Abstract
There are good reasons to call London the capital of urban fantasy. Like no other city it embodies an intertwinedness of enlightenment and modernity with notions of the occult, the mythical and the magical. The idea of an urban underworld that somehow is the dark mirror of the city is central for the depiction of a fantastic London. I will look into three examples of urban fantasy: Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere (1996), China Mieville’s story Reports of Certain Events in London (2004), and Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (1985) that portray London as a liminal space and a gothic heterotopia.
Highlights
There are good reasons to call London the capital of urban fantasy
I will look into three examples of urban fantasy: Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere (1996), China Miéville’s story «Reports of Certain Events in London» (2004), and Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (1985) that portray London as a liminal space and a gothic heterotopia
Urban fantasy is a hybrid of different traditions and styles, in which a modern and civilized high-tech world —essentially marked as our world, the «Primary World», is combined with fantastic characters or another fantastic world
Summary
The beginning of the fantasy genre can not be pinpointed. At the very least, modern fantasy —like all genres— can be understood as the history of accumulated figures, motifs, tropes and narrative procedures. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), is characterized in short by the themes of the heroic journey (Campbell, 2008) and epic war (Meteling, 2016) It is about the establishment of an orderly, coherent and closed world, a «Secondary World» (Tolkien, 2006: 140), usually decorated with mediaeval trappings. These children’s bodies transform— further distancing them from human’s civilized society They develop pointy ears, becoming elf-like or resembling some depictions of Peter Pan. According to Michael Moorcock (1978), fantasy literature can be divided into two traditions: on the one hand there is the romantic, antimodern and apolitical fantasy, represented by the likes of C. It is often the case that these worlds or planes occupy the same space so that the fantastic is less a question of place but rather one of perception or state of consciousness
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