Contemporary Fantasy
Contemporary fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy literature that is set in the present day or a relatively modern time period. It often involves magical or supernatural elements existing within the real world, blurring the lines between the ordinary and the extraordinary. This genre frequently explores themes of escapism, adventure, and the impact of magic on everyday life.
8 Key excerpts on "Contemporary Fantasy"
eBook - ePubLiterature for Young Adults
Books (and More) for Contemporary Readers
- Joan L. Knickerbocker, James A. Rycik(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Then we discuss speculative fiction, a category that is broader than science fiction because it poses questions drawn from the social sciences as often as from the physical sciences. We also highlight gender and diversity issues in fantasy and speculative fiction and suggest how that literature might be used in the classroom. As shown in Figure 7.1, both fantasy and what we will refer to as speculative fiction allow young adults to enter imaginary landscapes where they can not only escape their world but also attain the distance necessary to see it more clearly. Fantasy: Worlds That Never Were The simplest way to define fantasy literature is to say that it contains elements that are unreal or magical, but the whole of a fantasy story is more than the sum of those elements. Gates, Steffel, and Molson (2003) note that the word fantasy comes from the Greek phantasia, which means “making visible” (p. 2), and they argue that the essential characteristic of fantasy as a genre is to create worlds that make truth visible. Fantasy is imaginative fiction that allows us to explore major life mysteries without being limited by size, time, or space.… Fantasy and myth nurture the imagination that fuels our creative impulses. Without the ability to ‘make visible’ something that does not exist, we would be limited indeed. Figure 7.1 Exploring other worlds through fantasy and speculative fiction (Gates et al., 2003, p. 2) The literature included under the fantasy label may include magic that comes from a ring or a wand, from an inborn talent, or from the giftof a goddess. It may depict an epic struggle between good and evil in an imaginary realm or the bond of friendship between a young adult and a dragon—or a vampire. It often shows a teenager’s awestruck exploration of a hidden world that has suddenly been revealed...
eBook - ePubFantasy and Mimesis (Routledge Revivals)
Responses to Reality in Western Literature
- Kathryn Hume(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...If we look at western literature historically, we find all sorts of departures from consensus reality throughout its span, in the works of such major authors as Homer and Virgil; Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pynchon; Crétien de Troyes and Rabelais; Gottfried of Strassburg, Thomas Mann, and Kafka; Dante and Calvino. There are genres and works that eschew fantasy throughout this span, and in the nineteenth century fantasy was consciously pushed to the periphery by the upholders of the realistic novel, but fantasy has generally been a well-established part of mainstream narrative, and is now well re-established in contemporary fiction. To do justice to this all-but-universal phenomenon, we must abandon the assumption that mimesis, the vraisemblance to the world we know, is the only real part of literature; give up the notion that fantasy is peripheral and readily separable. We must start instead from the assumption that literature is the product of both mimesis and fantasy, and talk about mimetic and fantastic elements in any one work. Only then can we hope to approach literature without the distortion of perspective bequeathed to us by Plato and Aristotle. My working definition is therefore of the simplest sort, and much like W.R. Irwin’s. Fantasy is any departure from consensus reality, an impulse native to literature and manifested in innumerable variations, from monster to metaphor. It includes transgressions of what one generally takes to be physical facts such as human immortality, travel faster than light, telekinesis, and the like. Telepathy, although it may show up as a statistical effect in Rhine Institute studies of card-calling, does not work on the communication-as-if-by-telephone principle that some fiction displays, so that too is fantasy...
eBook - ePubReading Between the Lines
A Christian Guide to Literature
- Gene Edward Veith Jr.(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Crossway(Publisher)
...E I G H T FANTASY: Literature as a Lamp J ust as there is a literature of imitation, there is a literature of creation. Fairy tales, allegorical visions, beast fables, medieval romances, Gothic tales, supernatural thrillers, epic quests in a sub-created uni verse, and science fiction constitute an important literary tradition. Such works have always been popular, firing the imaginations of their readers with tales of wonder and mystery that transcend everyday life. Fantasy draws upon the inward imagination rather than external reality for its subject matter. The play of the creative imagination is an important human power. The pure, radical fictionality of fantasy—its separateness from what we already experience—is part of its value. Nevertheless, the lamp of fantasy can shed light on the world outside its pages. Christians have always been drawn to fantasy. The great pioneers of fantasy—Spenser, Bunyan, Swift, MacDonald, Tolkien, Lewis were all devout Christians, as are many authors and avid readers of fantasy today. On the other hand, some Christians decry unrealistic lit erature. Mythological tales of magic spells and demonic villains seem to them dangerously close to the occult. Yet even the critics of fantasy can hardly deny that in the hands of a John Bunyan or a C. S. Lewis, fantasy has been a way of exploring and proclaiming the Christian faith. Fantasy, by projecting the inner life and by symbolizing the intan gible, will by its very nature raise spiritual issues. The battle between good and evil, the inner struggles of the mind, the contest between God and Satan for the soul—such momentous truths are in the realm of the unseen, but fantasy can express them in symbolic form. Something spiritual may be evil or it may be good. Fantasy’s spiritual orientation means that it can embody the occult and promote immorality, or it can embody Christianity and promote virtue...
eBook - ePubLiterature and Religious Experience
Beyond Belief and Unbelief
- Matthew J. Smith, Caleb D. Spencer, Matthew J. Smith, Caleb D. Spencer(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Fantasy ventures beyond the confines of history and rejects the mythical technique, on the one hand, and reintroduces magical elements such as gods, demons, and human interactions with supernatural powers and allows writers and readers to indulge in the thrill of magic, on the other. Fantasy is “a work mediated through—and in a telling sense defined by—those elements,” after they have been allegedly singled out and exiled from the disenchanted universe of the modern era. 24 Starting from the Romantic era, fantastic elements in fiction “were widely regarded as superstitious, to be tolerated only if supported by evidence of actual belief or if supported by didactive or moral purpose.” 25 That is to say, even though fantasy provides a shelter for magic, the magical was forced to hide behind the historical and the mythical for survival. It is Tolkien who foregrounded the magical as the defining feature of fantasy in his classic essay “On Fairy-Stories.” According to him, fantasy comprises more than stories featuring magic. It involves magic as its practice and product. Presenting an apologetic of fantasy against its cultured despisers, Tolkien developed his own theorization of magic. 26 I characterize Tolkien’s strategy as retrieving the tradition of natural magic while circumventing the irredeemably derogatory term “superstition” and the demonic side of magic associated with it. In his preparatory notes for the 1947 published version of the essay, magic is defined as “the special use (real, imagined, or pretended) of powers that, though they must derive ultimately from God, are inherent in the created world, exterior to God.” 27 Breaking away from post-Enlightenment scientific rationality but conforming to the teachings of Christian theology, he posited the existence of Faërie, a mysterious realm behind the sensible world, a reservoir from which magical practices endeavor to draw...
eBook - ePubFairy Tales of London
British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present
- Hadas Elber-Aviram(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...As Edward James observed, Lord of the Rings ‘looms over all the fantasy written in English. . . since its publication’. 215 Tolkien’s unprecedented popularity has often spurred scholars to define fantasy synonymously with Rural Fantasy. Fredric Jameson probably had Middle Earth in mind when he wrote of the fantasy genre as a ‘vision of an immense historical degradation’. 216 Brian Atterbery declared plainly that ‘One way to characterize the genre of fantasy is the set of texts that in some way or other resemble The Lord of the Rings. ’ 217 Darko Suvin argued that ‘the common denominator of Fantasy seems to me the resolute refusal of any technology, urbanization, and finances associated with the capitalism of Industrial Revolution and “paleotechnic” (Mumford) machinery’. 218 Thus defined, fantasy literature emerges as a deeply conservative, anti-metropolitan and reactionary mode of writing. Notwithstanding, recent years have seen a renewed interest in narratives of Urban Fantasy, even if that is not the name by which its latest fictions have been labelled. Moorcock has observed ‘a trend away from traditional rural Tolkienesque fables towards well-written stories with a strong urban focus’. 219 He regards this turn as newly emergent, a ‘modern school of urban fantasy’ that ‘appeals to readers not merely seeking escape but looking for versions of their own experience’. 220 Dirk Vanderbeke similarly argues that whereas ‘such counter-worlds’ of fantasy are traditionally ‘set in a pastoral or rural environment’, 221 recent fantasies have located ‘doorways into a world that is and isn’t ours. . . in the modern city and metropolis’. 222 Scholars have linked this urban turn to the ‘British Boom’ in speculative fiction, 223 pioneered by urban writers such as China Miéville, Ken Macleod, M. John Harrison and Neil Gaiman. What present scholarship lacks is a deeper exploration of this school’s historical development...
eBook - ePubBehind the Frontiers of the Real
A Definition of the Fantastic
- David Roas(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Pivot(Publisher)
...Meanwhile, magical realism creates a harmonious coexistence between the natural and the uncanny in an everyday world, which creates a curious hybrid of the fantastic and the marvellous. Finally, science fiction proposes an expansion of our framework of reality by means of scientific speculation (present or future, human or alien), so just as occurs with the marvellous and, to a certain extent, with magical reality, the (apparently) impossible ceases to be perceived as such as it has a logical explanation, always based on certain scientific and technological developments presented as possible within the strict margins of the text. It is therefore surprising that, in spite of the great differences between the four categories (although they do share some common features), all-encompassing theoretical approaches have proliferated in an attempt—from different perspectives—to gather together the fantastic, the marvellous, magical realism and science fiction under a single heading, when these categories present very different means of transgressing the limits of mimetic realism. Thus, in the English-speaking world the term fantasy has arisen as a non-mimetic macro-category: “a set of works that may appear to be heteroclite and which refer to the imaginary in its various states. Thus, works of science fiction appear alongside fairy tales and Edgar Allan Poe alongside Lewis Carroll” (Bozzetto 2002 : 35)...
...I have commented elsewhere on the difficulties that arise from overly prescriptive attitudes towards genre identity. 1 As Andrew Rayment puts it, ‘Armitt could, perhaps, be considered a kind of spokesperson’ for those critics for whom the ‘attempt to shoehorn a text into a binding yet artificial category is a “travesty” of compartmentalization, a “death wish” of division and sub-division’ (Rayment 2014: 10). Nevertheless, close neighbours of fantasy such as science fiction, the ghost story, the horror story and the Gothic are not discussed in detail in this book, except insofar as they help to cast clearer light on what fantasy is not. Readers interested in these undoubtedly adjacent and often overlapping genres are recommended to read companion volumes in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series such as Fred Botting’s Gothic, Maggie Ann Bowers’s Magical Realism and Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction. What is fantasy? At their most conventional, at least in structural terms, fantasy narratives such as Alice in Wonderland (1865) immerse the reader into an alternative world with its own logic, landscape and temporality and subsequently return that reader intact to the frame world of realism, in this case the river-bank where Alice has been sitting with her sister. The fantasy world is not usually assumed to have collapsed when left, although Alice’s departure is certainly accompanied by chaos as the pack of courtier cards (court guards) explodes into the air ‘and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream … and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister’ (Carroll 1929: 102). It is in this type of narrative that one experiences, most clearly, the type of ‘joyous turn’ or ‘ eucatastrophe’ which, according to Tolkien, characterizes ‘the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function’ (Tolkien 2001: 68)...
eBook - ePub- Jacqueline Furby, Claire Hines(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...We have dipped our toes into story oceans, exposed the tangled roots and some of the uses of fantasy, traversed continuums, swum in unmapped waters and sighted fantasy fuzzy sets. It would seem that to set limits for the fantasy film is a Herculean task of epic proportions. We might conclude that it is against the very nature of fantasy to accept limits; fantasy adapts, it can cross boundaries and borders in ways that often resist categorization. Yet perhaps there are some common elements, themes, iconography or ideas we have encountered that may aid our approach to fantasy, and the heroic quests of others. We submit these along with a few indicative examples where appropriate to take on the journey towards further discovery. At the heart of fantasy is magic (the Harry Potter series). Fantasy film imagines and realizes the magical and its synonyms: the impossible, the marvellous, the wondrous and the miraculous. This might be expressed as a magical place (The Wizard of Oz) or time (Excalibur, 1981), in magical events (Clash of the Titans, 1981), through magical characters (Labyrinth, 1986), or through magical transformation or metamorphosis (La Belle et la Bête, 1946). Fantasy film typically draws its subjects, themes, characters, events and settings from traditional story forms such as myth (Jason and the Argonauts, 1963), legend (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991) and fairy tale (The Company of Wolves, 1984)...
