrumental in the rise of science fiction, and it was at this time the two genres began to be associated with each other.
By 1950, "sword and sorcery" fiction had begun to find a wide audience, with the success of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.[29] However, it was the advent of high fantasy, and most of all J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which reached new heights of popularity in the late 1960s, that allowed fantasy to truly enter the mainstream.[30] Several other series, such as C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, helped cement the genre's popularity.
The popularity of the fantasy genre has continued to increase in the 21st century, as evidenced by the best-selling status of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen sweeping epic, Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive series and Mistborn series, and A. Sapkowski's The Witcher saga.
Several fantasy film adaptations have achieved blockbuster status, most notably The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, and the Harry Potter films, two of the highest-grossing film series in cinematic history.
Fantasy role-playing games cross several different media. Dungeons & Dragons was the first tabletop role-playing game and remains the most successful and influential. According to a 1999 survey in the United States, 6% of 12- to 35-year-olds have played role-playing games. Of those who play regularly, two thirds play D&D.[31] Products branded Dungeons & Dragons made up over fifty percent of the RPG products sold in 2005.[32]
The science fantasy role-playing game series Final Fantasy has been an icon of the role-playing video game genre (it was still among the top ten best-selling video game franchises). The first collectible card game, , has a fantasy theme and is similarly dominant in the industry.[33]
Fantasy encompasses numerous subgenres characterized by particular themes or settings, or by an overlap with other literary genres or forms of speculative fiction. They include the following:
In her 2008 book Rhetorics of Fantasy,[35] Farah Mendlesohn proposes the following taxonomy of fantasy, as "determined by the means by which the fantastic enters the narrated world",[36] while noting that there are fantasies that fit none of the patterns:
See also: Fantasy fandom. Publishers, editors, authors, artists, and scholars with interest in the fantasy genre get together yearly at the World Fantasy Convention. The World Fantasy Awards are presented at the convention. The first WFC was held in 1975 and it has occurred every year since. The convention is held at a different city each year.
Additionally, many science fiction conventions, such as Florida's FX Show and MegaCon, cater to fantasy and horror fans. Anime conventions, such as Ohayocon or Anime Expo frequently feature showings of fantasy, science fantasy, and dark fantasy series and films, such as Majutsushi Orphen (fantasy), Sailor Moon (urban fantasy), Berserk (dark fantasy), and Spirited Away (fantasy). Many science fiction/fantasy and anime conventions also strongly feature or cater to one or more of the several subcultures within the main subcultures, including the cosplay subculture (in which people make or wear costumes based on existing or self-created characters, sometimes also acting out skits or plays as well), the fan fiction subculture, and the fan video or AMV subculture, as well as the large internet subculture devoted to reading and writing prose fiction or doujinshi in or related to those genres.
According to 2013 statistics by the fantasy publisher Tor Books, men outnumber women by 67% to 33% among writers of historical, epic or high fantasy. But among writers of urban fantasy or paranormal romance, 57% are women and 43% are men.[37]
Fantasy is studied in a number of disciplines including English and other language studies, cultural studies, comparative literature, history and medieval studies. Some works make political, historical and literary connections between medievalism and popular culture.[38]
French literature theorists as Tzvetan Todorov argues that the fantastic is a liminal space, characterized by the intrusion of supernatural elements into the realistic framework of a story, accompanied by uncertainty about their existence.[39] However, this precise definition is not the predominant one in English critical literature, and the French term fantastique is used to differentiate the French concept from the broader English term of fantastic, synonym of fantasy. The restrictive definition of Todorov and the difference of critical traditions of each country have led to controversies such as the one led by Stanislaw Lem.[40]
Rosemary Jackson builds onto and challenges as well Todorov's definition of the fantastic in her 1981 nonfiction book . Jackson rejects the notion of the fantastic genre as a simple vessel for wish fulfillment that transcends human reality in worlds presented as superior to our own, instead positing that the genre is inseparable from real life, particularly the social and cultural contexts within which each work of the fantastic is produced. She writes that the "unreal" elements of fantastic literature are created only in direct contrast to the boundaries set by its time period's "cultural order", acting to illuminate the unseen limitations of said boundaries by undoing and recompiling the very structures which define society into something "strange" and "apparently new". In subverting these societal norms, Jackson claims, the fantastic represents the unspoken desire for greater societal change. Jackson criticizes Todorov's theory as being too limited in scope, examining only the literary function of the fantastic, and expands his structuralist theory to fit a more cultural study of the genre—which, incidentally, she proposes is not a genre at all, but a mode that draws upon literary elements of both realistic and supernatural fiction to create the air of uncertainty in its narratives as described by Todorov. Jackson also introduces the idea of reading the fantastic through a psychoanalytical lens, referring primarily to Freud's theory of the unconscious, which she believes is integral to understanding the fantastic's connection to the human psyche.[41]
There are however additional ways to view the fantastic, and often these differing perspectives come from differing social climates. In their introduction to The Female Fantastic: Gender and the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares describe how the social climate in the 1890s and 1920s allowed for a new era of "fantastic" literature to grow. Women were finally exploring the new freedoms given to them and were quickly becoming equals in society. The fear of the new women in society, paired with their growing roles, allowed them to create a new style of "fuzzy" supernatural texts. The fantastic is on the dividing line between supernatural and not supernatural, Just as during this time period the women were not respecting the boundary of inequality that had always been set for them. At the time, women's roles in society were very uncertain, just as the rules of the fantastic are never straightforward. This climate allowed for a genre similar to the social structure to emerge. The fantastic is never purely supernatural, nor can the supernatural be ruled out. Just as women were not equal yet, but they were not completely oppressed. The Female Fantastic seeks to enforce this idea that nothing is certain in the fantastic nor the gender roles of the 1920s. Many women in this time period began to blur the lines between the genders, removing the binary out of gender and allowing for many interpretations. For the first time, women started to possess more masculine or queer qualities without it becoming as much of an issue. The fantastic during this time period reflects these new ideas by breaking parallel boundaries in the supernatural. The fantastic breaks this boundary by having the readers never truly know whether or not the story is supernatural.[42]