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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 alternate term for the genre is phantasy,[6] although this is rarely used.


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.

Analysis[edit]

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.[45]


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.[46] 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.[47]


Rosemary Jackson builds onto and challenges as well Todorov's definition of the fantastic in her 1981 nonfiction book Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. 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.[48]


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.[49]

Horror

Science fantasy

Science fiction

Superhero fiction

Supernatural fiction

Utopian and dystopian fiction

Fantasy literature

Outline of fantasy

List of fantasy authors

Lists of fantasy novels

List of fantasy worlds

List of genres

List of high fantasy fiction

List of literary genres

Fantastique

Theosophical fiction

Worldbuilding

Apter, T. E. Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)

Brooke-Rose, Christine, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)

Capoferro, Riccardo, Empirical Wonder: Historicizing the Fantastic, 1660–1760 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010)

Cornwell, Neil, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)

Siebers, Tobin, The Romantic Fantastic (Ithaca: , 1984)

Cornell University Press

Traill, Nancy, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996)

online

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy