{{oldpeerreview}} == My Two cents on Feautured Status == I strongly feel Harry Potter is more Contemporary fantasy then Comic fantasy. it does not parody any other book and does not reference it self in a postmodern way. It's much more Contemporary fantasy as it is a wizard world inside the 1990s in britan, not in an imaginary world. While it can be "funny" is more focused on plot and strong character development. ---- It appears to me as if little or no distinction is made between High Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery. I personally would say High Fantasy tends to be structured in more of epic proportions, with prophecies, legends and foretellings about powerful beings and what not driving the story, along with recurrent themes of good versus evil and the like. Sword and Sorcery seems to be chiefly concerned with adventure, swashbuckling, and more of a sort of interest in what is happening now, with no "big picture." These facts are somewhat alluded to in both subtopics, but not on the main page. Furthermore, I do not believe that this is featured article material. It appears to be more of a list of interrelated topics rather tenuously strung together in a single article. It is not a bad article, but itself does nto have alot of content, more being an expanded table of contents. --L.A.F. ----- I am a little concerned about this notion that fantasy was invented by Tolkien. There are many examples of stories which are clearly fantastic, which predate Tolkiens work. The Narnia chronicles are an obvious example. Beowulf from which Tolkien borrowed much of his stylism is another example which predates Tolkien by around a millenium. It is true that Tolkien is the source of many of the cliches of the current fantasy scene. The obligatory map, and worse still the glossary can I think be fairly attributed to Tolkien. ----- First I would say that yes, fantasy does predate Tolkien; however we are saying that it "came into its own" (became a separate genre) after Tolkien. Second, that Beowulf was part of the mythic tradition and not a fantasy. Third, that Narnia antedates, not predates The Hobbit. ---- I still think you are placing too much primacy on Tolkein. I am not sure how you are distinguishing "mythic tradition" and "fantasy". You are right about Narnia. Let me suggest the search for the Holy Grail instead, which definately predates Tolkein! ---- The 19th century was a hotbed of fantastic literature. Ignoring such patently popular and fantastical works as Bram Stoker's Dracula, there was a body of research conducted by people such as Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen, The Brothers Grimm etc. All of the foregoing were tremendously popular in their own right, and their work documents fantastic literatures which predate Tolkien by hundreds of years. I would therefore argue that to say that fantasy literature came into its own only on the publication of Tolkien's work is to ignore the reality surrounding fantasy literature. ---- I agree that it is not honest to attribute the invention of fantasy as a whole to Tolkien, but AFAIK he was the first to set his fantasy in a complete, independent fictitious world. And that's what makes his books different from "Dracula" or works of "mythic tradition", which play in our very world, though sometimes a few centuries in the past (I know that Tolkien conceived of Middle Earth to represent our earth in a distant past, but this is not comparable to, e.g., Beowulf, since this connection to our world is not immanent to Tolkien's tales but rather a piece of extra information given by him). Even Narnia is not comparable to Middle Earth (or rather Arda), since it is a "parallel universe" or a "dream world", and as such rather ancillary to "the real world". In Tolkien's works, there is no separate "real world", since Arda ''is'' "the real world". And I think this independence is what sets Tolkien off from the above-mentioned books. Tolkien may not have invented fantasy, but he liberated it. PS: Could we perhaps agree on the spelling "Tolk'''ie'''n"? The '''i''' precedes the '''e''', not the other way around! ---- Of course, the ''real'' founder of the fantasy genre was Homer. ''Ha! Homer was writing history, not fantasy.'' :''What's funny about the suggestion that he was writing fantastic stuff? The ancient Greeks had no notion of "fantasy" per se, but they had a rich mythology that is not based in reality. The Odyssey was probably looked at as a good yarn, not history.'' I'm thinking this page should be on fantasy fiction. "Fantasy" is also a topic in psychology, of course. --LMS ---- What do we do about the fact that while there may be a prevailing common distinction between Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, and there might also be a prevailing sense that each of those genres has a distinct set of signifiers associated with them, academic study in these fields do not necessarily agree with that common definition, and sometimes don't even agree with each other? Which is the encyclopedic--the common or the academic (perhaps plural academic) idea? Some literary scholars, for example, is a proponent of the idea that Speculative Fiction might be a better term, and that all of it can be related to Freud's notion of the Fantastic or Uncanny. That is, the Fantastic is to find the unfamiliar in a familiar setting. In which case, "fantasy" fiction of the type proposed by Tolkien, which is wholly outside of the familiar, might be better defined as Pastoral. But in a way, the study of literature is about categorizing in the sense that botanist might see it. This isn't empirical stuff we are dealing with. Rather these terms, which have been abused by advertisers as "categories" for sales tracking purposes, are more descriptive modifiers that give us a frame work for discussion. This is frequently why humanities academics are misunderstood on the point of categories. When someone says, "I am reading Tolkien in a Freudian way" they don't mean that Tolkien's work IS Freudian. More they are using Freud and Tolkien in combination to discuss something else, something ephemeral, about the human condition, which can only be seen when those two ideas are brought together. Or, at least, that is what the good academics do. I am not here to defend stupid people who say stupid things in the name of Academia, but to point out that what is viewed from the outside as very static and empirical really isn't. Dracula IS a fantasy Novel in the sense that Freud and Rabkin mean. But it is a Horror novel in the popular sense. And ultimately, from a political point of view, it is very Marxist. So where does it go? This is all, of course, IMHO. --trimalchio ----- While I'm not certain, I believe that the claim Tolkien created the first "stand-alone" fantasy world may be wrong. E.R. Eddison's first books pre-date ''The Hobbit'' by a couple of years, and I think they have no connection to the Earth. The world in James Branch Cabell's ''Something About Eve'' also occurs to me. Cabell's Poictesme books are connected to Earth -- Poictesme is supposed to be in southern France -- but I believe the world in this book is self-contained. -- Paul Drye ---- Lord Dunsany created "secondary world" fantasy fiction in the early 1900's. --- Dunsany created his own mythology in a narrative form before Tolkien put down the roots and seeds that would become the Silmarilian. Tolkien intended a modern English mythology, but clearly he used existing traditions. As a storyteller first of all, in the epic and fantastic mode, how much does Tolkien's cultural artifact differ from Homer's? Before Dunsany there were the penny dreadfuls such as Amadis of Gaul, and concurrent with these and pre-dating them there is oral folklore, which Homer drew from. Perhaps there is no first and original when it comes to story - perhaps it exists in a place removed from time, with ancient urges returning to manifest in the present, and present fabulations rooting down into the darkness of the collective mind. --- Tolkien's world is supposedly our own, sort of, as seen in a different stage of imagination, an imaginary past of our own world. Imagine going back in time to the time of the Trojan War, but to the Greece of the myhological texts, not the historical Greece, to a flat world where the Sun is a god in a chariot and Mount Olympos actually reaches to the sky. Is that our world or not? From the introduction to ''The Lord of the Rings'':
Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed; but the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger: the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea.
Maps, of course, appeared in the Oz books and a map appears in Austin Tappen Wright's ''Islandia'', a novel about an imaginary island nation in our world, published in 1942. The novel was created after Wright's death from Wright's far more detailed material including an Islandian language he had created. Most of this original material is now lost. --jallan --- I find it disturbing that none of the listed sub-genres cover 'real world people transported to fantasy worlds' stories. For a page on Fantasy not only to not mention Oz, Narnia, Never-never_Land or Glory_Road at all seems a bit odd. For none of the subgenreas thus linked ALSO to not mention any of the, is straight up erroneous. BTW all that arguing above as to whether Tolkien established Fantasy -- no, he merly established High Fantasy. Swords & Sorcery was firmly entrenched by the time The Hobbit was released, and people had been cheering Conan and Bran Mak Morn on their adventures long before they caught their breath over Bilbo's, Frodo's and Aragorn's adventures. --- I've plonked Narnia down in High Fantasy for the moment. I don't think it quite belongs there, but it wasn't listed, and none of the other categories are any more suitable. The other most suitable places are contemporary fantasy and mythic fantasy, but as you can see, they're not quite right for it either. Maybe there should be a new category, something to do with "alternate worlds" fantasy. After all, there are three separate worlds and a portal that are visited in the Narnia books, all containing differing qualities and degrees of civilisation and magic and species. == History section == Apart from any specific changes made to the article, I'm a little concerned that a series of edits vastly expanding the history of the fantasy genre were marked as minor. The minor label should only be used for edits that do not affect the substance or content of the article and are unlikely to be of interest to editors who are concerned with the article's contents. An edit that lumps the Book of Genesis into the same genre of fiction as the Lord of the Rings or the Eye of Argon seems to me quite clearly not to meet this standard. Perhaps Help:Minor_edit would be of interest. Moving on to the specific edits: I think the distinction needs to be made clearer between the modern genre of fantasy and the corpus of ancient and mediaeval mythology and folklore that many fantasists claim as its antecedent. The article itself defines fantasy as "featur[ing] some difference from Earth that is not a result of science or technology", and I would contend that many of the works cited as "fantasy" don't contain ''any'' difference from the world in which they were written, as far as their authors and those authors' audiences were concerned. I notice looking back at previous discussion on this page that someone has asserted that the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed the Odyssey as "a good yarn" (and therefore fiction, not history). I'd challenge anyone who wants to label the Odyssey as fantasy to come up with a citation for this view, as it seems to me to be as inaccurate as the notion that they saw the Odyssey as hard, factual history. The distinction between fact and fiction, between scientifically possible and scientifically impossible, that seems so clear to us today was not nearly so apparent to the people who wrote and read (or composed and listened to) many of the works listed here, and therefore by the article's own definition of fantasy, they cannot be considered fantasy. I also think it's particularly unfortunate to include the history of the world as contained in the sacred text of the world's largest religion in a list of ancient "fantasy" works. Whether any one of us personally believes that history, or whether modern science tells us that the events described in that history are physically impossible, is immaterial. I'm going to do a quick edit on the history section now. This edit will leave the information already there wholly intact and limit itself to *drawing a distinction between modern fantasy and fantasy's antecedents, *correcting slight factual errors (Beowulf is not a Classical work) *and making the references to Genesis less clumsy (one of the links actually leads to a Hemingway novel). I look forward to hearing what everyone else has to say on this topic. Binabik80 19:20, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC) :I agree with all of your points. I'm the one who made those edits you object to, and I made them too hastily upon reflection. :Basically, ancient works such as the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', ''The Odyssey'', or ''Beowulf'' are discussed as "earlier" forms of fantasy very often, but only for the sake of discussing the genre's origins and development. This fact was not made clear enough. From a few internet searches, the impression I get is that even those who classify these works as fantasy for such purposes would likely not agree with doing so elsewhere. Yet, for some reason people seem to find it useful to discuss ''Beowulf'' or ''The Divine Comedy'' as though they were seminal works of the fantasy genre at least while discussing the roots of the genre itself, which I think is worthwhile to uphold within the article (as long as we make the distinction very clear between those works that are actually part of the modern genre and those which only become "honorary" works of fantasy when speaking of the genre's history). Let's also not forget those ''Lord of the Rings'' fans who think that Tolkien's work is every bit the equal of Dante's or Homer's, and actually ''would'' have them all lumped together. :Also, should ''Star Wars'' be listed on this page as an important work of fantasy? Some place it in the science-fantasy genre/subgenre, but I've seen many people claim it was straight fantasy, and reject the whole concept of "science-fantasy". --Corvun 21:33, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::I see there's already an article on science fantasy (that's not quite a stub, but certainly wouldn't suffer from being fleshed out a little); it's probably a sufficiently important subgenre to mention in the introduction as well as adding to the list of subgenres. Maybe something to this effect: :::''Fantasy and Science_fiction jointly share the subgenre called Science_fantasy, which has many of the trappings of science fiction, such as space travel and laser guns, but also contains significant elements that bear more resemblance to magic than science or in some other way draw more from fantasy than from science fiction. The best known example of science fantasy is the Star_Wars series of films and its spinoffs, set aboard spaceships and on alien planets but featuring swashbuckling knights, princesses in distress, a dark sorceror who has enslaved the galaxy, a mystical source of magical power called the Force, and even an opening line that is a variant of "Once upon a time", "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".'' ::With something like this included, I think Star Wars makes a good addition to list of modern fantasy works, since it's reached a far wider audience than any other fantasy work (I guess possibly excepting the Lord of the Rings, but I doubt it). ::I like what you've been doing with the history section, btw. It's now a much more in-depth and cogent treatment than the article has been able to boast previously.Binabik80 23:52, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC) :::Thanks, I'm glad to see that something I started off as such a mess is actually shaping up into something people might find useful. :::Question: I think Gulliver's_Travels deserves a mention here, being notable due to its popularity and the fact that it can probably very accurately be called an early work of Comic_fantasy. Would you agree? And if so, where do you think it should be placed? --Corvun 02:12, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::::I'd suggest putting it at the beginning of early modern fantasy, introduced by something like, "What we can consider modern fantasy appeared with the dawn of the novel at the beginning of the eighteenth century."Binabik80 15:05, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Apparent vandalism?== User:68.115.110.215 went through the history of fantasy section and removed any references to Christianity for no reason I can discern. In light of the facts that the edits were made anonymously and the editor chose not to offer any explanation in the edit summary or here, I'm going to consider this vandalism and revert it. In light of the fact that these are the only two edits ever made from this ISP, I'm willing to give this user the benefit of the doubt & assume they don't how to present their edits. If they want to discuss their edits, I look forward to them being brought up for discussion here.Binabik80 23:11, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC) Addendum: I think it also bears noting that the paragraph about Beowulf becomes pretty nonsensical without the sentence that User:68.115.110.215 removed, and there's nothing in there that I think can be remotely construed as offensive to Christians '''or''' pagans. :I've included a paragraph directly adressing the Book of Genesis, hoping to better explain its relevance to the subject of fantasy, explaining that the intent was not to imply that the stories are "just fiction", an implication to which some Christians, Muslems, and Jews might object. :I also look forward to hearing why the sentence concerning Beowulf was removed. I'm hoping it wasn't simply because the editor found the mention of Christianity and Paganism in the same sentence to be alarming. I'm not going to presume this was the case, but there ''are'' those sorts of people out there. --Corvun 00:18, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC) Why in the history section Robert E. Howard is not mentioned at all, while, whatever one's opionions on Conan may be, he was one of the first 1900s fantasy writers? :You've got a good point. I think Lovecraft probably deserves a mention as well. The problem is there's so many folks who made such incredible contributions to fantasy. That's why the "history" section was spun-off into its own page. Obviously we need to fill some of the history section that was left here back in. I'll be on it tomorrow if not today. --Corvun 20:22, 13 September 2005 (UTC) == Classical "fantasy" == I've been looking around the Theoi Project, and it looks like there were at least a few ancient Greek authors that expressed open disbelief in a lot of the fantastical creatures that featured in Greek mythology. It is also said that some of the Greek philosophers expressed doubts concerning the literal truthfulness of ancient Greek religion. So while at least some (probably a majority) of ancient Greeks held actual belief in the fantastic, there were others that saw the factual accuracy (if any) of the stories to be secondary to, or at least separate from, the value of the stories themselves. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, which is why I brought this to the talk page first, but it seems to be that this ''willing suspension of disbelief'' in the fantastic (as opposed to actual belief) is important to the history of fantasy. Thoughts? Remarks? --Corvun 12:01, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC) :I think it would make a good inclusion. It reminds me a little of when people began questioning the literal truth of the Old Testament (though without much of the same baggage of a fundamentalist tradition). This is very interesting. Binabik80 16:28, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC) == Fairytale fantasy == I removed fairytale fantasy from the list of subgenres. Here's what I took out: :==== Fairytale fantasy ==== :''Main article:'' Fairytale_fantasy :Adult literature in this subgenre is often violent and overlaps with ''Mythic fantasy'', or sexual and overlaps with ''Romantic'' or ''Erotic fantasy''. Children's literature in this subgenre tends to avoid the darker or more sexual tones previously common in traditional fairytales, instead concentrating on the more kid-friendly variety of fairy story. :* To_be_written: examples of Fairytale fantasy I removed because it had neither examples, nor a main article, & I think the list of subgenres is looking a little long at the moment (I'll be back here after I've finished my copyedit of the article to talk a little more about that). I have no objection to a reinsertion of the text once either Fairytale_fantasy has been written (as long as it's something more than just restating the above paragraph) or someone wants to come up with 2-3 examples of the subgenre. Binabik80 04:03, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC) == Do we have a featured article here? == I think this article might be ready to have a go at featured article status. I've gone through & given it a full copyedit; the table of contents in particular worried me, as I felt the list of subgenres looked a little intimidating (especially since it was just a long straight line of subtopics, rather than a tree), but I eliminated 3 or 4 that didn't have anything in them & now I think it looks better. Before the article goes to peer review, though, I wonder if it might not benefit from some citations. It references a tremendous body of fantasy literature but doesn't cite any non-fiction sources. I'm thinking here particularly of the history section. To a large degree, the history of the antecedents of genre fantasy comprises collating a number of significant works from Western literature and simply placing them in the perspective of the modern genre. These earlier works & literary periods already have articles on themselves, so the lack of specific, comprehensive sources needn't necessarily be a dealbreaker. But if anyone has any works on the theory or history of fantasy, they wouldn't go amiss. Binabik80 04:44, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC) :Having heard no pushback, I'm going to go ahead and list the article for peer review. ::Hi. Sorry I've been absent for so long. I wasn't able to have consistent access to the internet for quite some time and I've only recently been able to get back into the swing of things. ::Personally, I think we should try to expand the article as much as we can, periodically moving sections to their own pages and summarizing the main page whilst working toward building up a fantasy series. I think the ''history'' and ''sub-genre'' sections are almost complete enough to be spun off into their own articles. Next on the agenda would be creating a template for every page in the series. Perhaps a side-table, like the one on the Anarchism pages. ::Of course, getting more thorough scholarly references and citations would be an integral part of this process. ::What do you think? --Corvun 07:56, July 25, 2005 (UTC) == Summary needed == I've copied the "History of fantasy" section to its own page. The version that remains here needs to be summarized and have (most of?) the images removed. Anyone feeling up to it? --Corvun 05:24, August 6, 2005 (UTC) Also a summary for the '''fantasy film''' and '''fantasy art''' sections --Corvun 05:46, August 6, 2005 (UTC) == Streamlining == Okay, now that many of the subjects dealt with on this page have their own articles, I went ahead and trimmed off some of the redundant information that was left here. Though, I think I may have streamlined it a bit too much, we can always re-add information where needed, or write new stuff from scratch, if we want to fill the article back in a bit. I think it would be nice, eventually, to have new images on the page. While anything representing the state of the art would probably be protected by copyright, we can always go around asking permission. Also, we should probably re-add one of the images from the old history section to the new history section. Any nominations for which image to bring back? --Corvun 11:23, August 18, 2005 (UTC) == New material on the relation to science fiction and science fantasy == This article did not reflect the significant advances in SF critical theory made since the mid-1990s. These advances (which I have tried to capture in a major rewrite of the Science_fiction Scope section) have implications for the discussion of fantasy. I have added two paragraphs to the introduction that call out technology-of-magic and science fantasy as boundary subgenres that clarify the relationship between fantasy and SF. Esr 07:39, 6 December 2005 (UTC) :As with the other articles you have rewritten in a single day, I have reverted this one for the same reasons. It's very nice that you just got your degree in Literature and are ready to take on the Literary world, but you'll have to run it by us first. KennyLucius 17:21, 6 December 2005 (UTC) Kenny, who is "us", and what gives you the right to dismiss my work as "vandalism"? Esr 18:42, 6 December 2005 (UTC) :Presumably, my right came from the same place as your right to dismiss the existing articles. Please don't try and make this into a personal thing. You are disposing of the work of many people, and dismissing the views of everyone who came to a consensus on the nature of speculative fiction and its subgenres. You can't do that overnight. Try to think of it as educating all of us, rather than correcting a faulty document. Open a dialog. :My suggestion is that you put your article on your own user page with a section for comments. Give it a week, since most contributors don't do this full-time. I will then give you a full accounting of my apprehension. Please, also, cite your source so that I will know who I am criticising. KennyLucius 19:14, 6 December 2005 (UTC)