The Fantasy Story
Today I’d like to tell you about fantasy literature. It is very hard to tell all about it but I’ll try to do it as good as possible and not being boring. First fantasy motifs were shown in romanticism. We all know the mystical and unreal characters: ghosts, phantoms etc. Authors for building the special mood and charm of that epoch used that figures.
But fantasy is something more than romantic ways of showing nature or inner experiences of the main character in the novel. It’s also not an attempt of explaining the unreal and difficult to understand visions or event. In the course of time it began to live it’s own life more and more the writers started to use these motifs. And what had happened? They created fairy-tales completely different from the basic kinds of literature, they invented fantasy. So how did it all start? Well, there are lots of ideas about that. I’m the one who agrees with theory that the very beginning was “Alice in Wonderland” written by Lewis Carroll in 1865. We may laugh that it is on the same bookshelf as “Winnie the Pooh” or “Peter Pan” and many more. It’s a fact that these works were written for children but they had this thing, some kind of new idea, concept that distinguished them, made it different from many others. That is the origin of fantasy literature. Now I would like to focus on the definition of this sort. Being honest, there is a problem cause there is really no good definition. There are many of them, but each other denies another. One way of solving this is creating many under kinds of fantasy which wonderfully started to suit the novels, e.g.:”Lord of the Rings” became epic fantasy, “Conan” by Robert E. Howard was heroic fantasy and so on. But this is not a good, objective way. My favourite definition is one made by Andrzej Sapkowski. He said: ”Fantasy is all that have a sign with caption ‘Fantasy’. If on the
But fantasy is something more than romantic ways of showing nature or inner experiences of the main character in the novel. It’s also not an attempt of explaining the unreal and difficult to understand visions or event. In the course of time it began to live it’s own life more and more the writers started to use these motifs. And what had happened? They created fairy-tales completely different from the basic kinds of literature, they invented fantasy. So how did it all start? Well, there are lots of ideas about that. I’m the one who agrees with theory that the very beginning was “Alice in Wonderland” written by Lewis Carroll in 1865. We may laugh that it is on the same bookshelf as “Winnie the Pooh” or “Peter Pan” and many more. It’s a fact that these works were written for children but they had this thing, some kind of new idea, concept that distinguished them, made it different from many others. That is the origin of fantasy literature. Now I would like to focus on the definition of this sort. Being honest, there is a problem cause there is really no good definition. There are many of them, but each other denies another. One way of solving this is creating many under kinds of fantasy which wonderfully started to suit the novels, e.g.:”Lord of the Rings” became epic fantasy, “Conan” by Robert E. Howard was heroic fantasy and so on. But this is not a good, objective way. My favourite definition is one made by Andrzej Sapkowski. He said: ”Fantasy is all that have a sign with caption ‘Fantasy’. If on the