History of fantasy
The modern fantasy genre is distinguished from tales and folklore which contain fantastic elements, first by the acknowledged fictitious nature of the work, and second by the naming of an author.
The English Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1408–1471), was written in prose; this work dominates the Arthurian literature, often being regarded as the canonical form of the legend.
[6] At the time, it and the Spanish Amadis de Gaula (1508), (also prose) spawned many imitators, and the genre was popularly well-received, producing such masterpiece of Renaissance poetry as Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata.
[9] Several fantasies aimed at an adult readership were also published in 18th century France, including Voltaire's "contes philosophique" "The Princess of Babylon" (1768) and "The White Bull" (1774), and Jacques Cazotte's Faustian novel The Devil in Love.
[14] Of particular importance to the development of the genre was that the Gothic writers used novelistic techniques, such as Defoe was using, rather than the literary style of the romance, and also began to use the landscape for purposes of expressing the characters' moods.
[16] One noted Gothic novel which also contains a large amount of fantasy elements (derived from the "Arabian Nights") is Vathek by William Thomas Beckford.
The tradition begun with Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile and developed by the Charles Perrault and the French précieuses, was taken up by the German Romantic movement.
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué created medieval-set stories such as Undine (1811)[18] and Sintram and his Companions (1815) which would later inspire British writers such as MacDonald and Morris.
[22] In France, the main writers of Romantic-era fantasy were Charles Nodier, with Smarra (1821) and Trilby (1822) [23][24] and Théophile Gautier in stories such as "Omphale" (1834) and "One of Cleopatra's Nights" (1838), and the later novel Spirite (1866).
[29] The fairy-tale tradition continued in the hands of such authors as William Makepeace Thackeray, but The Rose and the Ring showed many elements of parody.
[30] From this origin, John Ruskin wrote The King of the Golden River, a fairy tale that uses new levels of characterization, creating in the South-West Wind an irascible but kindly character similar to the later Gandalf.
[34] Another major fantasy author of this era was William Morris, a socialist, an admirer of Middle Ages, a reviver of British handcrafts and a poet, who wrote several fantastic romances and novels in the latter part of the century, of which the most famous was The Well at the World's End.
[41] S. T. Joshi claims that "Dunsany's work had the effect of segregating fantasy—a mode whereby the author creates his own realm of pure imagination—from supernatural horror.
[42] According to historian Michael Saler, speculative fiction entered a new stage in the 1880s and 1890s as a consequence of the rise of the secular society, where the imagination in literature was freed from the influence of the church.
Several of the genre's most prominent authors began their careers in these magazines including Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury.
[54] By 1950, sword and sorcery had begun to find a wide audience, with the success of Howard's Conan the Barbarian, and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.
[61] Outside the pulp magazines, several American writers used the medium of fantasy for humorous and satirical purposes, including James Branch Cabell (whose 1919 novel Jurgen became the subject of an unsuccessful prosecution for obscenity),[62] Thorne Smith, with Topper (1926) and Turnabout (1931),[63] and Charles G. Finney, author of The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935).
[64] In Britain in the aftermath of World War I, a notably large number of fantasy books aimed at an adult readership were published, including Living Alone by Stella Benson,[65] A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay,[66] Lady into Fox by David Garnett,[65] Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees,[65][67] and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
He drew inspiration from Northern sagas, as Morris did, but his prose style was modeled more on Tudor and Elizabethan English, and his stories were filled with vigorous characters in glorious adventures.
[36] Eddison's most famous work is The Worm Ouroboros, a long heroic fantasy set on an imaginary version of the planet Mercury.
Herbert Read devoted a chapter of his book English Prose Style (1928) to discussing "Fantasy" as an aspect of literature, arguing it was unjustly considered suitable only for children: "The Western World does not seem to have conceived the necessity of Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups".
[77] In the early 60s there was a renewed interest in sword and sorcery, and publishers mined the pulps for older stories to reprint along with the limited amount of new material.
In demand for more, Ace Books science fiction editor Donald A. Wollheim felt Tolkien's three part novel had enough elements in common with sword and sorcery that it would appeal to the readers of the latter, after which he published an unauthorized paperback edition.
[80] The author and editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Brian Attebery, writes that fantasy is defined "not by boundaries but by a centre", which is The Lord of the Rings.
[77] While constructing original fantasy worlds with detailed histories, geographies and political landscapes had been a part of the genre from the time of L. Frank Baum, Tolkien's influence greatly popularized the notion.
Reprinted authors included William Morris, Lord Dunsany, and George MacDonald; more recent authors included Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung books, and Evangeline Walton's The Island of the Mighty, the success of which led to the publication of the other three novels she had written in that series, and to a distinct strain of Celtic fantasy in later fantasy.
[86] The long-running series of light fantasies by Piers Anthony (Xanth) and Terry Pratchett (Discworld) regularly hit the bestseller lists from the 1980s onward.
[87] A Song of Ice and Fire is considered a path-breaking work which paved the way for a new kind of fantasy referred to as grimdark, which was less idealistic and more violent in nature.
[88][89] With J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, which have become the best selling book series of all time, fantasy is becoming increasingly intertwined with mainstream fiction; a process aided by the international popularity of other works such as Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle, Ranger's Apprentice by John Flanagan, Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.
Since the 1990s, the genre has been marked by the rise of female-centric urban fantasy, very different from Tolkien's works, as shown by the popularity of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels and Charlaine Harris' The Southern Vampire Mysteries books.
