This page is for those who love, to write, not just to write but to write fantasy. You may ask yourself what exactly is fantasy.Fantasy
is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena
as a primary plot element, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take
place in imaginary worlds where magic and magical creatures are common. (Wikipedia).
Fantasy in the field of literary study is most popularised by Tzvetan Todorov, in his work of The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre in 1973. In this text Todorv defines that fantastic as "...that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event (p. 25)." he sets up a criteria of how to recognise the fantastic.
"The fantastic requires the fulfilment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work -- in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations."
"The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what hey perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. At the story'end, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous."
Genres of Fantastic
Todorov distinguishes the fantastic from two other genres, these are the uncanny, and the marvelous. The uncanny is often a logically presented story, with extraordinary, shocking, or unexpected events that can be explained by the laws of logic in the end. The uncanny however, the events that occur can only be explained by the acceptance of the supernatural. The marvelous is described as being the closest to fantastic as illustrated in the diagram below:
Todorov distinguishes the fantastic from two other genres, these are the uncanny, and the marvelous. The uncanny is often a logically presented story, with extraordinary, shocking, or unexpected events that can be explained by the laws of logic in the end. The uncanny however, the events that occur can only be explained by the acceptance of the supernatural. The marvelous is described as being the closest to fantastic as illustrated in the diagram below:
The line between the sub-genres fantastic-uncanny and fantastic marvelous represents the pure state of fantastic, as in the line between two realms. The fantastic-uncanny deals with events that appear to be supernatural to both the character in the story and the reader, yet have a natural explanation in the end, is in the character was having a dream, or they are mentally insane e.t.c
The other sub-genre of fantastic-marvelous deals with the narratives in which the character and the reader decide that there is no rational explanation to the events in the story, thus except the interference and existence of supernatural characters.
Then there is just ans uncanny exists in its purest form marvelouse also exists in its purest form. In these stories there is no outrage, or surprise within the character about the existence of the supernatural. Thus it is not the attitude towards the events that characterises the marvelouse, but the nature of the vents themselves.
In order to delimit the marvelous in the pure state, it is convenient to isolate it from several types of narrative in which the supernatural is somewhat justified.
1. We may speak first of all hyperbolic marvelous. In it, phenomena are supernatural only by virtue of their dimensions, which are superior to those that are familiar to us.2. Quite close to this first ttype of the marvelous is the exotic marvelous. In this type, supernatural events are reported without being presented as such. The implicit reader is supposed to be ignorant of the regions where the events take place, and consequently he has no reason for calling them into question.
3. A third type of the marvelous might be called the instrumental marvelous. Here we find the gadgets, technological developments unrealized in the period described but, after all, quite possible.4. The "instrumental marvelous" brings us very close to what in nineteenth-century France was called the scientific marvelous, which today we call science fiction. Here the supernatural is explained in a rational manner, but according to laws which contemporary science does not acknowledge.
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