History of fantasy

Myth, Legend, and Saga

Epic of Gilgamesh

Odyssey

Aenid

Beowulf (1000-)

Prose Edda

• Snorri Sturluson
• Iceland
• 13th century

Icelandic Sagas

• Snorri Sturluson
• Trans. William Morris (19th century)
• Influenced: JRR Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, and Neil Gaiman

Celtic

• Cuchulainn
• The Mabinogion
• Influenced: Evangeline Walton, Charles de Lint, Lloyd Alexander, Katherine Kerr, and Emma Bull

Ancient Novels

Alexander Romance

• 3rd century BC
• Alexander the Great

The Golden Ass

• Apuleius
• 16th century
• Adventures of a man transformed into an ass

Romance

Middle Ages

“Matter of Britain”

Arthurian tradition (elite and reinforcing Christian values)

• King Arthur and his knights
• 13th century
• History of the Kings of Britain (1136)
• Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (15th century)
• Arthurian revival to support English monarchy: Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Steward, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Peter David, and Stephen Lawhead (20th century)

Poor and dispossessed

• Robin Hood (Errol Flynn and Richard Greene versions)

“Matter of France”

• Charlemagne and his Paladins

Gothic

Hallmarks

• a surface story, which will be proved wrong
• claustrophobia created through the mise-en-scene of landscape
• moment of revelation is often an anticlimax
• claustrophobia created by a sense of imprisonment
• subversive, desires to shock
• (1760s-1820s) but is active in fantasy very much longer

The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (more fantastic)

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe (more rational)

Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (1784)

Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1786) by William Beckford

Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley

The Vampyre: A Tale (1819) by John William Polidori

Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1842)

“The Pit and the Pendulum” (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844)

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)”

Robert Louis Stevenson “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886)

Gothic + historical novels = 19th century cult of the medieval

Contemporary gothic writers

• HP Lovecraft
• MR James
• Stephen King
• Anne Rice
• China Mieville

Fairy Tradition

Celtic

• Fairy is a separate world that lives alongside ours.
• “Tam Lin”
• “Thomas the Rhymer”
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Irish

• Fairies are more physical creatures
• Own courts and customs
• Interacting with humans only when forced

Contemporary writers in the fairy tradition

• Charles de Lint
• Emma Bull
• Marie Brennan
• Susanna Clarke
• Elizabeth Hand
• Hal Duncan

Fairytale

• 1600s-
• Different from the fairy tradition
• Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy popularized courtly fairytales
• Brother’s Grimm
• Characteristics
  • Formulaic
  • Random in their construction of fairy
  • Fairies are intimately concerned with humans
  • Powers are arbitrary but moral
• Antoine Galland translates The Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights) into French
  • Influenced: Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare (1983)
• 19th century
  • Baron de la Motte Fouque’s “Undine” (1811)
    • “The Sandman” (1816-1817) in Jacques Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffman” and Leo Delibes’ ballet “Coppelia”
    • “The Nutcracker” in Tchaikovsky ballet.
  • “Feathertop” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852)
  • Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)
    • Most successful 19th century writer of fairytales
    • Courtly polish of Perrault + dark morality of the Brother’s Grimm
      • The Little Mermaid (1837)
      • The Snow Queen (1844)
      • The Little Match Girl (1845)
      • The Red Shoes (1845)
      • The Ugly Duckling (1844)
  • Japanese ghost stories of Lafcadio Hearn
  • Chinese fantasy stories of Ernest Bramah

Fantasy in anthropology

Andrew Lang

• The Blue Fairy Book (1889)
• The Lilac Fairy Book (1910)

Animal and trickster stories

Rudyard Kipling

• The Jungle Book (1894)
• Just So Stories (1902)

Joel Chandler Harris

• Uncle Remus (1881)

Contemporary fairytale writers

• Robin McKinley
• Gregory Maguire
• Gail Carson Levine

Romanticism

Took the sublime landscapes of Gothic and gave them a lighter and more inspiring color → glowing imagery in fantasy

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci

William Blake (1757-1827) influenced late 20th century folk and rock singers, and writers

Mid-nineteenth century

• Still Arthurian romance and fairytale but no longer retelling

William Makepeace Thackeray, The Rose and the Ring, or The History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo: A Fireside Pantomime for Great and Small Children (1855)

• Inspired the writing of new tales
  • The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) by Oscar Wilde
  • Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925) by Walter de la Mare

Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies: a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863)

Christian fantasy

George MacDonald

• Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858)
  • portal fantasy in which the main character strays into faerie (by going through a doorway, the ‘portal’ into the fantastic world), and observes the doings of the fairy world
• Lilith (1895)
• At the Back of the North Wind (1871)
• The Princess and the Goblin (1872)
• The Princess and Curdie (1883)

Whimsy

Hallmarks

• Light-hearted
• Fancy
• Slightly surreal
• Sense of randomness that can be both delightful and unnerving
• Delights in puns, word play, and double/triple meaning of words.
• Very visual

Lewis Carrol

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
• Through the Looking-Glass, and what Alice Found There (1871)

F. Anstey

• Vice Versâ, or A Lesson to Fathers (1882)
  • Body swap story
• The Brass Bottle (1900)
• Both stories laid the ground for modern urban fantasies in which faerie and the modern world collide

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Hallmarks

• Restoring the supposed ideals of medieval craftsmanship and in the process provide a visual response to the much broader cult of the medieval in the 19th century.
• Illustrations with faux medieval costume, flowing hair, and emphasis on drapery
• Study of medieval documents and medieval national histories

Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market

• Poem that provided language and plot for many fantasy writers

William Morris

• Pre-Raphaelite who encompasses the whole movement in his career
• Craftsman, scholar, writer of fantasies and revolutionary socialist.
• News From Nowhere (1890)
• The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World’s End (1896) and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) → No longer portal worlds. The fairyland is the only world that exists (full fantasy).
• His principal fantasy heritage is the indefinitely extensible quest in which the landscape itself plays a major part.
• Created a pseudo-medieval diction for his characters
• He created the quest fantasy, which Tolkien and Lewis revised
• Greer Gilman continues to refine Morris’ proper fantasy language (see Cloud and Ashes, 2009)

Dracula (horror) stands at the opposite end of The Water of the Wondrous Isles

What all fantasy writers have in common is intense focus on detail.

• Intensity of observation
• Attempt to create a fantastic world through the accretion of detail

1900-1950

The first years of the 20th century produced highly inventive fantasy for children.

L. Frank Baum

Edith Nesbit

• Writing for children
• Greatest influence to fantasy in the beginning of the 20th century
• “the indigenous fantasy”
• Ancestor of all the maps introduced in modern fantasy trilogies.

L. Frank Baum

• wanted to write a fantastic world that owed nothing from Europe.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Edith Nesbit

• the reader is asked to ally with (rather than be amused by) the child.
• Nesbit also introduced the idea that the fantastic could burst through into our world at any moment, without necessarily being scary.
• Created urban fantasy (“low fantasy”), magic entering into and disrupting the urban environment

Peter Pan and Wendy (1911), JM Barrie

Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Rudyad Kipling

The Wind in the Willows (1908), Kenneth Grahame

Mary Poppins (1934), PL Traverse

The Box of Delights (1935), John Masefiel

The Ship That Flew (1936), Hilda Lewis

The Little White Horse (1940), Elizabeth Goudge

Enid Blyton

• Dominate children’t adventure fiction
  • The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (1936)
  • The Enchanted Wood (1939)
  • The Magic Faraway Tree (1943)

Fable

Beatrix Potter

• The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)
• Squirrel Nutkin (1903)
• The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913)
• The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908)

Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows

Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle adventures (1920–52)

George Orwell’s, Animal Farm (1948)

Toy Story

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), Margery Williams

Uncle Remus (1881), Joel Chandler Harris

Walter Brooks’s Freddy the Pig (1927–52)

EB White

• Stuart Little (1945)
• Charlotte’s Web (1952)

Little full fantasy in the United States at this time.

Carl Grabo’s, The Cat in Grandfather’s House (1929)

Rachel Field’s Hetty, Her First Hundred Years (1929)

Ruth Gannett’s My Father’s Dragon (1948) and its sequels.

Ttwo short stories from James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks (1949) and The Wonderful O (1955).

Two key books for children in this period:

• The Hobbit (1937)
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950)