Week 3 - Fantasy :)

Hey everyone, here is my entry for this week!!!. First question of my post is: How has fantasy as a genre been defined? Find at least five formative definitions in Attebery (1980)

1) " Any narrative which includes a significant part of it's make up is some violation of what the author clearly believes to be natural law - that is fantasy

2) "Perhaps the most satisfying way would be to line up a shelf of books and say, there. That is what i mean by fantasy."

3) "an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility."

4) "Whatever the material, extravagant or seemingly commonplace, a narrative is a fantasy if it presents the persuasive establishment and development of an impossibility".

5) Tolkien states: "founded upon the hard recognition that things are so on the world as it appears under the sun, on a recognition of fact but not a slavery to it".

Just another two i found that maybe suitable!;

6) "Fantasy, though needs consistency, reader and writer are committed to maintaining the illusion for the entire course of fiction."

7) "Fantasy is a game of sort, and it demands that one play whole - heartedly, accepting for the moment all rules and turns of the game"

So Attebery defines fantasy to how i see fantasy. I personally think that a fantasy is a place that you can go to and it allows your imagination to run wild!, you can imagine anything from low fantasy like having a parallel world and to high fantasy a world that's completed with maps etc. Fantasy is always around us from when we are young to old!, it is introduced to us right from the get go. Everyone can enjoy fantasy's, so it is easy to say that fantasy is a popular genre!.

My next question I have chosen is; What are some archetypes ( eg. common character types) of fantasy fiction?

Tax (2002) States that "there are specific types of women in the fantasy genre; absent beloved, evil witch, damsel in distress and girl warrior"

Things like wizards, goblins, dragons, wise old man, superhero and so on.......

My personal opinion on character types are as follows: heroic males, witches, princesses, princes, the bad guy, superhero's etc, these archetypes are what makes a fantasy what it is, without these archetypes there wouldn't be fantasy it would be like book with the normal human being's with the guy and the girl whereas superhero's are what make it interesting and what allows the reader to escape that's why it's called a fantasy.

REFERENCE PAGE

Attebery, B. (1980). Locating fantasy. In The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guinn. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1980.

Tax, M. (Jan 28, 2002). In the Year of Harry Potter, Enter the Dragon. In the Nation