fantasy fiction

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FANTASY LITERATURE PAMUKKALE UNIVERSITY ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT NAME: BİLGE KARADUMAN NUMBER: 04167007 LESSON: SEMINARIUM LECTURER: ASST. PROF. DR. MEHMET ALİ ÇELİKEL DENİZLİ 2008

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DEFINITION OF FANTASY

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Fantasy is a genre that uses magic and other supernatural forms as a primary element of plot, theme, and setting. Fantasy is generally distinguished from science fiction and horror by the expectation that it steers clear of technological and macabre themes, respectively though there is a great deal of overlap between the three. The term also is a word quite often used in our daily life, often lacks a well outlined frontier, except perhaps for a couple of features: - Fantasy is opposed to everyday reality in some way. - Fantasy is the result of the imaginary operation of our minds.

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One thing is clearly non-real in fantasy literature: The inventions of our creative mind. It is our imagination that plays with reality, making combinations of it's elements, projecting our hidden desires onto the outside world; in any case we should be always bear in mind the limitations already stated by Aristotle in this famous and well known sentence: “Nothing is in our mind that was previously in our senses”. Here lies the reason for such an apparent contradiction. It is our way of acquiring knowledge that limits all our production, of the sciences as well as the arts.

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Curiously enough, therefore, fantasy and reality are not to be separated. They cannot be separated. And what is even more that fantasy depends on reality and can hardly be fully grasped outside its realm. When we want to understand fantasy we face again another apparent contradiction: Fantasy is an escape from everyday reality. There is a reality on it's own and a product of our mind striving to get rid of, and surpass, it is man himself fully at work, revealing the dependency on nature and our striving for independence and liberation.

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HISTORY OF FANTASY

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Beginning perhaps with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the earliest written documents known to humankind, mythic and other elements that would eventually come to define fantasy and its various subgenres have been a part of some of the grandest and most celebrated works of literature. From The Odyssey to Beowulf, from the Mahabharata to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, it is possible to see fantastical elements. “Epic of Gilgamesh” “Beowulf”

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TRAITS OF FANTASY

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The history of modern fantasy literature is usually said to begin with George MacDonald, the Scottish author of such novels as The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes, the latter of which 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. The other major fantasy author of this era was William Morris, a popular English poet who wrote several novels in the latter part of the century, including The Well at the World's End. It wasn't until the turn of the century that fantasy fiction began to reach a large audience. Edward Plunkett, better known as Lord Dunsany, established the genre's popularity in both the novel and the short story form. Many popular mainstream authors also began to write fantasy at this time, including H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs. These authors, along with Abraham Merritt, established what was known as the "lost world" sub-genre, 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. “The Wizard of Oz”

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By definition, any work of fiction must not be "real", there are clearly differences between an obvious work of realism, like Anthony Trollope's The Warden, and an obvious fantasy, like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. And yet, Alice contains characters like those one could meet in "real life," and its characters speak English, and Alice breathes air and has two legs like any other nine-year old girl. George MacDonald's Phantastes, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came include both poetry and prose, they cover a variety of styles and literary techniques. These works share both fantastic setting and characterization. The settings of these works vary from Carroll's Wonderland to Tennyson's Camelot, but they all differ from the world that surrounds us. In addition, the works frequently describe a process of transition from a realistic world to the fantastic.

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Perhaps the most obvious sign of the fantastic to a reader is the setting of a work. And perhaps the most obvious examples of this are Carroll's Alice books. Perhaps the most obvious sign of the fantastic to a reader is the setting of a work. And perhaps the most obvious examples of this are Carroll's Alice books. “Alice in Wonderland”

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“Phantastes” “Goblin Market”

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All the works create a sense of reality even in their most fantastic moments, because they have internal rules that they follow. These rules are not the rules of the real world, but they still dictate the actions of characters in the work. These works are also characterized by travel - in most of them, it is a transition from the real world to the fantastic. This transition is important because by showing their characters traveling, these writers "prove" to their readers that they are creating fantasies.

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Like setting, these characters follow Rabkin's requirement for "ground rules" in fantasy. In Carroll's Alice books, the frequent use of anthropomorphic animals is always housed in realistic terms. When Alice first meets some talking animals, she frightens away a group of birds by mentioning her cat. While Carroll describes the birds in very human terms -they all find "various pretexts" to leave Alice- they do so only because they are birds, who fear cats as predators. Even with the more abstract characters, like the animated playing cards, they follow a version of the real world's rules.

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“Through the Looking Glass” “Idylls of the King”

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“Odyssey” “The Lord of the Rings”

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