How does Attebery (1980) define fantasy?
Attebery (1980) claims that fantasy is any narrative which includes as a significant part of its make-up violation of what the author clearly believes to be natural law. There are various ways a story can proclaim its fantastic nature.
Attebery (1980) claims that fantasy is any narrative which includes as a significant part of its make-up violation of what the author clearly believes to be natural law. There are various ways a story can proclaim its fantastic nature.
He relates
fantasy with some other stories written by other authors including: Tolkien The
Lord of the Rings, Lewis’ Narnia and Perelandra books, The Wind in the Willows,
the Alice books, The Princess and the Goblin and all of George Macdonald’s
other magical stories, some of Saki’s tales, Titus Groane and its successors,
E. Nesbit’s magic adventures, E. R. Eddison’s private epics, and Lord Dunsany’s
wonder stories. (Attebery, 1980)
However, Attebery (1980) cited Irwin
(1976), where Irwin pointed out that the primary feature that makes a work
unable to be fantasy is “an overt violation of what is generally accepted as
possibility”.
Attebery (1980) also pointed out
that fantasy treats all the impossibilities (two people painlessly exchanging
heads, a tree reaching out to grab passers-by) without hesitation, without
doubt, without any attempt to reconcile them with our intellectual understanding
of the workings of the world or to make us believe that such things could under
any circumstances come true.
Fantasy needs consistency. Reader
and writer are committed to maintain the illusion for the entire course of the
fiction. And Tolkien refers this as “secondary belief” (Attebery, 1980)
Reference list:
Attebery, B. (1980). The
fantasy tradition in American literature: From Irving to Le Guin.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Irwin, W. R.
(1976). The Game of Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Urbana,
Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Ok Cing Cing, you have found good definitions and cited them accurately. However, there is no reference to the primary text. Does Earthsea fit into any of these definitions? Or all of them? Sadly, this blog post is only 226-words long. It needed to be between 300-400 words.
ReplyDeletehi brendan, can i make amendment to it?
DeleteHi Cing Cing,
ReplyDeleteI like "Fantasy needs consistency". That sums it up for me. The reader/viewer needs to believe in the story line even though they might recognise the impossibility of it all. They simply enjoy the journey, the story-teller takes them on.