Paperback(Revised, Updated ed.)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781907471667 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Libri Publishing Ltd |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2012 |
| Edition description: | Revised, Updated ed. |
| Pages: | 285 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Short History of Fantasy
By Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James
Libri Publishing
Copyright © 2009 Farah Mendlesohn and Edward JamesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-907471-66-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
At the time of writing, thirty-nine out of the forty top-grossing movies worldwide are fantasy or science fiction. J.K. Rowling is one of the world's best-selling authors. Terry Pratchett's books go straight into the hardback best-seller lists. Star Wars tie-ins dominate the New York Times paperback lists. A show about a cheerleader who kills vampires proved the cult TV hit of the 1990s and sparked a revival of TV fantasy. J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which has never been out of print, topped almost every poll of favourite books taken in the UK at the end of the twentieth century. On the literary shelves, younger writers seem to be perfectly comfortable sliding from realist fiction to the fantastic. Yet there is a problem. Susanna Clarke and David Mitchell, who won critical and commercial acclaim in the early twenty-first century with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Cloud Atlas, books which any fan of fantasy would recognize, were presented to the world as literary writers, while Tolkien's pre-eminence and the popularity of both Rowling and Philip Pullman were dismissed as evidence of an adolescent society, an argument which tends to force defenders of fantasy into arguing for its adult qualities. (As the amount of children's fantasy discussed here indicates, we would prefer to challenge the notion that only one mode of adulthood is acceptable.) When Rowling and Pullman received nominations for the Whitbread there was a collective cry of outrage from the literary establishment. Even as fantasy seems to be increasing in popularity, critics try to separate out "the good stuff" and claim that it is "not fantasy", as happened with books by both Jonathan Lethem and Jeanette Winterson. Yet, as Margaret Doody has said, "when novels by admired novelists [Elias Canetti and Isabel Allende] deal with barons living in trees and girls with green hair, it is time to give up the pretense that the primary demand of a long work of prose fiction is that it should be 'realistic'".
This all seems very strange. Fantasy, surely, is dragons, elves, broomsticks, fairies, ghosts, vampires, and anything which goes bump in the night? The problem, as we shall see in this book, is that even while we are explaining this to the latest author who denies that their work is fantasy there are plenty of fantasies which contain none of the above, but which have something about them that means we know they are fantasy (try Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy or the TV series Lost).
We (and we are using 'we' to indicate that there are two authors of this book, with interests in very different kinds of fantasy) are not going to get involved here with the cultural arguments which continue to sideline fantasy, although we will outline their origin. This book is quite happy to focus predominantly on writers proud to be fantasy writers, and books which have come to form the canon of fantasy literature. The book will cover many different kinds of fantasy, including horror, and ghost stories, and fantasy written for children. Although we are primarily concerned with the written form, we will also draw in works of the fantastic produced in other media, from painting, through comics, movies and TV, although for reasons of space we have been very selective and, perhaps ironically, the greater the interest in fantasy in a particular media, the less we have been able to represent that. So, for example, there is more about art in the early chapters when many of the artists and writers were the same people, than there is in the later, when fantasy art has developed an independent path. We hope, however, that our list of important artists at the end of the book will serve to compensate to some degree.
The most obvious construction of fantasy in literature and art is the presence of the impossible and the unexplainable. This helps to cut out most science fiction (sf) which, while it may deal with the impossible, regards everything as explicable, but as an explanation it leaves in large swathes of horror, which fulfil both these criteria. Furthermore, this is a culturally specific explanation. There are many texts that read as fantasy if published for an audience that expects to be reading about something that is "not real"; these texts may, however, have originated from the minds of people whose ideas about the location of the boundary between "real" and "fantastical" were different. John Clute, who is by far the most important critic, coined the term "taproot" for an originating text that continues to serve as a reference point, thus The Pilgrim's Progress, can be understood as a "taproot" text for modern fantasy but was for its author the relaying of a divinely inspired vision and not in the least bit fantastical. Many magic realist texts from Latin America and the American South read as fantasy to fantasy readers, but were written with a firm sense of a supernatural world that exists in conjunction with the natural.
A second approach to defining fantasy is historical. Critics such as Brian Stableford and Adam Roberts have argued that in the middle of the eighteenth century the fantastic becomes material for self-conscious art. The rise of fantasy literature and art from the later eighteenth century is therefore a response to the Enlightenment, and to the contemporaneous rise of literary and artistic mimesis. We cannot have the artistic expression of the impossible until we have a clear idea of the limits of scientific possibility. But we may be misunderstanding the response of earlier times to the fantastic. A rather fine recent performance of the early-seventeenth-century play Macbeth drew our attention to the degree to which nothing supernatural is ever proven to have happened within the play. Does the script (and also the script of The Winter's Tale) reflect the credulity of the author and audience? Or is it a sceptical author inviting his rationalist audience to mock a king (James VI of Scotland and I of England) known to believe in witchcraft and the supernatural? If the latter, we must push the self-conscious use of the fantastic back in time by at least two centuries.
A third approach to fantasy is via the theories of the academics who have interested themselves in the field. Despite its popularity, fantasy has been relatively neglected by scholars, and there are just over a handful of important theorists in the field. Kathryn Hume understands fantasy in terms of its psychological and aesthetic response to mimesis. Tzvetan Todorov's ideas about fantasy narrow the field to a very tiny sliver, in which only those texts that maintain "hesitation" are fantastic. Of these, the most famous is Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), in which the reader has to decide whether the fantasy is "real" or not. Rosemary Jackson understands fantasy to be a "literature of desire", a term picked up by those interested in the psychology of the fantastic. Jackson also argues that fantasy is innately subversive, in that it offers alternatives to and an escape from the "real world". Colin Manlove regards fantasy as a form of allegory, and his selection of texts is highly coloured by this. Our book will assume that if you are interested in literary criticism and defining fantasy, you will go and read these authors (and there is a recommended reading list at the end). The four theorists who will inform this book are Michael Moorcock, whose Wizardry and Wild Romance locates fantasy in the language in which it is written; Brian Attebery, whose Strategies of Fantasy understands fantasy as a "fuzzy set" with a core and an ever hazier corona of texts; John Clute, whose grammar of fantasy in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is made up of four movements, wrongness, thinning, recognition, healing (although more recently he has substituted "return" for "healing"); and finally Farah Mendlesohn, one of the authors of this book, whose Rhetorics of Fantasy sees fantasy as a number of fuzzy sets determined by the mode in which the fantastic enters the text. What all four of these critics have in common is that they understand fantasy as a conversation that is happening, as we write, between the authors of the texts and the readers. Much of the best criticism of fantasy literature has been written by fantasy writers, both in a formal critical context (the essays of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, M. John Harrison and Diana Wynne Jones are some of the best known) and in the pages of their fiction. Many works of fantasy are direct critical responses to the field and we will try to reflect that.
Finally, there is what publishers and booksellers package and sell as fantasy. For many people fantasy can be identified by its cover art. A dragon or a wizard is usually a clue; but so is a half-naked barbarian (male or female) wielding a sword. This style of art was made notorious when original artworks by Rowena A. Morrill were found in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces. However, fantasy art has its origins in the work of the visionary artist William Blake, in the work of Gothic painters such as Henry Fuseli and those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood such as Edward Burne-Jones, and many covers are identifiable less by the actual icons than by the shades of light and dark and the lush use of colour that the artists have inherited. Most bookshops have sections called "fantasy and science fiction" and one would expect all the books to look much the same. But fantasy leaks, and can be found under "literature", in the separate section labelled "horror", and, with the rise of romantic supernatural fiction, even under "romance". Each of these subcategories has its own genre-specific packaging.
Fantasy, now the most popular of the fantastical genres, was once the neglected cousin to both sf and horror. Some time in the 1980s the balance shifted, and approximately two-thirds of all books currently sold in "fantasy and science fiction" are now fantasy (see the annual surveys published in Locus). In a recent readership survey of almost 1,000 self-defined science fiction fans, the two youngest cohorts read more fantasy than science fiction. Meanwhile, a cursory consideration of the horror shelves and the figures published in Locus in the 1990s revealed a market currently in decline: while this trend was reversed at the beginning of the century, horror fiction is often shelved under "fantasy" suggesting that this is the more marketable label.
This book intends to fill a gap. While plenty of people have worked on defining fantasy, and John Clute and John Grant and their collaborators have catalogued it, there is no short history of fantasy. This book is going to start with a discussion of the emergence of the "fantastic" as a literary form in the eighteenth century, and with a glance backwards to its various progenitors: the epic, the romance, the fairytale. We will then move on to consider the rapid development of different "branches" of fantasy. While chapters two and three will cover around 150 years and 50 years respectively, and chapter five will deal with the immense (if delayed) influence of two writers from the mid-twentieth century (Tolkien and Lewis), the rest of the book will proceed roughly decade by decade, from the 1950s through to the first decade of the twenty-first century, pointing both to the dominant trends and the conversation at the margins. There will, however, be a pause for chapter ten, which considers the influence of another three writers, Rowling, Pullman and Pratchett, who have made as much of an impact in the 1990s and 2000s as Tolkien and Lewis did in the 1950s and through the 1970s. Although some non-English works will be discussed, the emphasis here is on English language fantasy. We realize that this will give the curious sense that English fantasy dominates the world but in sheer numbers this is probably true. For various cultural and economic reasons, very little translated fantasy enters the Anglo-American market, while not only is there a great deal of translation from English into other languages, in Europe, at least, English-language material is widely read by fantasy fans. Where such works have come through to the Anglo-American market, however, whether by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, Astrid Lindgren or Michael Ende, they will be discussed.
The purpose of the book is to track the conversation of fantasy writers as they develop and extend the genre. The book will make very little reference to critics, but should provide readers with a very long reading list.
CHAPTER 2From Myth to Magic
Fantasy and not realism has been a normal mode for much of the history of Western fiction (and art). Arguably however, fantasy as a genre only emerges in response (and contemporaneous to) the emergence of mimesis (or realism) as a genre: only once there is a notion of intentional realism, so the argument goes, can there be a notion of intentional fantasy. Yet the ancient Greek and Roman novel, the medieval romance, and early modern verse and prose texts all commonly use what we consider to be the tropes of fantasy: magical transformations, strange monsters, sorcerers and dragons, and the existence of a supernatural world.
The earliest forms of written fiction that we have from the ancient world are works that we might understand as fantasy and which have influenced many modern fantasy writers: stories about gods and heroes, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the works of Homer. His Odyssey, about the travels of a hero through a world inhabited by giants, sorcerers and monsters and prey to the vagaries of interested supernatural parties, is a precursor for much later fantasy fiction. The Greek stories about the gods and goddesses were, of course, for most ancient Greeks part of the structure of their religious belief, but they could be elaborated by poets or playwrights, and some contemporaries even referred to them as "the lies of poets". Epics about gods and heroes were sometimes used for obvious political purposes, like Virgil's Aeneid. The Greek and Roman heroic tradition remained well known to Western romancers throughout the Middle Ages, and beyond; but the Egyptian tales of gods and the underworld had little impact on Western tradition until the nineteenth century; after that they offered a rich seam of unnerving notions about death, ritual and a cyclical world.
At the beginning of the first millennium the various "barbarian" peoples (that is, non-Romans) had their own traditions of gods and heroes, and presumably had their tales and poems about them. However, they were not recorded until very much later, or if they were then the manuscripts have not survived. Almost all that remains of the heroic tradition from pre-Norman England is the epic poem Beowulf, with its three-fold story of the hero fighting the monster, the monster's mother, and the dragon, while what little we can know about the Old English gods has to be reconstructed from a reading of Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, written in Iceland in the thirteenth century. Snorri Sturluson may also have been the author of one of the many surviving Icelandic sagas, telling mostly of the doings of farmers in the newly settled land of Iceland, and dealing with ghosts and visions in the same matter-of-fact way in which they discussed feuds and family politics. The Icelandic sagas became known to a wider audience in the nineteenth century, through translations by William Morris and others, and provided an important new thread in the development of English-language fantasy: they influenced many of the writers of fantasy we will be discussing here, most notably Morris himself, J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner and Neil Gaiman.
Much more was written down in the Celtic-speaking world, including the many stories of ancient Irish heroes such as Cúchulainn and the collection of Welsh legends called The Mabinogion. However, these traditions were largely marginalized and unknown to the wider European tradition until the beginnings of the nationalist revivalist movements of the nineteenth century. The Celtic material was so little known that when in the eighteenth century the Scottish poet James McPherson claimed to have translated the ancient Irish myths of the poet Ossian, his fraud was accepted and incorporated into the contemporary Gothic and medievalist enthusiasms. In the later nineteenth century medieval Welsh and Irish literature was published and studied, and right across Europe, and well into the twentieth century, elites would continue to 'collect' folklore and to reconstruct (sometimes rather naively) the supernatural thought-world of the European peasant. "Celtic" fantasy loosely based on these traditions continues to form a strong thread in modern North American fantasy with authors such as Evangeline Walton, Charles de Lint, Lloyd Alexander, Katherine Kerr, and Emma Bull developing the tradition further.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Short History of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James. Copyright © 2009 Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James. Excerpted by permission of Libri Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Chapter One Introduction, 1,Chapter Two From Myth to Magic, 7,
Chapter Three 1900–1950, 25,
Chapter Four Tolkien and Lewis, 43,
Chapter Five The 1950s, 61,
Chapter Six The 1960s, 75,
Chapter Seven The 1970s, 91,
Chapter Eight The 1980s, 119,
Chapter Nine The 1990s, 143,
Chapter Ten Pullman, Rowling, Pratchett, 167,
Chapter Eleven 2000–2010, 185,
Chronology of Important Works and People, 219,
Glossary, 253,
Further Reading, 257,