The A to Z of Fantasy Literature
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PEARCE, PHILIPPA (1920– ). British writer. Her work for younger children includes some marginal fantasies and recycled tales, but her crucial contribution to fantasy literature is the classic timeslip fantasy Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), in which the protagonist meets a girl from Victorian times in a ghostly garden and embarks upon a problematic but enlightening relationship. The Way to Sattin Shore (1983) is also a timeslip fantasy. The stories in The Shadow-Cage and Other Tales of the Supernatural (1977) and Who’s Afraid? and Other Strange Stories (1986) tend toward horror fiction; they are reprinted with other material in the omnibus Familiar and Haunting (2002).
PENNICOTT, JOSEPHINE (?– ). Australian writer and artist. The dark/
portal fantasy trilogy comprising Circle of Nine (2001), Bride of the
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Stone (2002), and A Fire in the Shell (2003) features an unusual secondary world whose goddesses are in conflict with fallen angels.
PERRAULT, CHARLES (1628–1703). French civil servant. He dabbled in verse fabulation before publishing his classic collection of moralistic adaptations of folktales Histoires ou contes de temps passés (1697; tr. under various titles, most famously Tales of Mother Goose). Its success, following that of Madame d’Aulnoy, prompted a flood of similar adaptations and new tales in the same vein. Perrault’s versions of “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood” (which he seems to have invented), “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “Puss-in-Boots,” and “Hop o’my Thumb” became standard, and his notion that traditional tales might profitably be rewritten to provide educative tools for the “civilization”
of children helped to shape the culture of modern childhood. Angela Carter’s The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) is one of many modern versions. Little Red Riding Hood became one of the most frequently transfigured fairy tales, testifying to Perrault’s skill as a synthesist (although those that take the wolf’s side testify to his limitations as a moralist); notable examples include Anthony Schmidt’s Darkest Desire (1998), Manlio Argueta’s Little Red Riding Hood (tr. from Spanish 1998), and Debbie Viguié’s Scarlet Moon (2004).
PERUTZ, LEO (1884–1957). Austrian writer exiled in 1938, settling in Israel. He was one of the most prolific and versatile fantasists of the early 20th century. The novel translated as From Nine to Nine (1918; tr.
1926) is a posthumous fantasy. The Marquis de Bolibar (1920; tr.
1926, aka The Marquis of Bolivar) is a historical fantasy featuring the Wandering Jew. The Master of the Day of Judgment (1923; tr. 1939) is a moralistic/visionary fantasy; The Virgin’s Brand (1933; tr. 1934) is a companion piece reversing the hallucinogenic effect. Saint Peter’s Snow (1933; 1990) features a plot by the German government to use drugs for social control; it was immediately banned by the Nazis. In Turlupin (1923; tr. 1996), an aristocrat’s fate is magically bound up with a mango tree. By Night under the Stone Bridge (1953; tr. 1989) is a historical fantasy set in medieval Prague. Leonardo’s Judas (1957; tr. 1989) is a religious fantasy picking up themes from the untranslated Die Geburt des Antichrist (1921).
PHILLPOTTS, EDEN (1862–1960). British writer. His early work was mostly humorous, including items collected in Fancy Free (1901) and
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Transit of the Red Dragon (1903). A Deal with the Devil (1895) is a Faustian fantasy in the manner of F. Anstey. My Laughing Philosopher (1896) records imaginary conversations between the protagonist and a bronze bust, foreshadowing the Epicurean sensibility that Phillpotts subsequently extrapolated in a long series of fabular classical fantasies.
The Girl and the Faun (1916) is a poignant Arcadian fantasy. Evan-der (1919) is a rare extrapolation of Nietzschean dualism. Pan and the Twins (1922) extrapolates a similar ideological conflict, more lightheartedly than Anatole France’s championship of satyrs against Christians. In The Treasures of Typhon (1924), a halfhearted Epicurean undertakes a quest for a magical plant. Circe’s Island (1925) is an amalgam of Odyssean and Orphean fantasy. In The Miniature (1926), the classical gods deliver a harsh verdict on the philosophical evolution of humankind—a theme carried forward in The Owl of Athene (1936), where they decide to subject the species to an acid test. Arachne (1927) recycles the eponymous legend but contrives a better moral. Alycone (1930) chronicles the misadventures of an inept poet.
The Lavender Dragon (1923) is a moralistic fantasy in which a benevolent dragon steals lonely humans to populate a utopia. The Apes (1927) is an ironic allegory of evolution. The Flint Heart (1910) and Golden Island (1938) are children’s fantasies.
PHOENIX. A fabulous bird; it reproduced by a process of self-renewal involving the consumption of its old body by fire, thus giving it an important symbolism carried from classical sources into alchemical philosophy and then into such contes philosophiques as Voltaire’s “The Princess of Babylon.” It features in such modern fantasies as E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, which inspired Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix (1957); the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series volume Double Phoenix (1971), which combined Roger Lancelyn Green’s From the World’s End (1948); Edmund Cooper’s “The Firebird”; and Cherith Baldry’s trilogy begun with The Book of the Phoenix.
PICARESQUE FANTASY. “Picaresque” is the term given to a genre of fiction originated in Spain that followed the exploits of rogues and thieves with mock-ironic sympathy. It has analogues in Arabian fantasy in the spirit of Antoine Gallande, exaggerated in such pastiches as Captain Marryat’s The Pacha of Many Tales. The strategy never died out, but it became morally problematic as respect for law and government
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increased. In secondary worlds, however, it is easy to represent ruling classes and their law-enforcement agencies as totally corrupt and thus make “criminals” heroic. The strategy is common in Arabian fantasy and was imported into sword and sorcery fiction by Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, and Michael Shea.
Picaresque fantasy’s popularity was boosted by the commercial suc-
cess of the Thieves’ World shared world series, which echoes in the work of such writers as Anne Logston and Juliet E. McKenna and in Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief (1996), Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrun-ners series (1996–99), Beth Hilgartner’s A Business of Ferrets (2000), and Parliament of Owls (2002), Eve Forward’s Villains by Necessity, and Mindy L. Klasky’s Glasswright series (2000–2003). As Diana
Wynne Jones’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland points out, the thieves of commodified fantasy are usually organized into guilds like those in Trudi Canavan’s Black Magician trilogy; the assassin’s guild is a prominent feature of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.
PIERCE, MEREDITH ANN (1958– ). U.S. writer for young adults. The Darkangel (1982) is a vivid psychological fantasy featuring a seductive vampire; A Gathering of Gargoyles (1984) and The Pearl of the Soul of the World (1990) are sequels. The Firebringer trilogy, comprising Birth of the Firebringer (1985), Dark Moon (1992), and The Son of Summer Stars (1996), features a unicorn prince involved in a similarly striking conflict between Good and Evil. The Woman Who Loved Reindeer
(1985) is a messianic fantasy. Where the Wild Geese Go (1988) and Treasure at the Heart of the Tanglewood (2001) are quest fantasies featuring misfit children. Her short fiction is sampled in Waters Luminous and Deep (2004).
PIERCE, TAMORA (1954– ). U.S. writer for young adults. In the series comprising Alanna: The First Adventure (1983), In the Hand of the Goddess (1984), The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (1986, aka The Girl Who Rides Like a Man), and Lioness Rampant (1988), young protagonists of opposite sexes trade places in order to seek their preferred vocations. Two further series set in the same secondary world—one comprising Wild Magic (1992), Wolf-Speaker (1994), The Emperor Mage (1994), and Realm of the Gods (1996), the other First Test (1999), Page (2000), Squire (2001), and Lady Knight (2002)—similarly offer feminized adventures in magic. Trickster’s Choice (2003) launched a further series in the same milieu.
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The Circle of Magic quartet, comprising Sandry’s Book (1997, aka The Magic in the Weaving), Tris’s Book (1998, aka The Power in the Storm), Daja’s Book (1998), and Briar’s Book (1999), tracks the education of four magically talented children—a theme continued in The Circle Opens series, comprising Magic Steps (2000), Street Magic (2001), Cold Fire (2002), Shatterglass (2003), and Trickster’s Queen (2004).
PINKWATER, DANIEL M. (1941– ). U.S. writer of children’s fiction, much of it cast as hybrid or chimerical/science fantasy, almost all of which is characterized by a distinctive humor that retains echoes of the British nonsense tradition. Notable examples include Wizard Crystal (1973), Magic Camera (1974), I Was a Second Grade Werewolf (1983), Devil in the Drain (1984), Lizard Music (1988), Borgel (1990), and Wempires (1991). A novel for adults, The Afterlife Diet (1995), is a satirical/afterlife fantasy.
PLANETARY ROMANCE. A term that has replaced interplanetary romance in the parlance of sf criticism (refer to HDSFL) as a categorization of exotic adventure stories in the tradition pioneered by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The subgenre is host to a large number of exercises in hybrid science fantasy. It provided light cosmetic disguise for exercises in sword and sorcery when genre fantasy was not yet established as a viable marketing category, being used in that fashion by such writers as Leigh Brackett, Lin Carter, and Andrew J. Offutt, following a precedent set by Edwin Lester Arnold even before Burroughs popularized the form. The use of planetary romance for fabulations of a more sophisticated kind was pioneered by Ray Bradbury, also following precedents set by such writers as E. R. Eddison. Extraterrestrial settings continue to be employed for some such exercises, including Rosemary
Kirstein’s The Steerswoman (1989) and its sequels, and Anselm Aud-ley’s Aquasilva trilogy, comprising Heresy (2001), Inquisition (2002), and Crusade (2003).
POE, EDGAR ALLAN (1809–1849). U.S. writer, a key figure in the evolution of modern short fiction and a pioneer of several subsequently commercialized genres, most notably detective fiction, sf (refer to HDSFL), and psychological horror fiction (refer to HDHL). His importance in the development of fantasy outside the last two categories is less obvious, but his intense interest in matters of abnormal psychology and his development of a distinctively decadent style were highly
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influential. His humorous fantasies about the Devil’s work, including
“Bon Bon” (1832), “The Duc de l’Omellette” (1832), “The Devil in the Belfry” (1839), and “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” (1841), are his purest genre products, but the exotic erotic fantasies “Berenice”
(1835), “Morella” (1835), and “Ligeia” (1838); the quintessential decadent fantasies “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The
Masque of the Red Death” (1842); the doppelgänger story “William Wilson” (1840); and the intense narrative poem “The Raven” (1845) all provided exemplars of the greatest importance. The title of his first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840), was chosen to signify their attempt to establish a new post-Romantic ambience, which reached its philosophical and stylistic extremes in such studies as “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845) and “The Domain of Arnhem”
(1847).
POETRY. Myth and legend have always been key sources of poetic inspiration and imagery; by virtue of its origins in such forms as the epic, the popular ballad, and Marie de France’s lays, fantasy has always been exemplified in poetic forms. Such subgenres as the fable and the chivalric romance evolved from poetry into prose and retained sturdy connections into the 20th century. Folklore has also been a significant source of poetic imagery, warranting such collections as A. E. Waite’s Elfin Music; Charles Perrault’s pioneering collection of fairy tales included some verse items; and “nursery rhymes” evolved alongside other aspects of children’s fantasy, laying groundwork for the verse elements of nonsense. Folk music is still a thriving genre, its imagery—especially in respect of Celtic sources—still richly permeated by fantasy.
The poetry of the Romantic movement was heavily impregnated with fantasy motifs, as exemplified by M. G. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder; such motifs were especially evident in Britain in the works of Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, and they were carried forward into the work of the pre-Raphaelites and Algernon Swinburne—taking a sidestep into the nonsense of Edward Lear—and thence to such reactionary Romantics as W. B. Yeats, William Hope Hodgson, and Alfred Noyes. In France, such imagery was carried from the works of Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Leconte de Lisle into the symbolist works of Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, and Stéphane Mallarmé; there were also parallel developments in Germany. Narrative poems within this tradition that made highly influential contributions to the evolution of fantasy literature include
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Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, and Arthuriana by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Williams, and many others.
The evolution of significant subgenres of popular fantasy in Weird
Tales was closely associated with poetic activity; H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard both write neo-Romantic poetry, while Clark Ashton Smith was primarily a poet, working in a decadent tradition established by such West Coast Bohemians as Ambrose Bierce, Edward
Markham, and George Sterling. Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry” was sufficiently significant as a “manifesto” for literary fantasy that Lin Carter reprinted it in one of his showcase anthologies (along with Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx”).
The 20th-century decline in the status of poetry relative to that of prose has reduced the influence of poetry within the context of fantasy literature, but its produce remains prolific, even in such demanding genres as the epic. Writers who conceive of themselves as poets who write prose “on the side” often prefer to deal in fantasy, whether for adults—
like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, George Mackay Brown, and Peter Redgrove—or for children, like Walter de la Mare, Randall Jarrell, John Masefield, Ted Hughes, and Nancy Willard.
POLDER. A term derived from Dutch meaning a tract of land reclaimed from the sea and protected from reinundation by dikes. It is employed in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia to refer to an artificially maintained enclave isolated—usually by magic—from the world at large. Many such enclaves are microcosmic secondary worlds hidden within the primary one, connected to it by some kind of portal; polders of this kind are often Arcadian tracts insulated against the march of progress and its thinning effect. Secondary worlds often have polders of their own, including ordered enclaves protected from corrosive Chaos.
POLITICAL FANTASY. A subgenre whose utopian mode is mostly extrapolated into modern sf (refer to HDSFL), and with satirical examples often categorized as sf even when they employ narrative spaces more usually associated with fantasy. The association of modern fantasy with quasi-medieval settings derived from fairy tales and chivalric romances has standardized feudal social systems to the extent that the politics of fantasy often seems ultraconservative, thus robbing it of the authority to make any meaningful comment on modern sociopolitical systems or to indulge in any kind of socially progressive thought
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experiment. Critics who assume that the “escapist” aspect of fantasy involves an intellectually treasonous disengagement with political thought and action—including sf admirers like Darko Suvin—tend to consider this conservatism final proof of the essential worthlessness of the entire genre, in spite of the extravagant use of fantasy in political satire and the writings of such political activists as Benjamin Disraeli and Upton Sinclair.
Fantasy’s seeming commitment to the ideals of monarchy and aris-
tocracy is, however, superficial; the order of hierarchical privilege retained by many genre fantasies tends to be chimerically founded on a distinctively modern regard for human and c
ivil rights. The good kings of genre fantasy tend to carry out their functions in a presidential manner and tend to hold more liberal views than the majority of actual U.S.
presidents, let alone actual kings. One consequence of this is that although there are relatively few modern fantasies that qualify as political fantasies in the sense that they exemplify alternative systems of government, there are a great many with feudal templates that serve as battlegrounds—or at least playgrounds—for discussion of the kinds of re-
sponsibilities that ought to go hand in hand with the exercise of power and the possession of privilege.
Revolutions in Faerie are rare—although they do occur, as in Gerald Bullett’s Mr Godly beside Himself—but that does not necessarily mean that the rhetoric of fairy tales is irredeemably committed to nostalgia for an obsolete political order. Indeed, the complaints made by such historians as Jack Zipes and Marina Warner, and the crusades mounted by such writers as Angela Carter and Donna Jo Napoli to subvert the sexual politics of traditional tales, take it for granted that such tales can and ought to be formulated in such a way as to champion oppositional positions. Assaults on the nostalgic conservatism of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis mounted by such writers as Dennis McKiernan, Philip Pullman, and China Miéville similarly assume that it is a disposable and problematic feature of the genre.
POLLACK, RACHEL (1945– ). U.S. writer. Unquenchable Fire (1988) and its sequel Temporary Agency (1994) are set in an alternative world where magical practices are regulated by guilds. Godmother Night (1996) is an ambitious fairy tale/transfiguration. Her short fiction is collected in Burning Sky (1998). Pollack coedited Tarot Tales (1989) with Caitlin Matthews.
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POLLOCK, WALTER HERRIES (1850–1926). British writer, mostly in a humorous vein. With his mother, Lady Julia Pollock, and W. K. Clifford, he compiled The Little People and Other Tales (1874). With Walter Besant, he wrote the Ansteyan novella “Sir Jocelyn’s Cap”