1
00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:01,180
[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
I'm Professor Stewart Lee.

2
00:00:01,200 --> 00:00:11,309
I'm a member of the Faculty of English here at the University of Oxford, associate member of Exeter College, and I lecture on Old and Middle English,

3
00:00:11,310 --> 00:00:20,310
or I used to, but I more recently lectured on 20th century literature, a particular focus on J.R.R. Tolkien and fantasy literature.

4
00:00:20,670 --> 00:00:25,829
But I also look at war writing, starting with First World War, the poetry of the First War.

5
00:00:25,830 --> 00:00:43,020
But it's expanded into Second World War as well. So I, as I defined in my opening talk or tried to, I think the key way to to to come up with a,

6
00:00:43,470 --> 00:00:47,900
a summary of what fantasy might mean is to focus on the impossibility.

7
00:00:48,560 --> 00:00:56,750
Um, so I think what distinguishes a fantasy literary text from anything else is that it has an element in there,

8
00:00:57,080 --> 00:01:06,620
either a fantastical creature or a fantastical setting, or the presence of magic or something like that, which is just simply impossible.

9
00:01:07,040 --> 00:01:14,090
Um, and it may just be a minor element in there, I don't know, but that's where I would put fantasy literature.

10
00:01:14,570 --> 00:01:23,030
Um, totter off, of course, talks about the fantastic and he there is referring to that point in a text which

11
00:01:23,030 --> 00:01:27,589
could be completely realistic up to that point where you begin to question,

12
00:01:27,590 --> 00:01:36,350
there's something uncanny, slightly weird happening, which you never actually know if it is a supernatural or fantastical event.

13
00:01:36,830 --> 00:01:40,940
Um, but for me, fantasy is where it clearly is impossible.

14
00:01:46,900 --> 00:01:56,740
Well, I think as we've shown in the first day of the summer school, it goes way back to the to the classical writers, Greek and Latin and so on.

15
00:01:57,070 --> 00:02:06,220
Um, and then it comes all the way through medieval literature. So what was brought up today is, of course, going back to my definition of fantasy.

16
00:02:06,610 --> 00:02:11,290
Did people at the time, did those authors, those writers, or however the text was formed,

17
00:02:11,530 --> 00:02:15,879
believe the elements in there to be impossible, or did the audience?

18
00:02:15,880 --> 00:02:21,940
And that's something which tends to move perhaps the text in and out of the definition of fantasy.

19
00:02:22,330 --> 00:02:28,290
So the example I often gave is Beowulf. Now Beowulf has monsters in the Fens.

20
00:02:28,300 --> 00:02:30,970
It has magic swords, and it has a dragon at the end.

21
00:02:31,990 --> 00:02:41,950
Now, it would appear that the the poet themselves who is is, let's say, uh, it was their ability to bring all this together.

22
00:02:41,950 --> 00:02:50,439
All these previous tales probably didn't believe it, but they go out of their way to define why or to explain why we don't see dragons.

23
00:02:50,440 --> 00:02:53,950
For the dragon is pushed over a cliff. And that's why you didn't see dragons anymore.

24
00:02:54,400 --> 00:03:03,220
But the audience sitting there listening to Beowulf, the tales, may well have believed that there really was something nasty out there in the Fens.

25
00:03:03,490 --> 00:03:12,370
So I think when we look back, we could look at those texts, even if they're anonymous and say, well, they're all influential, they're all important.

26
00:03:12,640 --> 00:03:14,980
But they may be what we call taproot texts.

27
00:03:14,980 --> 00:03:22,210
As John Clute calls in the encyclopaedia, the texts which influenced the development of what eventually becomes fantasy.

28
00:03:22,810 --> 00:03:29,740
Um, but in terms of like the key writers, there is the traditional path down through,

29
00:03:30,280 --> 00:03:34,720
uh, William Morris, George MacDonald, etc. into the early 20th century.

30
00:03:34,990 --> 00:03:42,070
And then you have, of course, the key, the inklings, um, which I believe Tolkien is probably the most important of all of them.

31
00:03:42,400 --> 00:03:51,010
Um, but then you have other elements coming through from folklore and folktales as we're hearing a presentation on through the Gothic,

32
00:03:51,010 --> 00:03:54,220
through the supernatural, through weird fiction, etcetera.

33
00:03:54,430 --> 00:03:57,610
So by the time you get to our day and age, it's all bundled up.

34
00:03:57,970 --> 00:04:03,400
And I think that's why when I was talking, I said, there may be a definition of fantasy,

35
00:04:03,400 --> 00:04:07,629
but there are all these subgenres where it goes off and you're never entirely certain.

36
00:04:07,630 --> 00:04:11,390
Is that what we might call weird literature, horror fiction, fantasy?

37
00:04:11,410 --> 00:04:14,950
It's a mixture of all of them. And it also acts as a magnet.

38
00:04:14,950 --> 00:04:25,360
It starts to absorb other genres. So romantic is bringing in the romantic story, and that might be the focal point, but it's in a fantastical setting.

39
00:04:25,840 --> 00:04:32,499
And I recently read a book which really appropriates the detective novel and sets it in a fantastical setting,

40
00:04:32,500 --> 00:04:36,190
but it's still the sort of closed manor house snowed in,

41
00:04:36,190 --> 00:04:41,500
and they're all trying to work out who the murderer is, albeit they've all got special powers and and so on.

42
00:04:41,530 --> 00:04:48,810
So. Yeah I think.

43
00:04:48,830 --> 00:04:53,900
Well, I'm reading the Fourth Wing at the moment, which, uh, just finishing it, which I enjoy.

44
00:04:54,020 --> 00:05:00,120
Um, I think it's, it is romantic as they would define it or people would define it because there

45
00:05:00,140 --> 00:05:05,900
is that sort of love story or forbidden romance going all the way through it.

46
00:05:05,960 --> 00:05:07,490
Um, almost.

47
00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:16,700
It's it's really Romeo and Juliet to the, to the male and female sort of being on the opposite sides of what was we've, we're told in the past at war.

48
00:05:16,700 --> 00:05:25,100
And I quite enjoy that. I mean, I think, um, it plays on the Dragon Rider school, it plays on the School of Magic, etcetera.

49
00:05:25,430 --> 00:05:28,940
But it's it's developing into quite a good tale, I think.

50
00:05:28,940 --> 00:05:36,080
And there are references that the writer will explore, no doubt, in the subsequent novel going and going later on.

51
00:05:36,590 --> 00:05:41,660
Um, I very much enjoyed Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree,

52
00:05:42,410 --> 00:05:48,440
which I thought was probably one of the best recent epic fantasies I've read.

53
00:05:48,980 --> 00:05:53,389
Um, because I think it does sort of take you into all new areas.

54
00:05:53,390 --> 00:05:59,000
And it does. It does. Sprawl is epic in the sense it's covered in multiple continents.

55
00:05:59,360 --> 00:06:07,910
And you do believe the different cultures, the different sort of, um, backgrounds of people and the fact that they do have to join together.

56
00:06:08,120 --> 00:06:16,870
So I found that very enjoyable. I believe Adam's onto something there.

57
00:06:17,380 --> 00:06:23,040
Um, and, uh, I mentioned, uh, in conversation after the talk.

58
00:06:23,050 --> 00:06:27,130
There's a, there's a very good website by Edward James which, uh,

59
00:06:27,190 --> 00:06:35,319
lists science fiction and fantasy writers who saw combat more or less in the First World War across multiple nations.

60
00:06:35,320 --> 00:06:39,340
So it's and that's led me to quite I've got quite interest in this,

61
00:06:39,340 --> 00:06:45,399
and I've read a lot of the texts that came out or those writers were producing and

62
00:06:45,400 --> 00:06:49,690
they'd they'd been involved some way in the armed services in the First World War.

63
00:06:50,080 --> 00:06:53,950
Um, and I think he. Yes, I think he's right.

64
00:06:54,370 --> 00:06:59,620
I think there is actually quite a lot of fantasy literature written in the 20s and 30s.

65
00:07:00,100 --> 00:07:06,579
Adam was perhaps suggesting there was a bit of a lull. And then it appears in the 50s or 60s in particular.

66
00:07:06,580 --> 00:07:09,760
Um, it's kind of under the surface and then it reappears.

67
00:07:10,330 --> 00:07:19,030
I think what we tend to forget is what a lot of people were reading, not necessarily what we now perceive as the canon from the 20th century.

68
00:07:19,480 --> 00:07:27,550
Um, so there was a lot of popular fiction that came out in the 1920s, um, which many people read short stories,

69
00:07:27,730 --> 00:07:34,750
uh, more often than not, but some, some novels, particularly dystopian or utopian novels, primarily dystopian,

70
00:07:35,200 --> 00:07:38,680
which I think were people who they'd gone through the trauma of the First World War,

71
00:07:39,220 --> 00:07:45,880
and they were either envisaging how the world could get better or more, more, more often than not, how the world was going to get worse.

72
00:07:46,120 --> 00:07:50,230
And they used fantastical settings to to demonstrate that.

73
00:07:50,740 --> 00:08:00,130
The other thing, which comes out again and again in the in the 20s, are people who are fixated on death and the afterlife.

74
00:08:00,880 --> 00:08:06,790
And you can understand, having gone through the slaughter of the First World War and seeing, you know,

75
00:08:06,790 --> 00:08:14,110
the inconsequential nature of human life and just how quickly it can be obliterated on a scale which no one could have imagined.

76
00:08:14,380 --> 00:08:19,780
That you do have a fixation on that. Um, we get it in the war.

77
00:08:19,780 --> 00:08:25,840
We get it just after the war, with the rise in spiritualism and that attempt to bridge the gap between life and death.

78
00:08:26,110 --> 00:08:28,299
But a lot of writers start to play around with that.

79
00:08:28,300 --> 00:08:35,800
And you get these short tales where they are in touch with the dead, or they're seeking to evade death or something like that.

80
00:08:36,190 --> 00:08:43,540
Um, I haven't, so I haven't explored that very much, but it definitely was an emerging theme I was seeing in those texts.

81
00:08:53,300 --> 00:08:57,470
I think it's hard to be honest, just to say there is a distinction now.

82
00:08:57,920 --> 00:09:01,430
Um, because technology is moving at such a pace.

83
00:09:02,300 --> 00:09:06,560
What's what's there now on, on, you know, devices.

84
00:09:07,190 --> 00:09:10,399
We probably would never have imagined 20, 30 years ago.

85
00:09:10,400 --> 00:09:12,560
It was the stuff of, let's say, science fiction.

86
00:09:13,100 --> 00:09:22,580
Um, so I think, I suppose the clear distinction or the definition of people would say is that science fiction envisages a world, whatever it is,

87
00:09:22,760 --> 00:09:33,860
that we believe could be possible if technology could advance in a way we don't, we don't see why it is impossible according to the laws of physics.

88
00:09:33,860 --> 00:09:35,450
And so we just haven't got there yet.

89
00:09:36,020 --> 00:09:46,490
So in that sense, um, where it goes against the fantasy sort of definition of, well, look, it could never happen or it never did happen.

90
00:09:46,910 --> 00:09:51,740
Um, so I think that would be the clear distinction.

91
00:09:52,070 --> 00:09:58,729
Um, but it really overlaps. And again, I go back to my point about, well, did people did, for example,

92
00:09:58,730 --> 00:10:04,070
Mary Shelley really believe that, you know, we could so together and reanimate a corpse?

93
00:10:04,490 --> 00:10:13,400
No. So it's often been called fantasy, but now it's not possibly too far away in terms of technology and science.

94
00:10:13,700 --> 00:10:22,999
And I was reading the other day about, um, a device a bit like, uh, Google's glasses, which can read your thoughts.

95
00:10:23,000 --> 00:10:29,720
You don't have to say it, and it will transmit that to your device to sort of turn the lights on and so on.

96
00:10:29,870 --> 00:10:37,069
Well, if it can transmit into another device and then the person can hear that we've just cracked telepathy,

97
00:10:37,070 --> 00:10:44,899
which previously we thought was impossible. And that's one of the things even in the fourth Wing, they're telepathic because the dragons have bonded.

98
00:10:44,900 --> 00:10:51,860
And these two characters can speak into each other's minds. So you you rapidly start to think, well, what is impossible now?

99
00:10:52,310 --> 00:11:00,170
Um, so I guess those were the two distinctions when I, when I probably made that, uh, reference.

100
00:11:00,170 --> 00:11:04,850
And I often talk about a Venn diagram, science fiction, horror, uh, fantasy.

101
00:11:04,850 --> 00:11:12,140
And I talk about the overlap. And, you know, you can put texts in all of these, but so that just shows it is a bit of a muddle.

102
00:11:12,500 --> 00:11:18,920
Um, uh, I think I was also saying that if you go into a bookshop, by way of example,

103
00:11:18,920 --> 00:11:21,890
you can see a set of books and there will be something at the top.

104
00:11:22,490 --> 00:11:30,650
Something is pushing whoever stacks the bookshelves or that bookshop to put those books under there.

105
00:11:31,130 --> 00:11:35,180
Uh, and this, this seems to be the way the world is heading towards those,

106
00:11:35,180 --> 00:11:40,500
those genres and categorisation of literary texts, and particularly on streaming platforms.

107
00:11:40,520 --> 00:11:46,250
Another point I'm making and you go there, you it will give you this those your fantasy films and it will give you a hundred.

108
00:11:46,610 --> 00:11:51,730
It thinks it knows what a fantasy film is. So I was more, let's say,

109
00:11:51,770 --> 00:11:59,630
in the discussions that have gone on for many years about genre studies have kind of gone out the window because the world is overtaking us.

110
00:12:06,680 --> 00:12:15,709
So I was very impressed with Bond West's, um, analysis of, uh, medievalism, because what it's all said to me,

111
00:12:15,710 --> 00:12:22,730
which is something which I've always I've always tried to say, is that people in medieval times,

112
00:12:23,120 --> 00:12:26,150
they were very different from us, but they were very similar to us.

113
00:12:26,570 --> 00:12:35,510
And I think the examples he was giving of where they were using fantasy or fantastical elements in text, they probably didn't believe it,

114
00:12:35,510 --> 00:12:40,340
but they were using it for a point to make a serious point about something that was happening in their time.

115
00:12:40,730 --> 00:12:44,750
Um, it could be some political or economical thing that was happening.

116
00:12:45,200 --> 00:12:48,329
And if we go back to my talk, I was saying, well, why?

117
00:12:48,330 --> 00:12:52,580
Why does the writer write this? Um, and very often, more often than not, it is.

118
00:12:52,580 --> 00:13:01,790
There's an objective behind it. So you can use the fantastic to allow you to look back on reality and perhaps have a better understanding.

119
00:13:02,240 --> 00:13:03,940
Uh, and I just thought that was wonderful.

120
00:13:03,960 --> 00:13:10,460
You then took those examples all the way through to the Victorian period and said, look, we were still doing it then, and we're still doing it now.

121
00:13:10,820 --> 00:13:14,560
And I always like that. I always like that reminder that they were human beings.

122
00:13:14,570 --> 00:13:19,790
They may have been several centuries ago, but they had exactly the same feelings as us.