6 Key excerpts on "Supernatural Fiction"

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  eBook - ePub

  Magical Realism and the Fantastic

  Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy

  • Amaryll Beatrice Chanady(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the case of the narratives discussed up to this point, most readers would have no difficulty in recognizing the presence of the supernatural. The problem arises when the fictitious world can be neither clearly rejected, nor accepted. Much occultist writing falls into this category. Whereas most readers would not lend credence to tales of reincarnation, metempsychosis or telepathy, there are many people who believe in these phenomena. The latter kind of reader would obviously not consider a story about such things as magico-realist, but as quite realistic. Prom his point of view, there is therefore no fusion of the natural and the supernatural, since the supernatural simply does not exist in these narratives. Is it legitimate, however, to define a mode of writing according to the beliefs of individual readers? If it were, the definition would be entirely subjective and useless. The presence of the implied reader in the text partially solves this problem. Although an author may sincerely believe in occultism, and address his story to receptive minds, the reader implied by the text believes in conventional norms of reason, and thus may differ from the intended reader. Since any definition of the supernatural is ultimately based on the beliefs of a certain culture, it will always be arbitrary from an absolute point of view, but less so than if it depended entirely on the individual. A general consensus must be reached if one is to be able to define anything. Since most educated readers in this day and age do not believe in occult phenomena, then these should be considered as supernatural, that is, something which contradicts the laws of nature as we know them. This kind of definition is of course relative, since the supernatural may be defined quite differently in the future; but for our purposes, we define “supernatural” in this way, and consider occult phenomena as such.

  Whether the intent of the author is to demonstrate the possibility of a certain occult event in which he firmly believes, or whether it is merely to base his literary creation on aspects of the occult he does not believe in, the resulting text is not necessarily affected by these intentions, although excessive authorial justification and explanatory comments may be detrimental to its quality. In both cases there is a fusion of the natural and the supernatural which the reader must recreate according to the code of the text. An exception to this is occultist writing in which the author painstakingly and pseudoscientifically explains the supernatural phenomena: in this case we have a treatise on demonology, metempsychosis, or any other aspect of the occult. The narrative must be written as a literary text, and not as a document or as a scientific demonstration of a principle. These are simply occultist writings, with none of the effect of magico-realist narratives.

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  Cultures of Witchcraft in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present

  • Jonathan Barry, Owen Davies, Cornelie Usborne(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  7 Literary critics have explored with great subtlety both the changing ‘verisimilitude’ sought in such stories and the ‘aestheticisation’ of the supernatural, with the emphasis shifting from the authenticity of the story to the authenticity of its effects on the reader’s feelings, and authors’ desire to evoke such feelings to offset the impact (again) of growing materialism and the perceived ‘disenchantment of the world’. Although these accounts consider the wider cultural contexts of these developments in fiction, they have not explored the continuing publication of supposedly factual supernatural stories.

  Similarly, the revived interest of historians in supernatural beliefs after 1720 has tended to ignore these works. Owen Davies has recovered the history of ‘grimoires’ as part of his work on magical practitioners and their clients, while Paul Monod and others have explored an ‘occult enlightenment’ of those who used magical texts.8 This influenced the publications I am studying, but these works gave no practical details about the nature and practice of magic, nor, by and large, do they throw any light on how ordinary people thought or felt about magic. Their protagonists were largely members of the middling and upper classes based in urban settings, and the supernatural occurrences they report happened to them uninvited, not because they were seeking magical assistance. There are almost no accounts involving witches, cunning folk or use of magic except in witchcraft stories reprinted from the pre-1720 period. For this reason they bear little relation to the kinds of stories which nineteenth-century folklorists sought to elicit from ordinary rural people, nor have modern historians of popular supernaturalism paid them any attention.9

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  Literature 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

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  Shakespeare and the supernatural

  • Victoria Bladen, Yan Brailowsky(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: Shakespeare and the supernatural Victoria Bladen and Yan Brailowsky Supernatural elements constitute a significant dimension of Shakespeare's plays: ghosts haunt political spaces and internal psyches; witches foresee the future and disturb the present; fairies meddle with love; natural portents and dreams foreshadow events; and a magus conjures a tempest from the elements. These aspects contribute to the dramatic power and intrigue of the plays, whether they are treated in performance with irony, comedic effect or unsettling gravity. Although Shakespeare's plays were written and performed for early modern audiences, for whom the supernatural, whether sacred, demonic or folkloric, was still part of the fabric of everyday life, these supernatural elements continue to enthral us, and maintain their power to raise a range of questions in more contemporary contexts. Supernatural elements implicitly question the border between the human and the non-human, and between the visible and the unseen. They also raise questions of control and agency that intersect with the exercise of power, a central focus across Shakespeare's œuvre. Shakespeare drew on the supernatural in all of his dramatic genres and throughout his career, from the early histories (such as Richard III and Henry VI, Part II) to the late romances (such as The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest), in tragedies (Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth) and in comedy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), suggesting the importance of the supernatural in his approach to drama. Exploration of this dimension resonates with many of the central themes of the plays, raising theological, political and moral questions. His work invites critical analysis of how supernatural figures, elements and forces are constructed in the plays, raising various options for performance, and what assumptions and ambiguities arise from these representations

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  Reading 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. Most fantasy—the great fan tasy—comes down on the side of Christianity.

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  Literature and Understanding

  The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts

  • Jon Phelan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Anna Karenina is an artfully constructed narrative, is thematically serious, subject to widespread positive critical acclaim, includes made up characters and does not persistently communicate facts about the world and, as a result, may be judged as a work of literary fiction. The category of literary fiction occupies the intersection between the set of works that are fiction and the set of works that are literature, and as such is a subgenre of both fiction and literature. I want to finish this chapter with two suggestions as to the implications of what has been argued. The first implication is a rejection of the view that literary fiction is a sub-genre of fiction in an equivalent way as erotica or sci-fi. The second implication is a re-organisation of arguments in the literary cognitivism debate according to whether each argument concerns literary fiction qua literature or literary fiction qua fiction.

  First, a note on the terminology: ‘genre’, ‘super-genre’ and ‘sub-genre’. On every account (Walton’s, Friend’s, and earlier), there is a hierarchy of genres. To clarify the nature of this hierarchy, my proposal is that there are four ‘super-genres’: fiction, non-fiction, literature and non-literature where the first and third category (fiction and literature) overlap to form an intersection termed ‘literary fiction’. The super-genre of fiction may be further sub-divided into many kinds, commonly referred to as ‘genres’, such as: crime, sci-fi, romance. As these categories are sub-divisions of fiction, I shall refer to them as ‘sub-genres’. I shall, therefore, maintain a distinction between the super-genre of fiction and sub-genres such as crime or romance. The fact that in popular usage ‘genre’ is the term used to refer to all these categories does not do enough work in classification.

  The label ‘literary fiction’ tends to be counted as a sub-genre alongside other sub-genres. For example, Lamarque says the following:

  Not all works of the imagination are deemed to be “literature” … and much popular fiction or drama or light verse would not be so classified. Publishers have even come to recognise a particular genre of fiction as “literary fiction”, in contrast to other genres, crime, fantasy, horror, war, science fiction, which are rarely classed as “literature”. What these other genres are thought to lack, as well as “fine writing”, is a kind of moral seriousness which is taken as a further essential mark of “imaginative literature”.

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