2. Stepping back: in societies where everyone believes in magic, fantasy isn't a separate genre. It's just storytelling.
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3. The Odyssey when first recited wasn't fantasy, it was storytelling. Nor were Beowulf or the Divine Comedy "fantasies"
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4. Fantasy as a separate genre (let's call it fantastika) is actually a curious by-product of rise of realism in the 18th century and early 19th century.
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5. Once you had prose narratives that aspired to verisimilitude (Richardson, Austen, etc) then stories of goblins & witches became more than storytelling: they became a genre of their own: fantastika.
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6. Fantastika encompasses the broad range of non-realist or anti-realist storytelling rooted in romance: gothic fiction, horror, fairytales, detective novels, science fiction.
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7. Fantastika, as
@john_clute notes, rose not just in counter-distinction to realism but also in awareness (after French Revolution) that radical change was possible.Show this thread -
8. Bourgeois mimetic fiction is inherently conservative in that it emphasizes stability of world & limits to change. Fantastika based on hope or fear that world is unstable.
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The broader label of “speculative fic” has been applied to both to override the prevailing ghettoization of fantasy/ the notion of SF (especially hard Sf) as bein somehow inherently more “masculine”
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He made an exception for Le Guin but only once he found a way to justify her in his own “cognitive” terms
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It is true that fantastic fiction has been woefully undertheorized compared to SF, to the impoverishment of fantasy and theory alike.
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