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Welcome to this short talk on how to approach fancy literature.

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My name is Stewart Lee. I'm a member of the English faculty at the University of Oxford, and I want

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to give you some tips and tricks and various approaches to looking at

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this very important and popular genre. Throughout

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the lecture, I'm going to use one text as an example to try

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and illustrate some of the points I'm making now out of the entire corpus of fancy

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literature. Choose one text may seem a bit daft, but I'm going to try

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and use one, which I think most people will be familiar with through either the filmed versions

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or from reading the books themselves. Hopefully Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

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First, let us consider what is it that these texts might have in common?

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The Odyssey, Beowulf, Pilgrim's Progress, The Castle of a Trento Frankenstein,

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Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, Animal Farm, and, of course, the

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Lord of the Rings. Well, they are all considered by some critics as works

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of what we now call fantasy literature. But how can any single definition

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or categorisation attempt to group these texts together,

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that there is a grouping of takes under fantasy, as there is under science fiction,

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is fairly obvious. If you go into any bookshop on the High Street, you will be able to

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go to this section where there is a collection of books under the title Fancy Literature, and

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you'll be able to buy various books by various authors the same way you

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could buy detective novels or science fiction and so on.

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But what is it that brings all these books together? What is it that links them?

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Fantasy literature, as I have already mentioned, stands out as a separate

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what we would call genre. But it has distinct links with other genres such

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as science fiction or horror and supernatural. But what is it that distinguishes

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fantasy from science fiction, science fiction from horror, supernatural and horror and supernatural

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from fantasy? And similarly, what text might we say overlap

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the two or three genres? When you start to answer these questions, that's when

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you start to try and get towards a definition of what fantasy is.

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It's made slightly more difficult. Fancy literature, because it does feel like the ground underneath it

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is moving constantly. Here is a list of just some of the terms that we

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here associate it when people talk about fantasy literature, high epic fantasy sword

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and sorcery, low heroic fantasy whimsy, magical realism, urban fantasy,

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dark fantasy, historical fantasy and so on.

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These are what we might call sub genres if the overarching jorah is fantasy.

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Examples of, for example, high or epic fantasy where we're usually talking about something

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on a very large scale in terms of geographical space, but also time

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and indeed entire worlds depend on the outcomes of the actions

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of the heroic characters at the centre of the book. A good example of that would be,

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of course, the Lord of the Rings sword and sorcery or lower heroic. Fancy's usually focussed

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on an individual, usually some form of bigger than life character who

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goes on single adventures fighting their way through very action packed

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stories. For example, Ari. Conan the Barbarian series

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Whimsy might be something where the fantasy is kind of all a bit tongue in cheek. Like Alice in Wonderland.

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A magical realism might be like some of the stories that you get from Borges.

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But returning to the preliminary list of books, we could group these together, perhaps is all containing

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elements of something which simply cannot happen, at least according to our current

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knowledge. We have the reanimation of a corpse to the talking teddy bear,

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but this in turn can cause problems. Things that Billy people believed in the past

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as possible, which we would now generally accept is impossible and vice

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versa, may mean that the text moves between genres, between believability

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and unbelievability. So from that sense, from realism

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to fantasy. For example, we could perhaps

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perceive a possible future where technology is so far advanced, where some form of reanimation

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is possible. But the idea that by nature, just as a natural

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event, a teddy bear, a stuffed teddy bear could stand up, talk and have adventures

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is unrealistic, is simply unbelievable. So there that we may have a distinction

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there between fantasy and moving, perhaps with Frankenstein to science fiction.

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In English literature, the search for Francis's origin can take us quite a weight back, as we shall see.

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But let's start with a comment by Dryden in 1712, where he talked

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about stories which embody the fairy way of writing. And this seems to suggest something

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slightly strange, magical not only in the content, but also in the composition process

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or purpose. If we move to more modern scholarship, we will

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see terms such as impossible, unreal wonder when people

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attempt to define fantasy literature. But there is also a very strong point that

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what we get in these types of books is not illogical or inconsistent. In fact, consistency

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is one of the key components of a successful Francey novel, as we shall see.

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But to come back to our definition, it may be considered as something

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which cannot happen. And more importantly, never could.

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So how do you start to approach such texts? It is true to say that there

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are some vers fantasies and indeed there are some fantasy representations in drama.

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But for the most part, what you will come across are short stories or novels.

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So a good way to start might be to consider how we would we would say it by a

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standard approach. Talk about a novel or a text.

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Here we tend to look under four key components, setting narration, plot and characterisation.

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The setting is simple. Where am when does the story take place? But in the

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case of fantasy, as opposed to mimetic realistic literature,

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how do we actually know where and when this is taking place? They often take place

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in imaginary worlds. More importantly, do we believe in it? And I'll

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come back to this later on when we talk about something called worldbuilding. Narration

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and point of view, as elsewhere we would consider, is, for example, the presence of the narrator

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is the first person or third person used. Is the narrator ever

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present, as in, for example, Tolkien's The Hobbit? This is standard

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stuff and in fantasy, because the author is challenged with conveying the unknown and the impossible.

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The narrator can be very intrusive. Tolkien himself realised that

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the narrator in The Hobbit became a bit of a barrier for people to accept the text

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certain his own children. Plot is the succession of events that take

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place. How is the plot unfolded? The exposition? What complications are

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introduced and when are they turning points in a clear climax? Does it end with resolution,

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with exposition? We also consider the structure. Is it linear? Does the narrator flashback or foreshadow

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again, all standard stuff? Does the narrator follow the norm

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in the Lord of the Rings, for example, as Tom Shippy pointed out, the complex to ing and fro

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ing of time in the chapter. The Council of Elrond in the Fellowship. The ring is something

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we would tend not to get in a traditional novel. It moves back and forth between millennia.

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The Lord of the Rings actually finishes off a story that started thousands of years before,

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but we only get glimpses of that throughout the text. Finally, this

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characterisation, we've come to expect our characters to be fully human in the modern novel.

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That may not be the case in fantasy. We tend to consider

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characters as a as either flat to use the enforced his term

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one might call an act. And where they are an abstraction or representative or rounded

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what we might call an actor, the type one would expect in the modern novel where you get full insights

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and they are very realistic in their emotional responses. How do we find out about

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these characters? Is it through telling explanatory or do we show? Are we showing the characters

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or do we discover them through dramatisation? Again, to return to The Hobbit,

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one might say that the dwarves that accompany Bilbo Baggins are not very rounded characters. There's

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very little to distinguish each of them, apart from the colour of their cloaks, with the odd

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exception, like Thorin. In fantasy, we often confront

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the possibility that the character elements are often expressed through race in

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the Lord of the Rings again. We do not need to delve much into the inner thoughts of legalese. The ELF

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or Gimli the dwarf to understand their take on life because we have known traits already associated

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with elves and dwarves. It's worth noting also, for example,

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it's quite common in fantasy to come across what we call doubling where two or more characters

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are paid to show a contrast again in Lord of the Rings, the valiant

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faramir who takes the right path is opposed, of course, to his brother, Borra

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mayor who falls to the power of the ring.

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But all of this tends to reveal information at the level of the individual text, which

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is fine, but it doesn't really help us to get to a macro understanding of the genre fantasy.

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To this end, then, critics have tended to adopt two main approaches. The first one is a chronological

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approach. The second is one of common elements or devices, mode, structures, tropes,

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motifs that bind these texts together. Let's begin by looking

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at a chronological approach to fantasy or the long history of fantasy. A good example

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might be the Cambridge companion to fantasy literature, as she will see, edited by Edward James

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and Fara Mendleson, which opens with a historical section covering fantasy from Dryden to Dun

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Seine Gothic and horror fiction American Fantasy, 1820 to 1950.

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The Development of Children's Fantasy and concludes with Tulgan Lewis and the explosion

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of Jorah fantasy before moving to a thematic study. A similar

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approach has also taken by Mendelson and James in their short history fantasy.

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In such studies and there are many. You will often be presented with a table at the beginning listing the fantasy publications

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in date order through the centuries. But this presents a very interesting question. First, what

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would be the starting point? The Cambridge Companion starts with Beowulf, then has the map Enochian

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The More Dhafir the fairy queen and so on. Whereas Mendleson endgame short history

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begins with the epic of Gilberte Mesh Homer's Odyssey. Virge it was Ed. I goes

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back to classical literature. Seven second, if we accept our earlier

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premise that fancy literature is about things which we as a reader believe could not happen.

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The author themselves shares the same belief. How do we square this with the fact that the audience of Beowulf,

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for example, probably did believe in monsters and magic and maybe indeed the poet

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did, too, as well. So was it a realistic text at the time of its composition?

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And it's only now that we would consider it fantasy or containing

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fantastical elements. The chronology

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of fantasy literature falls into many categories, and here I just list a few.

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A lot of the scholars will, for example, go back to classical and biblical texts and certainly

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mediaeval texts. These are often termed as tap root texts because

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they are often influence or provide some form of source for later fantasy

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writings. If we move into the 16th and 17th century, we can see fantastical elements

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in Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton and so on. But it's really with the explosion of

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what we might say, folklore, folk tales where people like Perreault in 16

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'97 or later on, the Grimm brothers started to collect fairy tales

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and folk tales and bring these all together that we start to see the embedding of fantasy

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elements in short stories. If you couple this with the thousand and one Arabian

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Nights, which first appeared in English translation in 1885, you can see this explosion

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of interests and influences in the fantasy genre.

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Taking this all together and putting the Arabian Nights aside for a moment, we can

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say that one of the things that things like Pierro and the Grim's brothers did was really establish

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the idea of a mediaeval setting. Most fantasy stories will have things

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like wizards, castles, princesses, kings, dragons and so

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on. And it's not surprising, therefore, when we start to see the emergence of adult

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fantasy literature in the 19th century with William Morris, George MacDonald and moving into

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the 20th century with Lord Done Saini, that we can see mediaeval elements reused

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again and again and again. However, as we moved into

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the late 19th century, of course, and the age of rationalism, where people were adopting

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scientific methodology and constantly seeking scientific explanations,

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stories such as fantasy tales seemed to have no place for an adult readership

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at least. And we can see that they were gradually moved to the nursery.

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We have a series of books written for children and indeed fancy literature for children around the turn

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of the century and into the early part of the 20th century was very, very common.

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Another area in this very, very brief analysis of the chronology of fancy literature is the

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influence of the Gothic. Which, of course, moved into the ghost story or horror story. But this was

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picked up in the 20th century, early 20th century, and by writers such

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as Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Makan, who were writing what we might call weird fiction.

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And one of the most famous exponents of this is H.P. Lovecraft, the American writer writing

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in the 20s onwards.

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The sea change, or perhaps one of the most important and.

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Developments, fantasy literature happened with the publication of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings,

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regardless of the opinion of Tolkien, most scholars on particularly those the history of fantasy

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literature cite the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954 to 1955

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as a seminal moment. Some, like Tom Shippey, go as far as to say it created a genre almost

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single handedly. But perhaps that's unfair. Of course, fantasy literature was written in

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the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, as we've already seen.

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And indeed, Tolkan had contemporaries who were also writing forms of what we might call fancy literature.

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His friend and colleague, C.S. Lewis, one, Mervyn Peake, T.H. White and so on.

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What is John Klute said in his analysis of fantasy literature? It marked

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the end of apology, right is now no longer needed to feel ashamed of writing fantasy,

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certainly for adults. And it did seem to cement the idea, such as the lengthy

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trilogy, although it was actually six books. The motives and tropes of the mediaeval world is already

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mentioned, and most importantly, the use of a fully realised, secondary, immersive

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world middle earth that Tolkien was clearly not the first writer create a new

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world. In fact, that idea had gone back centuries or to look to mediaeval literature of or

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as we've already said. But he was the first 20th century writer, perhaps to combine

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the two and command a wide readership. Moving to a global readership

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in the 1960s and of course, being picked up again and again, particularly with the re-emergence

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of the Peter Jackson films. One cannot help but agree with Terry Pratchett when he described

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Tolkan is being like Mount Fuji in Japanese prints, ubiquitous background

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presence to further things to know about Tolkien first. He taught

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as Dave Lewis several of the next wave of British and British fantasy writers such as Susan

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Cooper, Diane Wynne Jones, to name but two, and secondly, set a mark in the sand that subsequent

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writers either tried to build on, emulate or even reject to take fantasy

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in different directions. In terms of our survey,

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which is like to draw a line by noting the what we call the Ballantine Adult

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Fantasy Series or B a. F. S. Between 1969

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and 1974, this public 66 titles in around 68 volumes,

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which you could say establish the genre. Indeed, Williamson notes that it was probably this

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that really cemented the term fantasy as the description of the genre. We

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have writers such as MacDonald, Maurice Carroll, Edison, Howard Tolkien,

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Lewis Sprog, De Kamp, Pratt Liber to name, but a few

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which were reproduced at this time and then also inspired a new wave of writers that were then to

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pick up the mantle in the 70s and beyond.

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But in the chronological approach to one side, let us consider how scholars have tried to look at commonalities

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across fantasy text to see if this revealed anything about the genre.

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One of the common areas to look at is plot structure. And in this, there are similarities,

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very much in works such as Bart. Vladimir Propp or Joseph Campbell,

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who were studying comparative mythology in the early and mid part of the 20th century

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and looking for common plot areas which were replicate it across

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many, many titles.

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Fahrer Mendelsohn's rhetoric's of fantasy is a very, very good modern

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example of this. Mendelson argued that fantasy succeeds

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when the literary techniques employed are most appropriate to the reader's expectation of that category of fantasy.

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In other words, fantasy is popular because you kind of get what you expect. But in the hands of good writers,

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this can be reimagined. She proposed four main structures around which

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we could base or consider various fancy texts. The most important

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and and obvious one is what's called the Portal Quest fantasy, where the character

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leaves a familiar surroundings and passes through a portal into an unknown place. For example, The Lion, the Witch

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and the Wardrobe, Stephen Donaldsons Lord Foul's Bane Series. A subversion

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of this might be trying to win Jones Howl's Moving Castle. Such tales do not have

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to be quests. But the overwhelming majority are, as Mentals noted, and she saw a pattern

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in many of these books a reasonably defined journey setting if a moral universe

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with moral expectation and the tap roots being the epic, the mediaeval quest

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and so on. Immersive fantasy is where the fantasy world

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functions on all levels as a complete world. It's an entirely secondary world. And although Mendelson

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felt the Lord of the Rings was more a portal quest, Immersive might well be a very good description from

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Middle Earth. The positioning of the omniscient narrator, as Mendleson noted,

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is crucial. But most importantly, a point where we return to is that the world needs

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to be coherent. Mendelsohn's. Third category is that of intrusion fantasy, where more often

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than not the setting is the real world or a simulation. The real world that is intruded upon

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by fantastical elements. This is perhaps something we would find in writers like Lovecraft

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or Stephen King, where the horror elements intrude. In New England, small town.

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And finally, there's liminal fantasy where there really are no barriers between really and fantastical elements.

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They live side by side, such as Susanna Clarke's, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

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Common devices are used in many of these books

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by authors to try and create what we know is world building. That is to make

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the world, be it a liminal world or an entirely secondary world that you immerse

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yourself into to be entirely believable. And that's paradoxical,

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as it may sound to you, because, of course, you are trying to make the fantastic elements, those

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which are entirely unbelievable, believable. To do this, writers tend to

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employ a variety of methods. Most notably, the text is

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often presented as authentic. Think of the number of stories that utilise

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that discovered manuscript book idea with the story survives to us. The device is used as

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far back as Thomas Moore's Utopia, but more recently in the great Gothic novel The

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Castle of a Trenta. And it's actually had The Hobbit and the Lord of the Ring uses its

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uses for its framing device, where the story is actually written down Memoirs

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of Bilbo Baggins and then picked up by Frodo and Sam.

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Consider also the number of books that surround themselves with scholarly apparatus. The most obvious being a map

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at the beginning or end. The map not only helps the writer and reader address the spatial

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and topographical concerns of the world there, they are proud to be moving in, but

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it also gives a sense of authenticity. There are other scholarly apparatus.

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We often get with these types of books. We have appendices and genealogies. The Lord of the Rings being a fantastic

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example of this. And this all leads us to a sense of depth

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which can be engendered by embedding in the text references to a bleak past events. You

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will often be reading the story and then some of them will make a reference to something that happened a long time

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ago. Very often, or more often than not, you don't get a full explanation of that. You

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were just meant to realise that there is more to this story than meets the eye.

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Depth can also be engendered through familiarity, drawing on concepts that the readers already know about

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Tolkien himself. Note that it's desirable if you can. Necessary if you can use words

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that are already in existence, which have a certain sense and are laden with a certain sense.

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And therefore, I use dwarves in Middle Earth and elves and so on. You can't have everything. Absolutely

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strange at the outride. So for many Western writers, they can be assisted greatly

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in terms of making the world seem familiar. That first step to believability by drawing on

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known mythologies and to repeat the mediaeval motifs and tropes we've discussed at length earlier.

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This is what is familiar in such writers. It's a walk to Scott or indeed in Hollywood. It

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engendered in reader a sense of knowing which in turn can assist with immersion.

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Perhaps one of the most famous essays on this is tokens on

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fairy stories. In this token is at great pains to stress a story

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or environment should be presented. Its true. It's divided into various sections

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under the section entitled Children Tokin notes that children have what we might term literary belief.

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The storyteller or sub creator can bring them into the secondary world, the world of the

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fairy tale where they encounter is a listener or reader. What was Conner's secondary

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belief? This is more powerful than cold. Reduce a suspension of disbelief.

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To achieve this token, I believe that most importantly, fantasy needed an inner consistency of reality.

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The secondary world. The author sub creator creates requires labelled and thought.

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The author of Fantasy aspires to capture a sensation of enchantment. Were you the reader?

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Almost dreamlike. Enter the secondary world for Tokin Fancy was thus a

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high art form in achieving the above was no mean feat because it engendered

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in reader the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires, namely to survey

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the depths of time and space, often on an epic scale. Moreover,

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Tolkien argued that by entering the secondary world for fantasy stories, we can achieve what he described

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as recovery. By this, he meant regaining a clear review of the real world,

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an idea common perhaps we can see in mediaeval dream tales. Most importantly,

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fantasy can provide us with consolation as it often tackles the great escape,

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namely the great escape from death. Even if this is not explicit in the plot, Tolkien

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perceives it is coming through in moments which he termed you catastrophe, the sudden, joyous

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term which denies universal final defeat, which all fantasy stories

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he believed should or would have. A good example of this in

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the Lord of the Rings is, of course, the destruction of the ring. Even at the very end, Frodo

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fails almost in his quest, and the quest is only saved by Gollum's intervention.

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Suddenly there is when the massed armies of the allies are surrounded by the even

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larger armies of sourer on a sudden, joyous turn, the dark lord

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falls. Now, you can agree or disagree with told him, but it is perhaps

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a partial answer to why fantasy literature is so popular.

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Is it, as its detractors say, simply escapism? Does it just allow us to forget about our worldly

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woes for a time and immerse ourselves in another world? Or does the epic scale or

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endless possibilities afforded to an author freed of the shackles of reality,

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allow them to explore real world issues? But on a scale impossible in mimetic literature

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or in an environment that does not require a familiarity of experience in the reader.

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As Mark Chadbourne, the modern day fantasy writer, said, fantasy is actually about reality.

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It's just about taking a longer and bigger view. Fantasy novels

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may be set to tap back into emotions we had as children, but long forgot

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or the ability to have secondary belief to give you that sensation. We rarely have as adults,

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namely wonder as there is the liquid commented, an adult is not a dead child,

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but a child that survived. Do these tanks go even further back than that and awaken

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in some long lost understanding or desire for stories that give us the legends

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of old stirring as Atterberry argued longings that either did not exist

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previously or that the reader was not aware of? Or are they just

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rollicking good yarns?

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So in this brief talk, I've tried to give a quick summary of how we might define the genre of

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fantasy and also be aware of the many subgenres that you could use,

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traditional approaches such as setting plot, narrator characterisation to look at fantasy novels.

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But there are special questions you might want to ask with the fantasy text. I've touched

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on the long, but in this case, quite a short history of fantasy. I've considered

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how people have looked at common structures, motives and tropes. I've

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briefly mentioned immersion and belief through tokens, essay on fairy

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stories, and I've touched also on popularity. Why might it be so that these

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books sell so well and are indeed dominating popular culture at the moment?

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I will leave you with this quote from early LA Gwinn, 1973, where

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you hobnob with hobbits and tell tales about little green men are quite used to being dismissed as mere

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entertainers or sternly disapproved of its escapists. But I think that perhaps the categories

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are changing like the Times. There's a certain sense of defensiveness to look Gwyn's comment

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in 1973, as if she was aware that writing or reading or talking

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about such texts may seem childish to many academics.

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However, that has changed. Fantasy literature is now one of the most important and popular

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genres around. It dominates popular culture through the works of Tokin

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or the Game of Thrones series. And it deserves considerable study.

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Finally, here is just a brief reading list of some of the books you might want to look

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at to allow you to develop your study of fantasy literature.