Fantasy defined.

How has fantasy as a genre been defined?

Five formative definitions in Attebery (1980).

When we started this topic of fantasy I initially thought that it would be a foreign topic to me as I wasn’t at all familiar with “Earthsea” or any concepts of the fantasy genre. However the more I looked into this question and started to reflect on my creativity I soon started to realize that the world of fantasy is not uncommon at all, in fact as early as children we engage with this genre through fairytales and make believe play. In real simple terms you could define fantasy as imagination, especially extravagant and unrestrained. Irwin says (as cited in Attebery, 1980, p. 3) “What ever the material, extravagant or seemingly commonplace, a narrative is a fantasy if it represents the persuasive establishment and development of an impossibility, an arbitrary construct of the mind with all under the control of logic and rhetoric.” There is definitely a sense of uncontrolled and abandoned thought to fantasy writing, it invites you into a new world we logic and sanity as we know is redefined.  Attebery (1980, p. 3) continues to say “Any narrative which includes a significant part of its make-up some violation of what the author clearly believes to be natural law – that is fantasy.”

I like how Attebery (1980, p. 3) describes Fantasy being like a game, which requires its players to take on a new belief in order to play, he say’s “Fantasy is a game of sorts, and it demands that one plays whole-heartedly, accepting for the moment all rues and turns of the game.” Attebery explains if we can surrender our rational minds in this new game then we will find a sense of “beauty and strangeness, a quality the C. N. Manlove, among others, calls wonder.”    

Fantasy not only breaches what is possible in our natural mind but it can also do what Rabkin (as cited in Attebery, 1980, p. 4) says “contradict, not our accepted model of the world, but rather the model generated within the story itself.” He goes on to explain that Alice in Wonderland is a clear of example of this, and in reflection we can concur that this story departs from the conventional rules of the real world, Alice plunges into a deep sleep her dream creates a fully formed world that constantly shifts and transforms with its own unique logic.  

It is interesting to note that even though fantasy in definition is the obstruction of natural law and reality, a new fantasy construct in itself has its own laws, Attebery (1980, p. 7)) sites MacDonald saying “His view of fairy tale form approached that of a modern structuralist: It can not help but have some meaning; if it have proportion and harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth.” This suggest that even amongst the creativity of imagination, the new world may seem more plausible or enjoyable if the rules or laws it exist by are consistent and dependable.   

References

• ·      W. R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1976, P.4. 
• ·      Attebery, B. (1980). The fantasy tradition in American literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• ·      http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fantasy?s=t
• ·      http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/alice/section1.rhtml