Fantasy
From the twentieth century, it has expanded further into various media, including film, television, graphic novels, manga, animation, and video games.
[10] Authors have to rely on the readers' suspension of disbelief, an acceptance of the unbelievable or impossible for the sake of enjoyment, in order to write effective fantasies.
[14] The ancient Babylonian creation epic, the Enûma Eliš, in which the god Marduk slays the goddess Tiamat,[15] contains the theme of a cosmic battle between good and evil, which is characteristic of the modern fantasy genre.
[20] Ovid's Metamorphoses and Apuleius's The Golden Ass are both works that influenced the development of the fantasy genre[20] by taking mythic elements and weaving them into personal accounts.
[20] Plato used allegories to convey many of his teachings,[20] and early Christian writers interpreted both the Old and New Testaments as employing parables to relay spiritual truths.
[20] This ability to find meaning in a story that is not literally true became the foundation that allowed the modern fantasy genre to develop.
Chinese traditions have been particularly influential in the vein of fantasy known as Chinoiserie, including such writers as Ernest Bramah and Barry Hughart.
The separate folklore of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland has sometimes been used indiscriminately for "Celtic" fantasy, sometimes with great effect; other writers have specified the use of a single source.
[24] The Welsh tradition has been particularly influential, due to its connection to King Arthur and its collection in a single work, the epic Mabinogion.
Despite MacDonald's future influence with At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Morris's popularity with his contemporaries, and H. G. Wells's The Wonderful Visit (1895), it was not until the 20th century that fantasy fiction began to reach a large audience.
For many years, this and successes such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) created the circular effect that all fantasy works, even the later The Lord of the Rings, were therefore classified as children's literature[citation needed].
In the early 20th century, the New Culture Movement's enthusiasm for Westernization and science in China compelled them to condemn the fantastical shenmo genre of traditional Chinese literature.
The spells and magical creatures of these novels were viewed as superstitious and backward, products of a feudal society hindering the modernization of China.
Stories of the supernatural continued to be denounced once the Communists rose to power, and mainland China experienced a revival in fantasy only after the Cultural Revolution had ended.
By 1950, "sword and sorcery" fiction had begun to find a wide audience, with the success of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.
[31] Several other series, such as C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, helped cement the genre's popularity.
[34] Fantasy encompasses numerous subgenres characterized by particular themes or settings, or by an overlap with other literary genres or forms of speculative fiction.
Additionally, many science fiction conventions, such as Florida's FX Show and MegaCon, cater to fantasy and horror fans.
[46] French literature theorists as Tzvetan Todorov argues that the fantastic is a liminal space, characterized by the intrusion of supernatural elements into the realistic framework of a story, accompanied by uncertainty about their existence.
[48] Rosemary Jackson builds onto and challenges as well Todorov's definition of the fantastic in her 1981 nonfiction book Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion.
Jackson criticizes Todorov's theory as being too limited in scope, examining only the literary function of the fantastic, and expands his structuralist theory to fit a more cultural study of the genre—which, incidentally, she proposes is not a genre at all, but a mode that draws upon literary elements of both realistic and supernatural fiction to create the air of uncertainty in its narratives as described by Todorov.
The fear of the new women in society, paired with their growing roles, allowed them to create a new style of "fuzzy" supernatural texts.
