The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  The play Magic (1913) toys ironically with illusion. The stories in Tales of the Long Bow (1925) use fantasy motifs more freely, as do some of the items posthumously assembled in The Coloured Lands (1938) and the overlapping Daylight and Nightmare (1986).

  CHETWIN GRACE (?– ). U.S. writer, mostly for children. On All Hallows’ Eve (1984) is a timeslip fantasy featuring a world ruled by witches. In the chimerical Out of the Dark World (1985), a boy trapped in a computer program encounters Morgan le Fay. The series comprising Gom on Windy Mountain (1986), The Riddle and the Rune (1987), The Crystal Stair (1988), and The Starstone (1989) features a misfit child’s quest for personal fulfillment. The Tales of Ulm from Hesta’s Hearth are set in the same milieu; Garrad’s Quest (1998), The Foundling of Snawbyr Grygg (2003), and Wycan (2004) follow similar story arcs, but The Fall of Aelyth-Kintalin (2002) is more adventurous, featuring a portal to the magical realm of In Between, where dream worlds are accumulated; Child of the Air (1991) is a fantasy of flight.

  Friends in Time (1992) is a timeslip fantasy. The Chimes of Alfaylen (1993) features magical music. For adults, The Burning Tower (2000) is a Tarot fantasy. Deathwindow (1999) is a mystery with dark fantasy elements.

  CHILDREN’S FICTION. Children must always have been the primary audience for the folktales of oral tradition, so it was entirely natural that fairy tales would become a core genre of children’s fiction. Charles Perrault’s popularization of the idea that they were adaptable to the task of “civilization” was challenged by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who asserted that children had no innate bias toward barbarism that needed correction; nevertheless, the majority of educators inevitably sided with Perrault.

  A fierce assault on the suitability of fantasy as children’s fiction was launched in 19th-century Britain by Christians who felt that the pagan residues in folkloristic fiction might distract children from the true faith,

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  and by utilitarians who opined that children should not be encouraged to believe in magic; such views were sternly opposed by Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, and Charles Kingsley. The moralistic aspects of children’s fiction were then counterattacked by the anarchic spirit of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, paving the way for unashamed exercises in whimsical indulgence by J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Walter de la Mare, and Beatrix Potter. Such prejudices were less obvious in 19th-century America, so the fantastic children’s fiction of Frank R. Stockton, Howard Pyle, and L. Frank Baum is more relaxed. Writers like Eugene Field, author of A Little Book of Profitable Tales (1889), established a rival camp, and Christian opposition to the paganism of Oz and its analogues grew increasingly clamorous in the 20th century. There too, however, an anarchic spirit of reckless invention arose in the works of such writers as James Thurber and Dr. Seuss.

  The horrific aspects of traditional folktales—abundantly evident in those collected by the Brothers Grimm—were routinely sanitized when they were adapted into children’s fiction, although the first great synthesizer of imitation folktales, Hans Christian Andersen, was never averse to harrowing material; the “art fairy tales” written under the aegis of the Romantic and Decadent movements often reveled in it. When the first magazines aimed at children were founded—the Victorian “boys’

  papers”—their editors were happy to add ghost stories to their standard repertoire, and popular horror fiction has always had a substantial read-ership among teenage boys.

  Contemporary fantasy for children remained self-consciously artificial for most of the 19th century, represented by such portal fantasies as Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869) and Mrs. Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock (1877), but E. Nesbit’s adaptations of the kind of intrusive fantasy pioneered by F. Anstey began a new tradition, carried forward by such writers as Elizabeth Goudge, Hugh Lofting, P. L. Travers, Lucy M. Boston, Edward Eager, Nicholas Stuart Gray, Penelope Lively, and Patricia Wrightson. The use of secondary worlds remained cautious, in spite of the spectacular precedent set by Baum, but portal fantasies gradually lost their painstaking formality, greatly assisted after 1950 by the example of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series. Most immersive fantasies for children written before 1950, save for those set in the stereotyped pseudohistorical settings of traditional folktales, were animal fantasies—although J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) was eventually to prove a crucial exception.

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  In spite of these limitations, the early 20th-century children’s market provided a useful refuge for several highly idiosyncratic writers for whom little imaginative space seemed available in the adult market, including Eleanor Farjeon and T. H. White. The additional scope granted to the marketplace in the 1950s, however, accommodated a remarkable boom in sophisticated fantasy formulated as children’s fiction, exemplified by Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, Arthur Calder-Marshall’s The Fair to Middling (1959), the early novels of Alan Garner and Penelope Farmer, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, Susan Cooper’s

  “Dark Is Rising” sequence, Paul Gallico’s The Man Who Was Magic (1967), Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child, Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man, Ursula K. le Guin’s Earthsea series, Leon Garfield’s “Mr Corbett’s Ghost,” and Dahlov Ipcar’s The Queen of Spells.

  The opening of these floodgates brought several new fantasy subgenres in children’s fiction, most significantly psychological fantasy adapted to the developmental phases of adolescence, as exemplified by Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams, William Mayne’s A Game of Dark, Jenny Nimmo’s The Snow Spider, and Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. The effectiveness of such works in modeling teenage angst and mapping out useful processes of psychological adaptation helped to force the identification within the marketplace of a specific category of young adult fiction. Heroic fantasies involving quasi-allegorical quests, timeslip fantasies, and ghost stories all became more common and more sophisticated in fiction written for teenagers, and such materials began to filter down into works aimed at younger age groups via the unconstrained wish-fulfillment fantasies of Roald Dahl, the more moralistically inclined works of Natalie Babbitt, Elisabeth Beresford, and Eva Ibbotson, and such picture books as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Raymond Briggs’s Fungus the Bogeyman. As children began to reach puberty earlier and pre-puberal children were encouraged by their consumption of ad-infested TV to anticipate maturation, this trend became more obvious, paving the way for horror fiction to be marketed to nine-to-twelve-year-olds in the late 1980s.

  The spectrum of publishing opportunities was abruptly transformed

  by the establishment of adult fantasy as a popular genre in the late 1970s; there followed a marked outflow from the children’s market in the 1980s. Some writers who felt themselves uncomfortably restricted

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  there shifted the emphasis of their endeavor to adult fantasy—examples include Andre Norton, Tanith Lee, and Patricia McKillip—but many young readers also found it more appealing to read “adult fantasy” than material explicitly labeled as juvenile fare. “Crossover” material like the works of Terry Pratchett, which appealed equally to children and adults, thrived as never before. Many writers found, however, that work explicitly aimed at children could be more adventurously varied and more imaginatively enterprising than the deluge of Tolkien clones and sword and sorcery novels that initially dominated the field of commodified fantasy. During the 1980s and 1990s, a great deal of children’s fantasy was more original, and arguably more mature, than the formularistic material aimed at adults; notable examples can be found in the works of Diana Wynne Jones, Nancy Willard, Margaret Mahy, Jane Louise Curry, and Jane Yolen.

  Children’s fiction underwent a dramatic revolution in the 1990s, first signaled by the enormous success of R. L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” series (launched 1992), which completed the adaptation of horror fiction motifs for nine-to-twelve-year-olds, usually by injecting a stro
ng element of humor. This helped pave the way for the even more spectacular success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, with an artful combination of comedy and dark fantasy that proved the publishing sensation of the decade. The outflow of talent and money from the children’s market was abruptly reversed, and children’s fantasy embarked upon another spectacular boom, in which commercially crafted best sellers by such writers as Eoin Colfer, Garth Nix, William Nicholson, and G. P. Taylor followed hot on the heels of the more spontaneous successes of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and David Almond’s Skellig (1998).

  One result of this new commercialism was an increase in the com-

  modification of children’s fantasy, reflected in a great deal of series work. The more enterprising practitioners include K. A. Applegate, John Bellairs, Bruce Coville, Annie Dalton, Catherine Fisher, Dick King-Smith, Dave Luckett, Gregory Maguire, Donna Jo Napoli, and Brad Strickland. As in the adult marketplace, however, the growth of a sturdy core permitted the rapid expansion of an experimental fringe, which provided space for adventurously innovative work by such writers as Karen Fox, Cornelia Funke, Jostein Gaarder, Brian Jacques, Robin Jarvis, Michael Molloy, Daniel Pinkwater, Kathryn Reiss, Paul Stewart, Theresa Tomlinson, Vivian Vande Velde, and Laurence Yep.

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  CHIMERICAL TEXTS. Texts that juxtapose motifs from very different sources or contrive other unlikely bisociations in order to derive narrative energy from the combination of apparently incompatible materials.

  Nonsense fantasy and surreal fantasy routinely made use of this kind of effect, as did early metafictional texts like Walter de la Mare’s Henry Brocken, before it became much more widespread in the late 20th century, led by works that applied the rationalistic outlook of science fiction to confrontations with entities drawn from myths and fairy tales, as in the magazine Unknown. Chimerical texts need to be contrasted with hybrid texts, which attempt the logical reconciliation and harmonization of their materials. Chimerization is fundamental to the method of such various writers as Tom Arden, Jonathan Carroll, Jasper Fforde, and Terry Pratchett, and to such subgeneric candidates as “hard fantasy” and China Miéville’s “New Weird.”

  CHIVALRIC ROMANCE. Chivalry was a code of honor supposedly observed by Christian knights, whose formalization adapted a Germanic rite of passage; it became a central myth of feudalism, central to chan-sons de geste and other baronial amusements, and thus to the tradition of Romance. Chivalric romance was pioneered by The Song of Roland, sophisticated by the lays of Marie de France and verse romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and stereotyped by such proto-novels as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal and the 14th-century Amadis de Gaul.

  There was always an element of self-parody in chivalric romance, but its ideals were comprehensively pilloried by Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–15). It was reintroduced into the produce of the Romantic movement by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s The Magic Ring and Robert Southey’s new translation of Amadis of Gaul, which paved the way for more experimental endeavors by William Morris and his imitators. Quixotic scepticism reared its head again in the work of James Branch Cabell, Robert Nichols’s “Sir Perseus and the Fair Andromeda”

  (1923), William Faulkner’s Mayday (written 1926; 1977), and Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous, albeit armored by a nostalgic affection carefully preserved in such revisitations as Italo Calvino’s The Non-Existent Knight and Patricia McKillip’s The Tower at Stony Wood.

  The tradition connecting chivalric romance to modern fantasy is

  mapped out in Lin Carter’s showcase anthologies. The spirit of chivalry is carefully conserved in the Romantic sector of Arthurian fantasy—especially in stories dealing with quests for the grail—and reverently interrogated in a great deal of heroic fantasy.

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  CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES. The signature attached to five Arthurian romances written in the late 12th century, including the earliest example of the kind, Erec et Enide; others have apparently been lost. Cligés, Le Chevalier de la Charrette (aka Lancelot), and Le Chevalier au Lion (aka Yvain) are orthodox chivalric romances, but the work that Chrétien left incomplete at his death, Le Conte du Graal (aka Perceval), introduced the crucial allegorical episode of the Fisher King and the mysterious Grail, which helped it become an enormously influential taproot text.

  Although the allegorical interpolation’s interpretation in Christian terms seems perfectly straightforward, the confusions caused by the incompleteness of Le Conte du Graal and its fusion in extant versions with another incomplete text—featuring the adventures of Gawain—

  have generated an astonishing profusion of scholarly fantasy. Perceval’s story was rapidly recycled in German, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, and its incorporation into the Welsh Red Book of Hergest engendered much speculation in Britain about a possible Celtic origin. Its pretensions were, however, parodied with equal alacrity by a tongue-in-cheek account of the adventures of Fergus of Galloway,

  signed Guillaume le Clerc.

  CHRISTIAN FANTASY. In addition to its scriptures, the Christian faith rapidly accumulated a rich folklore, which thrived in oral culture until it was recycled and augmented in such documents as Jacobus de Voragine’s 13th-century Legenda aurea [The Golden Legend], a miracle-laden anthology of saints’ life stories. Such tales served an important inspirational purpose, often transfiguring preexistent folklore so that its weight could be added to the Christian cause. Pious writers conscious of the fact that they were writing fantasies routinely excused their work as allegory.

  The most notable landmark in the early history of Christian fantasy is Dante’s Divine Comedy (c1320); the most important precedents in English literature were set by John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84). Subsequent Christian fantasy, including the Christian aspects of afterlife fantasy, angelic fantasy, and apocalyptic fantasy, usually has an ironic aspect derived from a slightly uncomfortable awareness of its lack of literal truth. An exceedingly passionate and dogmatic faith is required to persuade a writer that angels and miracles can be accommodated in realistic fiction; those who attempt to manifest such passion—Marie Corelli is the most conspicuous example—often seem to be protesting too much. Pious

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  synthetic legends such as those featured in Gottfried Keller’s Seven Legends (1872; tr. 1911) and Eugene Field’s The Holy Cross and Other Tales (1893) are not so very dissimilar in tone to the more sceptical offerings of Vernon Lee, Anatole France, and Laurence Housman, although this reflects the fact that writers who use Christian fantasy as a medium for working out their own doubts often increase their confusion rather than dispelling it and may be led reluctantly but inexorably into heresy; notable examples include George MacDonald and T. F. Powys.

  Effective literary propaganda for the faith can be found in various works by G. K. Chesterton, Upton Sinclair, C. S. Lewis, and Harry Blamires, and in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s The Fair to Middling (1959), in which inmates of a School for Incapacitated Orphans are challenged by temptations laid on by O. L. D. Scratch the Universal Provider. Effective works using the Christian mythos as a backcloth for non-

  evangelical purposes include examples by M. P. Shiel, Charles Williams, Robert Nathan, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Figures from the New Testament who lend themselves to use in fantasy are, however, mostly peripheral; they include Salome, the Wandering Jew, and two of Christ’s rival miracle workers, Simon Magus—featured in Wallace Nicholls’s Simon Magus (1946), Anita Mason’s The Illusionist (1983)—and Apollonius of Tyana, as featured in John Keats’s “Lamia.”

  The dramatic upsurge in religious publishing in the last decades of the 20th century, which produced a good deal of propagandist children’s fantasy, added considerably to the mass of Christian fantasy; notable examples include works by Walter Wangerin. Commercial publishers began to interest themselves in such material when it pro
duced best sellers in the field of apocalyptic fantasy; Hodder Headline started a line that included such fantasies as Philip Boast’s Sion (1999) and Anne Perry’s Tathea (1999). There as a similar increase in the popularity of exotic thrillers irreverently involving the Vatican in complex secret histories, including Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) and Scott McBain’s The Coins of Judas (2001). Syncretic hybridizers occasionally include Christian fantasy in their mix, as in Elizabeth Cunningham’s Celtic Magdalen trilogy, begun with Daughter of the Shining Isles (2000). Colin Manlove’s Christian Fantasy (1992) is a useful history of the subgenre. See also EROTIC FANTASY.

  CHRISTMAS FANTASY. Christmas annuals had been published in

  Britain for many years before Charles Dickens established a new norm

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  for such publications, but the sequence of Christmas books launched with A Christmas Carol (1843) set a crucial precedent, encouraging many more periodicals to begin issuing special Christmas supplements and exerting a powerful influence on their contents. Dickens’s exemplars proposed that Christmas was a time when the standards of narrative expectation that were rapidly becoming normal (favoring naturalistic fiction over anything “Gothic”) could be relaxed. That special license created a valuable publishing enclave for Victorian sentimental fantasy, especially for humorous/ghost stories. Stories composed with this tradition in mind outlasted the actual magazine supplements; notable examples can be found in the work of Tom Gallon, John Kendrick

  Bangs, Jerome K. Jerome, Marie Corelli, and Netta Syrett. The tradition continued into the 20th century in such collections as Coningsby Dawson’s When Father Christmas Was Late (1919), Robertson Davies’s High Spirits, and Connie Willis’s Miracle and Other Christmas Stories (1999). Notable individual works include J. M. Barrie’s Farewell Miss Julie Logan, Seabury Quinn’s Roads, Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Mervyn Wall’s The Garden of Echoes, Leon Garfield’s “Mr. Corbett’s Ghost,” Robert Westall’s The Christmas Cat (1991) and The Christmas Ghost (1992), Paul Hazel’s The Wealdwife’s Tale (1993), Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity’s Christmas (1999), and Jane Louise Curry’s The Christmas Knight.