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fore 1880, but the writer who first made a considerable popular impact with exotic ro-
mances of exploration was H. Rider Haggard, first in King Solomon’s Mines (1885), and later in She (1887) and The Ghost Kings (1908). The example that he set was rapidly taken up by others, and the fantasization of the lands where adventurers went exploring proceeded rapidly. Because this was also the period when interplanetary stories were begin-
ning to appear among early scientific romances, it was perhaps inevitable that writers began to displace their more exotic imaginary worlds to the surfaces of other planets. The example set by Edwin Lester Arnold in Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905) was rapidly followed by Edgar Rice Burroughs and many others. In The Lost World (1912), Arthur Conan Doyle revitalized remote earthly locations with survivals from prehistory,
and this too was an example enthusiastically followed. A new vocabulary borrowed from
scientific romance allowed later writers to send heroes through “dimensional gateways”
of one kind or another into magical fantasy worlds as exotic as could be imagined: The
most determined of all writers of this kind of escapist fantasy was the American Abraham Merritt, author of The Moon Pool (1919) and The Face in the Abyss (1932).
Though the lost-land story set on the earth’s surface was gradually destroyed by news
of real explorations—the last classic example was James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933)—
the borrowing of conventions from science fiction has allowed the basic story framework
to be retained to the present day. Contemporary humans can still be precipitated into magi-4
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cal imaginary worlds with the aid of a little fake technology or even a light sprinkling of jargon. The removal of imaginary worlds from darkest Africa to other planets and other
dimensions, however, coincided with another and possibly more important innovation in
the use of the theme, which was to dispense with the protagonist from the familiar world.
Fairy tales and heroic fantasy
Although traditional fairy tales had, at the time of their origin, been set in the believed-in world, their remote printed descendants could not help but seem to their consumers to be set in an entirely imaginary milieu. The magicalized medieval milieu of such stories became a stereotype useful to modern writers, who began to repopulate it with complex
characters whose adventures were filled with allegorical significance. The pioneers of this kind of enterprise were the German Romantic Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, in his novel
The Magic Ring (1813), and George MacDonald, in Phantastes (1958), but their example was followed in far more prolific fashion by William Morris, whose several romances of
this kind include The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897). The form gathered further momentum in the work of Lord Dunsany, most notably
in The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) and The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926); other contemporary examples include Margaret Irwin in These Mortals (1925) and Hope
Mirrlees in Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). These sophisticated but slightly effete fairy tales then began to give way to a more active brand of heroic fantasy, first featured to extravagant extent in E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ourobouros (1922).
Modified fairy-tale fantasy reached new heights of popularity in the fantastic volumes
included in James Branch Cabell’s “Biography of Manuel,” set in the imaginary magical
European kingdom of Poictesme. It was also developed in a much more extravagant way
by several of the contributors to the magazine Weird Tales, who used imaginary lands set in remote eras of prehistory in order to develop the subgenre commonly known as “sword-and-sorcery” fiction. Because it was initially restricted to the pages of a pulp magazine, this subgenre was developed primarily in the short-story form, although it is actually
better adapted to novel length. Its most famous progenitor, Robert E. Howard, wrote only one novel featuring his archetypal hero Conan: Conan the Conqueror (1950; originally
“Hour of the Dragon,” 1935-1936). The first important novel of this kind to be published initially in book form was The Well of the Unicorn (1948) by George U. Fletcher (Fletcher Pratt), but since the advent of the paperback book the species has become established as a successful brand of pulp fiction.
The most notable modern novels set entirely in imaginary worlds tend to give the ap-
pearance of being hybrids of sophisticated fairy romance and a variety of heroic fantasy not too far removed from American sword-and-sorcery fiction. The masterpieces of the
genre are The Once and Future King by T. H. White—published in its entirety in 1958 but absorbing three earlier novels—and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955.
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One of the most striking side effects of the development of fantasy novels of this kind
for adults was the revitalization of work done primarily for the juvenile market, which is often remarkably sophisticated in both technical and ideative terms. Tolkien’s juvenile
novel, The Hobbit (1937), is an old example; later ones include Ursula K. Le Guin’s six novels set in the world of Earthsea and various works by Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, and
Lloyd Alexander.
The paperback publication of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in the 1960’s and the feature films released to great acclaim in 2001-2003 sparked countless exercises in imitation that proved popular enough to make the trilogy the basic form of modern fantasy fiction. The reborn genre went from strength to strength in commercial terms, making best sellers out of dozens of writers, many of them direly mediocre in terms of the quality of their prose. Nor is it simply oral fairytales that were rehabilitated within modern commercial fiction; following the success of Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972), animal fables—which were also popular in medieval times—were similarly produced in some quantity. The leading examples of this form are the twenty-one novels in the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, in which generations of woodland creatures inhabit a vaguely medieval world.
This exploitation of imaginary worlds is the most striking aspect of the evolution of
fantasy novels during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and it is not entirely surprising that the “fantasy” label is now retained for such novels by publishers. There has, however, been a parallel evolution of occult and horrific fantasy. The Decadent movements at the end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a kind of fiction that reveled in the unnatural, and though most of the fantastic fiction of this kind was cast in short-story form, there were a few notable novels, including Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (serial 1890, expanded 1891) and Hanns Heinz Ewers’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1907) and its sequels.
Twentieth century gothic fantasy
In parallel with these works appeared a new wave of stories that developed the gothic
images of fear into new archetypes, treating them with a determined quasi-scientific seriousness. The great success in this line was Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which has remained in print and which surely stands as the most heavily plundered fantasy of all time, being the sourcebook for literally hundreds of vampire stories and films.
This resurgence of fiction that deals with the supernatural in a deadly earnest fashion
may seem rather paradoxical. It was possible for nineteenth century rationalists to imagine that their victory over superstitious belief was almost won and to look forward to a day when the irrational might be banished from human affairs. If anything, the reverse is true: Superstition, mysticism, and irrationality now thrive to a greater extent than ever before, and modern fiction reflects that fact.
Fantasy novels inten
ded to evoke horror and unease are more prolifically produced
and consumed today than they were in the heyday of the gothic, and one of the world’s
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best-selling novelists, Stephen King, is primarily a horror writer. In addition, the role played by occult forces within the neogothic novel is crucially different; in gothic novels, normality was usually restored, and when the forces of the supernatural did break free,
they usually did so in order to punish the guilty and liberate the innocent. In later
neogothic fantasies, however—whether one looks at the respectable middlebrow tradition
that extends from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy to the works of Angela Carter or
the lowbrow tradition that extends from Dennis Wheatley to James Herbert and Clive
Barker—the gothic elements were superimposed in a wholesale manner upon the mun-
dane world, subjecting it to a surrealization from which there could be no possibility of redemption.
This situation has been complicated by a marked tendency among writers of dark fan-
tasy to subject the traditional monsters of gothic fiction to moral reappraisal. In modern vampire fiction, particularly the lush historical romances of Anne Rice, Chelsea Quinn
Yarbro, S. P. Somtow, and Elizabeth Kostovo, the male vampire is more hero than villain, and his unusual existential plight is subject to a sympathetically fascinated scrutiny. Modern awareness of the extent to which such figures as the vampire and the werewolf embod-
ied and exaggerated the sexual anxieties of the nineteenth century has enabled writers to redeploy them in fictions that champion the cause of liberalism, although the question of whether understanding automatically paves the way to forgiveness remains interestingly
and sometimes achingly open. The psychoanalytical sophistication of much modern hor-
ror fiction has moved so far beyond traditional considerations of good and evil that it
seems to some critics to have turned from stigmatization to glamorization—an argument
supported by the strangely reverent tone adopted toward their all-too-human monsters by
such writers as Poppy Z. Brite and Thomas Harris.
The concerted attempt made by many modern writers of supernatural fiction to redeem
the Byronic literary vampire from the negative image foisted on him by John Polidori and Stoker extends beyond the limits of literary fantasy into lifestyle fantasy. Similarly intricate relationships between literary and lifestyle fantasies, aided and abetted by extravagant scholarly fantasies—a process that began with the modern reformulation of the idea
of witchcraft—have developed across the entire spectrum of New Age philosophies, pre-
tenses, and practices. The relationship between fiction and action has been further complicated by virtue of the spectacular success of fantasy role-playing games, pioneered by
Dungeons and Dragons, and fantasy-based computer games. Although play has always
been a significant medium of fantasy, it has never been the case before that so much play (involving adults as well as adolescents) has drawn so extensively upon a vocabulary of
ideas established and embodied by literary and cinematic fantasies.
Postmodernism
While the contents of popular fantasy fiction have overspilled in this remarkable fash-
ion, fantastic motifs and literary methods have been imported again into the literary main-7
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stream on a considerable scale. The mid-1960’s and early 1970’s saw the beginnings of a
significant break with the American realist tradition in novels by such fabulists as John Barth, Thomas Berger, Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover, which
eventually expanded in the 1980’s into an entire field of postmodern fiction closely connected—at least in the eyes of critics—with a series of formal challenges to the very ideas of realism and reality. British writers of a broadly similar stripe whose work spanned the same period include Angela Carter, Peter Ackroyd, Alasdair Gray, Robert Irwin, and Russell Hoban, although the notion of postmodern British fiction never took hold to the extent that their work began to be aggregated into a symptom of some crucial cultural transition.
Although postmodern fiction borrowed a good deal of imagery from science fiction—
and postmodern critics happily conscripted such science-fiction writers as Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling into the field—its mainstream practitioners usually
deploy such imagery as a set of metaphors commenting surreally and satirically on con-
temporary society, in the manner of Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo. The typical materi-
als of commercial fiction bearing the “fantasy” label are far less diverse, but their potential in this regard has been demonstrated by such works as Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series and Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996).
The translation into English during this postmodern period of several highly esteemed
Latin American novels that productively and provocatively mingle mundane and super-
natural materials, including key examples by Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Amado,
introduced the concept of Magical Realism to contemporary literary criticism. The style is widely, and perhaps rather promiscuously, applied to works that owe some allegiance to
alternative cultural traditions, whether or not it requires translation. Key examples can be found among the works of Ben Okri, Milorad Pavic, and Salman Rushdie. The increasing
interest of African Americans and Native Americans in their traditional cultures—previ-
ously obscured by the dominant Euro-American culture—and increasing curiosity about
the folkways of Asiatic and African cultures, have led to a steady flow of new works into the American book market, much of which is advertised as Magical Realism for want of
any other convenient label.
The relaxation of the realist norm allowed several varieties of fantasy that had long
been dormant to resurface in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Although the classical models of the conte philosophique established by Voltaire were mostly novellas, their modern equivalents frequently take the form of novels. Significant examples include Umberto Eco’s Il pendolo di Foucault (1988; Foucault’s Pendulum, 1989) and L’isola del giorno prima (1994; The Island of the Day Before, 1995) and the series of theological fantasies by James Morrow begun with Towing Jehovah (1994). The classical Kunstmärchen (art fairy tale) also was confined to shorter lengths, but its modern variants are similarly making increasing use of the novel form; key examples include John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981) and Coover’s Briar Rose (1996). Comic fantasy has been resuscitated with great success by such writers as Terry Pratchett—who was the best-selling novelist of the 1990’s in Britain 8
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and whose work has been translated into dozens of languages—and by Pseudonymous
Bosch, author of The Name of This Book Is Secret (2007) and If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late (2008).
Although the bulk of the commercial fiction published under the fantasy label has be-
come extraordinarily stereotyped and repetitive, with heavily promoted best sellers religiously following dumbed-down formulas derived from Tolkien, the fringes of the mar-
keting category continue to play host to a number of highly imaginative and accomplished writers. These include Peter S. Beagle, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock. It is now commonplace for writers who produce excellent fantasy for children to extend their endeavors into adult fantasy; writers working with great facility on both sides of this increasingly ill-defined boundary include Jane Yolen, Patricia McKillip, and Nancy Willard. The Harry
Potter series by J. K. Rowling, which has sold 400 million copies in dozens of languages, was marketed (if not written) for young adults but read by adults as well. In Britain,
Rowling’s publisher printed the books with alternate covers for adult readers who did not wish to be seen reading children’s literature. Adults are also drawn to the witty absurdist Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer and to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series.
Pullman’s books are marketed for young adults, yet their handling of complex religious—
or antireligious—themes has made them a topic for serious scholarly debate.
The simultaneous extension of all these trends gives contemporary fantastic fiction
such an extraordinary variety that it is becoming difficult to attach much meaning to the overarching notion of the fantasy novel—a difficulty clearly reflected in the comprehensive yearly summations of novel production offered by Terri Windling in her introduc-
tions to the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies that she coedits with Ellen Datlow. Windling routinely employs such fantasy categories as imaginary world, contemporary or urban, Arthurian, dark, religious, humorous, mysteries, historical, and literary fairytales but still requires such residual headings as “fantasy in the mainstream,” “young adult fantasies,” and “oddities” for the remainder. The priority traditionally awarded by critics to realistic fiction seems to be in the process of breaking down, and it may well be that a more elaborate literary taxonomy will have to be developed for the new millennium.
Brian Stableford
Bibliography
Anatol, Giselle Liza, ed. Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Fourteen scholarly essays examine the Harry Potter series, the biggest-selling fantasy series of all time. Topics include theories of adolescent development,
book banning, literary influences, and morality and social values.
Attebery, Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Comprehensive and intelligent study of