The A to Z of Fantasy Literature
Page 32
There is also a strong tradition of humorous ghost stories, pioneered by R. H. Barham and Charles Dickens; the latter gave such a significant role to ghosts in A Christmas Carol that Christmas fantasy became almost synonymous with “Christmas ghost stories”—an associa-
tion that took on an earnest aspect when Christmas magazine
supplements attained their heyday as the fashionability of spiritualist fantasy peaked. The advent of psychical research societies in the late 19th century generated a good deal of metaphysical fantasy in which ghosts are speculatively explained, as in the occult detective subgenre and such recherché works as Mary Harriott Norris’s The Veil (1907).
The importance of ghosts in horror fiction is satirically reflected in a good deal of humorous fantasy and ensures that ghostly apparitions are a common symptom of delusional fantasy. There is a sense in which all afterlife fantasies are ghost stories, although posthumous fantasies are more easily interpreted as exercises in ghostly existential fantasy, especially those in which spirits are becalmed on Earth because they cannot “progress” to the next phase in their destiny.
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Until the boom in children’s/horror stories began in the 1980s, the roles of ghosts in children’s fantasy were usually calculated to deemphasize, if not to dispel, their fearful aspect, so children’s ghost stories are closely linked with timeslip fantasies, their apparitions functioning primarily as transtemporal bridges. Ghosts in children’s fiction often play mentoring roles, offering educational glimpses into the past, as in works by Penelope Lively and Eva Ibbotson; many are enlivening presences, as in Nancy Atherton’s series begun with Aunt Dimity’s Death (1992).
Literary fiction makes considerable use of ghosts whose function is symbolic even when their manifestations are by no means ambiguous; characters who are writers are particularly prone to be pestered by ghosts, as in Brian Moore’s Fergus (1970) and The Mangan Heritage (1979) and Marcel Möring’s In Babylon (1997 in Dutch; tr. 1999). Other recent examples of haunted literary fiction include Josephine Boyle’s The Spirit of the Family (2000), Sarah Blake’s Grange House (2000), Sean Desmond’s Adam’s Fall (2000), Jessica Adams’s I’m a Believer (2002), Susie Maloney’s The Dwelling (2003), and John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004).
GIANT. An unnaturally large human being. Giants appear in many myth systems, being particularly prominent in Nordic mythology, although the Titans of classical mythology were presumably also giants and even Genesis refers back to a time when “there were giants in the Earth.”
They are standard adversaries of folktales; according to such folklorists as Robert Hunt, they have a particular significance in British folklore, dutifully reflected in the work of such pioneers of British fantasy as John Sterling. They also feature in chivalric romance as stern challenges for heroic knights, although the ones Cervantes’s Don Quixote took on turned out to be windmills. Notable examples from early fantasy literature include Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and the inhabitants of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
The British tradition of giant fantasy was carried into the 20th century by Eric Linklater in A Spell for Old Bones, John Cowper Powys and Andrew Sinclair in the trilogy of satires comprising Gog (1967), Magog (1972), and King Ludd (1988), but most 20th-century giants are relatively modest in size, like those in Hilary Mantel’s The Giant O’Brien (1998) and Harvey Jacobs’ American Goliath (1997). Some, however, go to the opposite extreme; the Rabelaisian aspects of Joe Orton’s Head to Toe (1971) and Jane Gaskell’s “Caves” (1984) question the suggestion that size doesn’t matter in a calculatedly gross fashion.
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GILBERT, WILLIAM (1804–1890). British medical man and writer, the father of W. S. Gilbert. He was a pioneer of psychiatry, extrapolating his work in that field in two anonymously issued collections of hypothetical case studies in delusional fantasy, Shirley Hall Asylum; or, The Memoirs of a Monomaniac (1863) and Doctor Austin’s Guests (1866). The Magic Mirror, a Round of Tales for Young and Old (1866) is a compendium of cautionary wish-fulfillment fantasies. The Wizard of the Mountain (1867) similarly mingles elements of horror and humor in its moralistic fantasies, which are far more generous with punishments than rewards;
“The Innominato’s Confession” explains this imbalance by arguing that the idea of magic is essentially diabolical, tempting rebellion against divine providence. The Washerwoman’s Foundling (1867) and The Seven-Leagued Boots (1869) are fairy tales of a similar ilk.
GILBERT, WILLIAM S. (1836–1911). British humorist. His two collections of Bab Ballads (1867–73) adapted the tradition of nonsense poetry pioneered by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll for adult readers. His early work for the theater was mostly humorous fantasy, including The Palace of Truth (1871), The Wicked World (1873), and Topsyturvydom (1974); the last title was sometimes used as a quasi-generic term when the subversive spirit of these early works was carried forward into the light operas he wrote in collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan. These include Iolanthe, or the Peer and the Peri (1882), in which the House of Lords and the ruling hierarchy of Faerie trade places, and Ruddigore; or, The Witch’s Curse (1887), about a line of baronets condemned to commit a sin a day or perish. Gilbert’s prose fiction was sampled in Foggerty’s Fairy and Other Tales (1890; exp. as The Lost Stories of W. S. Gilbert, ed. Peter Haining, 1982).
GILMAN, GREER (1951– ). U.S. writer. Moonwise (1991) is a highly sophisticated quest fantasy couched in an extraordinarily rich and complex language and set against the background of the conflict between two lunar goddesses, the side effects of which include the cycle of the seasons. The similarly stylized “Jack Daw’s Pack” (2000) is equally complex in its redeployment of mythical materials, here incarnate as symbolic playing cards. Jack Daw is an upstart god whose ambitions are also featured in “A Crowd of Bone” (2003), the second item of a projected three-part mosaic.
GOBLIN. No clear division can be drawn between goblins (or hobgoblins) and other fairy subspecies, many of which play malevolent or mischievous
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roles in various folktales, but literary goblins are usually situated at the malign end of the spectrum, whether in humorous fantasies like Charles Dickens’s “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” or darker moralistic fantasies like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. The makers of the evil mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” are usually—but not invariably—called goblins in translations, licensing such transfigurative exercises as C. J. Cherryh’s The Goblin Mirror. Other notable modern deployments of goblins include Alan Dean Foster’s Kingdoms of Light, Hilari Bell’s The Goblin Wood (2003), a revenge fantasy in which a human renegade sides with goblins, and Clare B. Dunkle’s trilogy begun with The Hollow Kingdom (2003), in which a goblin king catches 19th-century human trespassers and involves them in his conflict with the elves.
GOD. When used as a generic noun, a superhuman entity employed as an object of worship; as a proper noun, the supreme being of monotheistic religions, signified in the Judeo-Christian tradition by the tetragramma-ton expandable as Yahweh and Jehovah, and called Allah by Muslims.
The appointment of the one God required all others to be rendered obsolete or demonized, but the gods of the classical pantheon—and, to a lesser extent, those of the Nordic pantheon—retain considerable narrative utility as symbols of various aspects of nature and human propensity, so they remain significant figures even beyond the limits of fantasy literature.
Reverence demands that God maintain a dignified absence from most
Christian fantasies, where He is more often represented by angels, but He often appears in unflattering roles in antireligious satires—especially mocking apocalyptic fantasies—and exercises in literary satanism. Notable religious fantasies that attempt His description in order to explore or explain his mysterious ways include G. K.
Chesterton’s The Man Who Was
Thursday, Robert Munson Grey’s I, Yahweh (1937), several allegories by T. F. Powys, and James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah. The Greco-Roman all-father is diplomatically substituted in such works as Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Benjamin Disraeli’s “Ixion in Heaven,” and Maurice Druon’s The Memoirs of Zeus (1963).
The gods of tribes who lost out in the relentless march of Western progress and colonial adventurism are almost invariably represented in fiction as mere idols; even when they maintain an an active supernatural presence, it is usually demonic and often in the process of thinning,
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in accordance with a principle—reflected in such works as Richard Garnett’s “The Twilight of the Gods,” Laurence Housman’s Gods and Their Makers, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods— holding that gods decline as the number and faith of their worshippers dwindle. Gods who refuse to fade away politely under such circumstances inevitably become problematic, as in Felicity Savage’s Humility Garden.
GODDESS. A female god. Modern neopagans and the scholarly fantasies associated with their renaissance routinely claim (despite a dearth of plausible evidence) that worship of the male gods who were ultimately fused into the God displaced an older and much more widespread form of monotheistic worship devoted to the Goddess, who was known by different names in different cultures—including Gaia, Isis, Innana, As-tarte, Ishtar, and Parvati—but always played the same Earth Mother role. She is allegedly reproduced in weaker guise in many goddesses of later provenance, having been fragmented in the classical pantheon and elsewhere, and is more feebly echoed in queens of Faerie and other femmes fatales. Feminized fantasy very often adopts a version of this scholarly fantasy into its background; Robert Graves’s The White Goddess is an often-used taproot text and goddess worship has been integrated into modern lifestyle fantasy/witchcraft by such practitioners as
“Starhawk.”
Notable examples of goddess fantasy include David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor, various works by Dion Fortune, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Forest House, Greer Gilman’s Moonwise, Louise Cooper’s Our Lady of the Snow, Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon, and Brenda Gates Smith’s Secrets of the Ancient Goddess (1999), Karen Michalson’s Enemy Glory (2001) and Hecate’s Glory (2003)—in which a young trainee wizard becomes a reluctant acolyte of the goddess of evil—Elizabeth Cunningham’s The Return of the Goddess, Freda Warrington’s The Court of the Midnight King, Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads, and Anne Harris’s Inventing Memory (2004). See also EROTIC FANTASY.
GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON (1749–1832). German writer, a
central figure of German literature and its Romantic movement. He wrote ballads based in folklore and began work on a definitive dramatic version of Faust in 1773, although its two parts did not see publication until 1808
and 1832. The seven tales collected in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausge-wanderten [Conversations with the German Emigrants] (1795) include
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two ghost stories and the classic art fairy tale Das Märchen (tr. as
“Goethe’s Fairy Tale”). The story translated as “The New Melusina”
(1817) is a transfigured folktale. See also FAUSTIAN FANTASY.
GOGOL, NIKOLAI (1809–1852). Russian writer. His early stories, cast in the form of folktales, were collected in volumes translated as Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1831–32) and Mirgorod (1835). His later works were satirical fabulations, the most famous being “The Nose” (1836), a pioneering exercise in absurdism in which the eponymous feature is detached from its natural setting in order to take up an independent existence as a civil servant, and “The Overcoat” (1842), which tells of a clerk’s death-defying determination to acquire that gar-ment. The most comprehensive sampler of his work is The Collected Tales and Plays of Nikolai Gogol (1964).
GOLDMAN, WILLIAM (1931– ). U.S. writer best known as a movie scriptwriter. His affectionate metafictional satire The Princess Bride: S.
Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, the
“Good Parts” Version (1971) masquerades as an abridgement of a book from which the author’s grandfather read to him in his childhood, carefully omitting all the boring bits. The Silent Gondoliers: A Fable by S.
Morgenstern (1983) is a slim sequel. Magic (1976) is a delusional fantasy about a ventriloquist whose dummy becomes his doppelgänger.
GOLDSTEIN, LISA (1953– ). U.S. writer. The Red Magician (1982) is a historical fantasy set in a Jewish village in Eastern Europe before World War II. The Dream Years (1985) is a timeslip fantasy featuring the Paris of the Surrealist movement. Tourists (1989) is a surreal fantasy set in an imaginary Middle Eastern country. Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (1993) is set in a version of 16th-century London intimately linked to Faerie. In Summer King, Winter Fool (1994), the conflict of personified seasons is mirrored in the lives of human characters.
The heroine of Walking the Labyrinth (1996) discovers magical family secrets. Dark Cities Underground (1999) is a dark/portal fantasy. The Alchemist’s Door (2002) is a historical fantasy featuring John Dee and Rabbi Loew. Goldstein’s short fiction collections Daily Voices (1989) and Travelers in Magic (1994) mingle fantasy and sf. She wrote Daughter of Exile (2004) as Isabel Glass.
GOLEM. In Jewish legend, a humanoid creature molded out of clay and animated by a spell written on paper and placed in its mouth. The 16th-
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century rabbi Judah Loew was said to have created one to defend the Jews of the Prague ghetto against a pogrom. Literary recyclings of the story include Shulamith Ish-Kishor’s The Master of Miracle (1971) and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Golem. Other golem stories of note include Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, Sean Stewart’s Resurrection Man, Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Thane Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham (2002), and Frances Sherwood’s The Book of Splendor (2002).
GOODKIND, TERRY (1948– ). U.S. writer. The Sword of Truth sequence, comprising Wizard’s First Rule (1994), Stone of Tears (1995), Blood of the Fold (1996), Temple of the Winds (1997), Soul of the Fire (1999), Faith of the Fallen (2000), The Pillars of Creation (2001), and Naked Empire (2003), plus the novella Debt of Bones (1998; rev.
2001), is a commodified, epic fantasy of a violent and atypically cynical stripe.
GOREY, EDWARD (1925–2000). U.S. illustrator. The many brief picture books he began issuing in 1953 resemble orthodox children’s books in their format but incorporate a strong element of surreal black humor.
Most of the early volumes were gathered into the omnibuses Amphigorey (1972), Amphigorey Too (1975), and Amphigorey Also (1983).
Gorey’s works—especially those in which the text is rendered in
verse—continue the nonsense tradition founded by Edward Lear
(some of whose works he illustrated for new editions) and Lewis Carroll, but delight in gruesome and macabre twists. His last books were The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas (1998) and The Headless Bust: A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium (1999).
GOTHIC FANTASY. A term imported as a category description, by analogy with Gothic architecture, to describe the horror novels that enjoyed a hectic fad in Britain at the end of the 18th century (refer to HDHL).
The fact that almost all of them were set in the past distinguishes them from the bulk of modern horror fiction, linking them to the tradition of chivalric romance. Nathan Drake pointed out that there was a
“sportive” element to the Gothic imagination as well as a sinister one, incorporating fairy lore. Some so-called Gothic novels, most conspicuously William Beckford’s Vathek, are more appropriately considered as fantasies.
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Once the fad was over, familiarity had robbed many of the images
prolifically deployed by the Gothic novelists of their power to frighten readers, and they were frequently de
ployed with comedic intent or as mere grotesquerie, thus facilitating the proliferation of a self-conscious and tongue-in-cheek kind of Gothic fantasy, elements of which can be seen in humorous ghost stories—notably Charles Dickens’s Christmas fantasy A Christmas Carol—and archly decadent fantasies by writers like Richard Garnett and Vernon Lee. By 1900, however, new life had been breathed into the old images by more artful writers of intrusive horror stories, and an uneasy balance was struck between ghosts that still had the power to strike terror and those that had lost the knack, with considerable scope for tonal ambiguity.
The grotesque element of Gothic fantasy was made sophisticated in
the 20th century by ornately mannered and calculatedly archaic moral fantasies like those offered by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) as Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Ghislain de Diesbach in The Toys of Princes (1960 in French; tr. 1962). American Gothic had always seemed out of place, even in the days of Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, and this encouraged 20th-century cultivation of its grotesque element, especially in “Southern Gothic” fictions used to highlight contrasts between the progressive impetus of the North (symbolized by New York) and the atavistic archaism of the
South (symbolized by New Orleans). Much American Gothic material
is nonsupernatural, but its fantasy component is evident in such writers as Mary Elizabeth Counselman and some works by Joyce Carol Oates,
notably in Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). Other modern examples include Joe R.
Lansdale’s Freezer Burn (1999) and Tom Piccirilli’s A Choir of Ill Children (2003), but the most spectacular development in the subgenre has come about because of its extraordinary hospitability to vampires, as displayed by Anne Rice and Stephen Gresham’s In the Blood (2001). As with decadent English Gothic, the fad quickly gave rise to parody, in such works as Charlaine Harris’s series begun with Dead until Dark (2001) and Andrew Fox’s series begun with Fat White Vampire Blues (2003).