| Roots of Modern Fantasy |
• Early Literary Fantasy • Utopias • Romance and Romanticism • The Gothic Novel •
• American Romantics • |
What distinguishes traditional fantasy from literary fantasy is the inventiveness of the fantasy world. In traditional fantasy, the world has some basis in myth or legend or is our world only peopled with larger-than-life people and creatures.
In literary fantasy, the fantastic world comes from the imagination of the author. |
| Early Literary Fantasy |
Lucian of Samosata (born c. 125
A.D) wrote a number of satirical dialogues based on fantastic ideas. He was the first writer
of interplanetary fiction.
Icaromenippos or Journey Through the Air describes a journey to the moon with the aid of strapped-on wings.
One of his more titillating
passages describes the custom in which Lunar inhabitants choose to wear
artificial private parts.
Thus Lucian is also
the first writer to describe prosthetic limbs and cyborgs! |
| Cyrano
de Bergerac (1619-55), wrote Voyage to the Moon (1657), in which a traveler fastens a quantity of small bottles filled with
dew to his body. The sun sucks him up with the dew and he lands on the moon. |
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
wrote Gulliver's Travels in
1726. In this work Lemuel Gulliver embarks on four voyages:
- To Lilliput, where
inhabitants are six inches tall
- To Brobdingnag,
a land of giants
- To the flying island
of Laputa
- To the Land of
the Houyhnhnms, rational horses, and the irrational humanoid Yahoos
who serve them
While Gulliver's Travels certainly contains elements of the fantastic, the work is satiric rather
than speculative in intent.
It also doubles as
a spoof on travel literature. |
| Utopias |
| Utopias
are descriptions of ideal societies. Great utopias are generally moral or
political in intention and thus are not really science fiction or fantasy. However, because they are set in worlds of the imagination, they exist on the fringes of both science fiction and fantasy. |
Plato (c. 427-c. 348
B.C.) wrote The Republic, the
first utopia.
Thomas More, minister
to King Henry VIII of England, later martyred for his refusal to acknowledge
Henry as the head of the Church in England, coined the term "utopia"
from the Greek meaning "not a place," or "nowhere."
More's Utopia was published first in Latin (1516) and later in English (1551). |
| Romance and Romanticism |
| The roots of both science fiction and fantasy can be traced to the romance, the rise of romanticism in English literature, and especially to that aspect of romanticism known as the Gothic. |
A romance is a form
of narrative prose fiction that tells a story of events far removed from
realistic and ordinary life.
Romance utilizes elements
of the fantastic such as:
- deeds of knights
- encounters with
monsters and dragons
- the use of magic
|
In the late 18th and early 19th century, first in England and a bit later in the United States, writers of the Romantic Movement turned away from the the rationalism of the Enlightenment and became more interested in the importance of instinct and emotion in literature and in the unconscious mind rather than in reason. Interests in the supernatural and in the imagination led writers to include elements of the fantastic in their works.
One outgrowth of this interest in less realistic content for literature is the rise of the Gothic novel. |
Gothic literature (the name is derived from the Goths, barbarian pagan tribes of medieval
times) suggests whatever is medieval, primitive, wild, free, and
romantic.
Chief characteristics
of the gothic are
- castles
- magic
- mystery
- chivalry
Generally, horror
and ghosts abound.
A gothic novel is
any novel (like some genre romantic fiction) that attempts to create the
Gothic, medieval atmosphere of brooding and unknown terror.
In the Gothic mode
the emphasis is on the distant and unearthly and on suspense. |
| Genre fantasy as we think of it today has its roots in the Gothic strain
of the Romantic movement as embodied by Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. |
| The Gothic Novel |
The Gothic novel is the common ancester of both horror fiction and fantasy.
The first Gothic novel is generally considered to be The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole. Other important Gothic novels from this period include The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe and The Monk (1797) by Matthew Gregory Lewis.
The most influential of these novels by far is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) which contains elements of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. |
| American Romantics |
Several prominent American Romantics published stories that can be considered to be fantasy.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49),
a gothic writer, is considered the father of both the short story and
the detective story. His best stories are
horror or detective fiction. However, he did contribute to the genre:
- "The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" deals with the quasi-
scientific theory of mesmerism
- The
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1836)--is
a novel about a sea voyage into the unknown with science fiction trappings
|
Nathanial Hawthorne (1804-64) was a writer of gothic fantasy and also a master of the short
story.
Both "The
Birthmark" (1843) and "Rappaccini's
Daughter" (1844) contain elements of fantasy and also feature scientific experiments;
however, Hawthorne was always more concerned with guilt and innocence
than with science. |
| A little later in the 19th century, fantasy finally came into its own as a separate literary genre. |
