Exploring Fantasy Literature: Selected Topics

SHS Web of Conferences, 2018

The article deals with the problem of definition and classification of literary works marked as fantasy. Being quite a modern genre, fantasy, on the one hand, has become quite a popular literature among groups of people of different ages and occupations that leads to the rising attention of theorists of literature and literary critics. But, on the other hand, this literary genre is still not studied and described well enough. Therefore, literary studies do not have conventional definition or classification of the genre. Examining famous fantasy works by J. Tolkien ("The Lord of the Rings"), J. Martin ("The Song of Ice and Flame") and M. and S. Dyachenko ("Wanderers"), we managed to accentuate typical featured of the genre and define it. Comparing Western European and Slavonic fantasy, we came to a conclusion that this genre combines such necessary features as mythological basis, adventure intrigue, the division of the heroes into possessing superpowers and not possessing such ones, the presence of magical artefacts, opposition to the evil on a global scale. Speaking about classification of the genre we can point out two subgroups such as leaning towards the mythological basis and folklore and leaning towards the historical basis.

2014

This is an extract from Chapter 1 of Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity: Pratchett, Pullman Mieville and Stories of the Eye (Rodopi, 2014). "The books are true while reality is lying..." Championing the popular Fantasy genre on the same terms as its readers, Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity casts a critical eye over the substance and methods of political critique in the Fantasy novels of Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman and China Miéville. Ranging across subjects as diverse as exquisite fundamentalism and revolutionary trains, encountering pervert-priests, dwarf hermaphrodites and sex-scarred lovers and pondering the homicidal tendencies of fairy tales and opera, Rayment develops a theoretically wide-ranging and illuminating account of how the novels of these writers do and do not sustain politically insightful critique of the real world, while bringing intellectual and ethical concerns to bear on the popular Fantasy form.

Therefore, we present in the book, in a way resulting from our research interests, answers to the question about the ways and mechanisms of including the past into the present by a community. We do it by analyzing the way in which time lapse and change of conditions have been modifying these mechanisms and how they were inspiring people to search for new solutions which were supposed to serve adjusting the past to the current needs of a community. We are analyzing and interpreting various ways of making past present and of “embodying” it in the present, including as specific ones as transforming and modifying historical knowledge in fantasy literature and alternative history (the chapter: From Andrzej Kmicic to Witcher. Alternative History and Historical Fantasy in Poland at the Turn of the 20th and 21st Centuries). Being aware of historical variability of the content of cultural and social symbolism, we are reflecting on its new meanings and functions which are ascribed to it by contemporary participants of mass culture, including users of the new media functioning mostly in the digital environment.

0. Fantasy: Why Bother?; 1. Some Preconditions for Approaching Fantasy; 2. On What Fantastic Fiction Is Not; 3. In medias res: The Genres of Ahistorical Alternative Worlds; 4. Some Dilemmas on Uses and Values of Fantasy.

A short overview of the genre of fantasy literature and art regarding its development and its relation to reality. Lecture given at the University of Aachen, Germany, May 2011

Even though it often follows the heroic cycle of Campbell's monomyth, because it is exomimetic, fantasy literature lends itself to the presentation of characters who are set apart from society by their nature, not just by their heroic status. These are characters such as wizards, who in fantasy are often elevated from the position of secondary characters they held in fairy tales to the stories' protagonists. This makes fantasy works a good vessel for a discussion of the problems of otherness. As the genre evolves the presentation of the Other becomes more complex. In modern works they are often portrayed as the Other on multiple levels. As readers became more accustomed tolkienian wizards, dwarves, or rangers set apart from human society, the protagonists of modern fantasy stories often are made the Other to their own in-groups. The article presents a number of such characters from selected modern Polish fantasy novels and short story cycles.

NOTE: This paper now appears in citeable form in the introduction to my book Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness from Routledge. http://www.sponpress.com/books/details/9781138850231/ Brian Attebery’s model of fantasy as a “fuzzy set” of texts sitting nearer or further from the centre of genre is by far the most long-lasting definition of the genre, remaining influential more than 20 years after it was first offered (Attebery, 1992). As a way of conceiving of genre in textual terms, and of conceptualizing fantasy as a distinct genre, the model is extremely useful. It is, however, limited when issues beyond these are interrogated. Who places a text in the centre or periphery? What are the networks of influence and which individuals and groups are involved? Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, discussing science fiction and drawing on Rick Altman’s work on film and genre, have argued that “genres are…fluid and tenuous constructions made by the interactions of various claims and practices by writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents” (Bould & Vint, 2009, 48). This paper argues that a new model for conceptualizing not only fantasy, but other popular genres, is needed, one which takes into account more than the merely textual and enables exploration of the culture associated with a genre, one which enables us to question not only where texts sit in the ‘fuzzy set’ of fantasy, but who places them, how, and why. Such questions are extremely significant to contemporary speculative genres as cultural struggles over gender and race interlock and overlap in texts, fan communities on- and off-line, in professional organizations like SFWA, and among authors and editors. This paper draws on the concept of ‘genre culture,’ from popular music studies (e.g. Atton, 2012) , a formulation which places textual practices within a wider set of social processes that include not only fantasy conventions, but the behaviours of authors and audiences, the ideological arguments that circulate around the texts and the meaning and location of fantasy within a political economy. It builds on this concept using Actor Network Theory, developed by Bruno Latour and others (e.g Latour, 2005), to account for the role played by communication media – such as blogs and fan-forums – and textual media from – books to games to films – in connecting Bould and Vint’s “discursive agents.” The paper works towards a model of genre-culture which can provide a framework for exploring not only textual but community practices, not only conventions but habits, and can help account for the networks of influence which shape Attebery’s ‘fuzzy set’ at both its centre and edges. References Attebery, B. (1992). Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Atton, C. (2012). Genre and the cultural politics of territory: the Live Experience of Free Fmprovisation. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(4), 427–441. Bould, M., & Vint, S. (2009). There Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction. In Reading Science Fiction (pp. 43–51). Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vìsnik Marìupolʹsʹkogo deržavnogo unìversitetu. Serìâ: Fìlologìâ

УДК 82-312.9 N. Ivanova O. Ryzhchenko FANTASY AS A DEVELOPING PHENOMENON OF MODERN ART The article deals with the problem of interpreting the phenomenon of fantasy in modern science. Fantasy has spawned many discussions related to the definition of its sources and genre nature, the relationship with the myth-folklore tradition, the problems of classification, the specifics of extra-literary functions and many others. We consider fantasy to be one of the branches of speculative fiction, which naturally formed into an independent industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Initially having appeared as a genre, fantasy subsequently has outgrown this category. Today we can say with confidence that fantasy is a meta-genre, which has its own structure of modeling the world and unites various literary genres (novel, novelette, lyric poetry and others) and types of art (sculpture, cinema, animation, graphic arts, painting, and others) with a common subject of artistic representation.

Journal of Language and Politics, 2021

Many scholars have drawn attention to the affective power that aspects of discourse and practice exert in our social and political life. Fantasy is a concept that, like structures of feeling, rhetoric, myth, metaphor, and utopia, has generated illuminating explanatory and interpretive insights with which to better understand the operation of this power. In this piece I argue that there are distinctive virtues in affirming the value of the category of fantasy, from a theoretical point of view. Importantly, however, I also argue that the qualification 'critical' in Critical Fantasy Studies captures something about how such studies can draw out the normative, ideological, and politico-strategic implications of psychoanalytic insights and observations, and thus become part of a broader enterprise in critical theoretical and empirical research.