WHAT IS FANTASY?

 

                                                      

According to Cambridge Dictionary, the word fantasy denotes a ‘pleasant situation that you enjoy thinking about, but is unlikely to happen.’ In the context of literature, it is a type of story that delineates situations, completely different from real life, often involving magic. Unlike science fiction, in fantasy, there is no attempt on the part of the author to rationalize the plausibly unrealistic setting and incidents happening in the story with pseudo scientific principles. E.M.Forster in his Aspects of the Novel brilliantly captures the essence of this particular literary genre. Fantasy is a work of fiction with its own distinctive features. For the sake of demonstration, Forster selects two masterpieces, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Apart from the story, human feelings, and sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot, in any form of fiction offers, Fantasy has to offer something more. Although, when a reader starts reading a work of fiction, he is well aware of the fact that the story is not real, but they expect it to be similar to real life. In the case of fantasy, the initial challenge for the author is to present the unrealistic and supernatural in a convincing manner. So, when the fantastic is introduced in the realm of the fictitious, the reader is ‘either thrilled or choked off’.

 The devices used for the formation of a fantasy are the introduction of God, angel, ghost, monster, witch, supernatural machinery, even mythological creatures in an imaginary world far from the ordinary, real life setting. With reference to the farcical, but adroitly written novel, Zuleika Dobson, a fantasy written by Max Beerbohm, Forster asserts that the story should be treated ‘with a mixture of realism, wittiness, charm and mythology, and the mythology is most important.’ Many fantasies were stylized as a parody or an adaptation, for example, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.

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