[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] I'm Professor Stewart Lee.
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,
or I used to, but I more recently lectured on 20th century literature, a particular focus on J.R.R. Tolkien and fantasy literature.
But I also look at war writing, starting with First World War, the poetry of the First War.
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,
a summary of what fantasy might mean is to focus on the impossibility.
Um, so I think what distinguishes a fantasy literary text from anything else is that it has an element in there,
either a fantastical creature or a fantastical setting, or the presence of magic or something like that, which is just simply impossible.
Um, and it may just be a minor element in there, I don't know, but that's where I would put fantasy literature.
Um, totter off, of course, talks about the fantastic and he there is referring to that point in a text which
could be completely realistic up to that point where you begin to question,
there's something uncanny, slightly weird happening, which you never actually know if it is a supernatural or fantastical event.
Um, but for me, fantasy is where it clearly is impossible.
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.
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.
Did people at the time, did those authors, those writers, or however the text was formed,
believe the elements in there to be impossible, or did the audience?
And that's something which tends to move perhaps the text in and out of the definition of fantasy.
So the example I often gave is Beowulf. Now Beowulf has monsters in the Fens.
It has magic swords, and it has a dragon at the end.
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.
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.
For the dragon is pushed over a cliff. And that's why you didn't see dragons anymore.
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.
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.
But they may be what we call taproot texts.
As John Clute calls in the encyclopaedia, the texts which influenced the development of what eventually becomes fantasy.
Um, but in terms of like the key writers, there is the traditional path down through,
uh, William Morris, George MacDonald, etc. into the early 20th century.
And then you have, of course, the key, the inklings, um, which I believe Tolkien is probably the most important of all of them.
Um, but then you have other elements coming through from folklore and folktales as we're hearing a presentation on through the Gothic,
through the supernatural, through weird fiction, etcetera.
So by the time you get to our day and age, it's all bundled up.
And I think that's why when I was talking, I said, there may be a definition of fantasy,
but there are all these subgenres where it goes off and you're never entirely certain.
Is that what we might call weird literature, horror fiction, fantasy?
It's a mixture of all of them. And it also acts as a magnet.
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.
And I recently read a book which really appropriates the detective novel and sets it in a fantastical setting,
but it's still the sort of closed manor house snowed in,
and they're all trying to work out who the murderer is, albeit they've all got special powers and and so on.
So. Yeah I think.
Well, I'm reading the Fourth Wing at the moment, which, uh, just finishing it, which I enjoy.
Um, I think it's, it is romantic as they would define it or people would define it because there
is that sort of love story or forbidden romance going all the way through it.
Um, almost.
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.
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.
But it's it's developing into quite a good tale, I think.
And there are references that the writer will explore, no doubt, in the subsequent novel going and going later on.
Um, I very much enjoyed Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree,
which I thought was probably one of the best recent epic fantasies I've read.
Um, because I think it does sort of take you into all new areas.
And it does. It does. Sprawl is epic in the sense it's covered in multiple continents.
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.
So I found that very enjoyable. I believe Adam's onto something there.
Um, and, uh, I mentioned, uh, in conversation after the talk.
There's a, there's a very good website by Edward James which, uh,
lists science fiction and fantasy writers who saw combat more or less in the First World War across multiple nations.
So it's and that's led me to quite I've got quite interest in this,
and I've read a lot of the texts that came out or those writers were producing and
they'd they'd been involved some way in the armed services in the First World War.
Um, and I think he. Yes, I think he's right.
I think there is actually quite a lot of fantasy literature written in the 20s and 30s.
Adam was perhaps suggesting there was a bit of a lull. And then it appears in the 50s or 60s in particular.
Um, it's kind of under the surface and then it reappears.
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.
Um, so there was a lot of popular fiction that came out in the 1920s, um, which many people read short stories,
uh, more often than not, but some, some novels, particularly dystopian or utopian novels, primarily dystopian,
which I think were people who they'd gone through the trauma of the First World War,
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.
And they used fantastical settings to to demonstrate that.
The other thing, which comes out again and again in the in the 20s, are people who are fixated on death and the afterlife.
And you can understand, having gone through the slaughter of the First World War and seeing, you know,
the inconsequential nature of human life and just how quickly it can be obliterated on a scale which no one could have imagined.
That you do have a fixation on that. Um, we get it in the war.
We get it just after the war, with the rise in spiritualism and that attempt to bridge the gap between life and death.
But a lot of writers start to play around with that.
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.
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.
I think it's hard to be honest, just to say there is a distinction now.
Um, because technology is moving at such a pace.
What's what's there now on, on, you know, devices.
We probably would never have imagined 20, 30 years ago.
It was the stuff of, let's say, science fiction.
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,
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.
And so we just haven't got there yet.
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.
Um, so I think that would be the clear distinction.
Um, but it really overlaps. And again, I go back to my point about, well, did people did, for example,
Mary Shelley really believe that, you know, we could so together and reanimate a corpse?
No. So it's often been called fantasy, but now it's not possibly too far away in terms of technology and science.
And I was reading the other day about, um, a device a bit like, uh, Google's glasses, which can read your thoughts.
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.
Well, if it can transmit into another device and then the person can hear that we've just cracked telepathy,
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.
And these two characters can speak into each other's minds. So you you rapidly start to think, well, what is impossible now?
Um, so I guess those were the two distinctions when I, when I probably made that, uh, reference.
And I often talk about a Venn diagram, science fiction, horror, uh, fantasy.
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.
Um, uh, I think I was also saying that if you go into a bookshop, by way of example,
you can see a set of books and there will be something at the top.
Something is pushing whoever stacks the bookshelves or that bookshop to put those books under there.
Uh, and this, this seems to be the way the world is heading towards those,
those genres and categorisation of literary texts, and particularly on streaming platforms.
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.
It thinks it knows what a fantasy film is. So I was more, let's say,
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.
So I was very impressed with Bond West's, um, analysis of, uh, medievalism, because what it's all said to me,
which is something which I've always I've always tried to say, is that people in medieval times,
they were very different from us, but they were very similar to us.
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,
but they were using it for a point to make a serious point about something that was happening in their time.
Um, it could be some political or economical thing that was happening.
And if we go back to my talk, I was saying, well, why?
Why does the writer write this? Um, and very often, more often than not, it is.
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.
Uh, and I just thought that was wonderful.
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.
And I always like that. I always like that reminder that they were human beings.
They may have been several centuries ago, but they had exactly the same feelings as us.