Folklore and Fantastic Literature

Abstract

I At first blush,joining a term like which has its roots deep in traditions traceable back through generations, with terms like and fiction, which seem to have less to do with past than with alternate realities or projected futures, may seem like a juxtaposition dubious value. Folk materials, it seems, are something we recognize quickly in nineteenth-century writers like Cooper, Melville, or Hawthorne, or something we use to decode writers from longer ago and farther away-Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Gawain poet, for example. But this latter use folklore, to help decode literatures remote past and therefore substantially removed from world in which we now live, a key to that juxtaposition: writer fantastic literature, creator worlds, has need and uses folklore to make those imagined words accessible to reader in much same way, if obverse, as modern critic might use a knowledge folk materials to gain access to meanings) behind Shakespeare's depictions heroic deaths in Macbeth, Chaucer's use color red in reference to Wife Bath's stockings, or Gawain poet's attention to hunting lore. In short, and science fiction authors use traditional materials, from individual motifs to entire folk narratives, to allow their readers to recognize, in elemental and perhaps subconscious ways, and cultural depth worlds these authors have created. word appears in many leading critical definitions fantastic literature. C.S. Lewis, in Experiment in Criticism (1965), defines as narrative that deals with impossibles or preternaturals (50). In Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975), Colin Manlove argues that a substantial and irreducible element or worlds, beings, or essential to fantastic literature; and he defines supernatural or impossible as of another order from that in which we exist and form our notions possibility (3). In Fantastic in Literature (1976), Eric Rabkin argues that polar opposite (15). And in Problems Fantasy (1978), S.C. Fredericks calls the literature impossible (37). These critical exercises, which took place in 1960s and 1970s, as fantastic literature was experiencing an enormous increase in popularity, led Gary Wolfe, in The Encounter with Fantasy (1982), to assert that criterion ... may be first principle generally agreed upon for study fantasy (1-2). Although foregoing definitions have appeared to set fantastic literature in opposition to realistic literature, critic Kathryn Hume suggests that we should see real and as separate ends a continuum that includes all fiction. She argues that literature product two impulses. These are mimesis, felt as desire to imitate, to describe events, people, and objects with such verisimilitude that others can share your experience; and fantasy, desire to change givens and alter reality-out boredom, play, vision, longing for something lacking, or need for metaphoric images that will bypass audience's verbal defenses (20). And fantasy, Hume continues, is any departure from consensus reality (21, italics in original). All literature is, then, part mimetic and part fantastic, with realistic fiction toward one end spectrum and fantastic fiction toward other. creation a fantastic world not just a matter introducing people or things into an otherwise realistic world, blending mimetic and fantastic-although that basically strategy much horror fiction. Science fiction and require author to create a world that makes sense in and itself. J.R.R. Tolkien may have been first to articulate principle Secondary World. …