EUCATASTROPHE. A term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in his seminal essay “On Fairy-stories,” where it is opposed to Tragedy in an argument asserting that the uplifting effect of fairy tales is a vital aspect of their social and psychological function. It refers to the final “turn” of a story that gives rise to “a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story.”
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The term has become a significant element of the genre’s critical discourse in spite of its rather awkward coinage (“good disaster” is suspiciously oxymoronic) and the fact that it adds little to the commonplace notion of a “happy ending.”
EXISTENTIALIST FANTASY. The philosophical tradition of existentialism, founded by Søren Kierkegaard and carried forward by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, attempts to define and evaluate the fundamental conditions of human identity and agency. The project arguably began in literary works, and it has remained closely associated with literary exemplification, particularly with endeavors in psychological fantasy that tend toward contes philosophiques.
Heidegger’s assertion that the most fundamental aspect of the human condition is angst resulting from awareness of death can easily be extrapolated into a partial explanation of some of the classic themes of fantasy, including wish-fulfillment fantasies of immortality and various forms of afterlife, the personalization of Death, and the compensatory construction of secondary worlds. John Clute’s suggestion that bondage is central to the development of fantasy literature argues that testing the limits and exploring the perversities of “free will” has always been an important spur to literary fantasization and that the most important function of children’s fantasy may be the construction of parables of maturation mapping the route from childhood to adulthood in terms of the acquisition of personal responsibility and Sartrean “authenticity.” Notable existentialist fantasies include Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and Richard Grant’s Kaspian Lost.
Some animal fantasies are thought experiments in exotic existentialism, and many fantasies dealing with ghosts, vampires, and other traditional paraphernalia of horror fiction are experiments of a similar kind. Raymond Briggs’s parodic Fungus the Bogeyman takes this kind of “adversarial existentialism” to a ludicrous extreme.
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FABLE. A short prose fiction formulated to express and exemplify a useful truth or moral precept, often employing animals as representations of human character traits. The term is closely related to the French fabliau, which usually relates to items of vulgar and cynical narrative verse. The
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fables credited to Aesop are among the earliest recorded prose fantasies, although they were first written down—and perhaps composed—much
later than the sixth century BC in which Aesop supposedly lived. Other early examples include those attributed to Pilpay, first recorded in Sanskrit. Translation into Arabic in the eighth century assisted the further-ance of a native tradition; they were first translated into English in 1570.
The 17th-century French writer Jean de la Fontaine produced new versions of Aesop’s and Pilpay’s fables and also composed many others, mostly in verse, in collections published between 1668 and 1694. His example was followed by many 18th-century writers, including the
Britons John Gay and Robert Dodsley. The subgenre was introduced
into children’s literature at an early stage, the first British collection thus adapted being William Godwin’s Fables Ancient and Modern
(1805). The fable attracted academic study and criticism from folklorists, in such works as Thomas Newbigging’s Fables and Fabulists, Ancient and Modern (1895). Notable 20th-century fabulists include T.
F. Powys, Italo Calvino, James Thurber, and Jacquetta Hawkes in Fables (1953).
FABULATION. In common parlance, any fanciful composition is de-scribable as a fabulation, but in the critical lexicon the term’s use usually follows the meaning attached to it by Robert Scholes in The Fabulators (1967; revised as Fabulation and Metafiction, 1979). Scholes defines it as “ethically constrained fantasy” or “didactic romance,”
distinguishing it from “pure romance” by virtue of its acute con-
sciousness of its own artifice. The distinction alleviates the need for the kind of “willing suspension of disbelief” suggested by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; readers of fabulations never commit any kind of belief to the narratives they read, reveling instead in their manifest artificiality.
As Scholes observed, the narrative techniques of fabulation made a spectacular comeback in late 20th-century American literature, which seemed remarkable partly because early 20th-century Anglo-American literature had purged itself of fabulation to a far greater extent than most European traditions (or their Latin American extensions), thus giving such work an appearance of novelty. Theorists hastened to explain the renaissance of American fabulation in terms of a postmodern phase in which fiction could no longer legitimately pretend to be “about” the world and must therefore be concerned with the metafictional
processes of its own making.
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Although many critics would condemn commodified fantasy in its entirety to the realms of “pure romance,” thus reserving “fabulation” to work produced by more prestigious literateurs, there was always a
strong element of fabulation in the kinds of fantasy produced for pulp magazines and for the consumption of children. It is arguable that all fantasy fiction is fabulation and that what delineates fantasy fiction from myth making, legend mongering, allegedly divine revelation, and other forms of constructive delusion is precisely the shared awareness that it is fantasy. Notable practitioners of fabulation include Slavomir Mrozek, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, R. A. Lafferty, Angela Carter, Rikki Ducornet, Harlan Ellison, Kelly Link, Alasdair Gray, and Steven Millhauser. Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists (2002), a special issue of the journal guest-edited by Peter Straub, is a showcase anthology.
FAERIE. An Old French term signifying enchantment by supernatural beings living more or less invisibly in close proximity with humankind—and, by extension, the parallel world that those beings inhabit. The beings themselves thus became the faery or fairy folk, whose nature and variety depended on idiosyncratic local tradition. In modern fantasy fiction, Faerie is usually used to refer to the world of Faerie, the primary model for all secondary worlds; writers for adults generally prefer the name to the rather childish “Fairyland,” although
“Elfland” retains sufficient gravitas to maintain rivalry. The vagueness of Faerie’s boundaries—often involving its separation by portals—
reflects the common assumption that a magic spell is required to facilitate its perception and that once it has been perceived another will be required to restore perception of the primary world, often at some cost in terms of time.
Although Faerie is the backcloth of all fairy tales, it has a special significance in literary accounts that suggest that it is moving further away or that its connections with the primary world are being severed—the cardinal example of thinning. The notion that Britain’s Faerie had suffered such a severance—evoked by Walter Besant in “Titania’s Farewell” and Andrew Lang in That Very Mab—paved the way for heroic expeditions thereto in stories pleading for re-enchantment after World War I, including Gerald Bullett’s Mr Godly Beside Himself, Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist. The latter two conserve a sense of Faerie as an Arcadian realm, and it is often employed as such. Subsequent accounts of
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Faerie often maintain this sense of exilic severance, whose counterpart is found in numerous American fantasies in which an immigrant Faerie seems ill fitted to its new location, as in Raymond E. Feist’s Faerie Tale, Rick Cook’s Mall Purchase Night, and John M. Ford’s The Last Hot Time (2000). European versions like that in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Kingdo
ms of Elfin seem more comfortably situated even when they have undergone sweeping changes or belong to the darker
end of the spectrum, like the version in Garry Kilworth’s The Knights of Liöfwende.
FAIRY. An anglicization of the French faerie, which absorbed and largely displaced the Anglo-Saxon elf in English parlance after the Norman conquest. The term first became common in the 13th century, although folktales involving such beings had already been recorded by chroniclers such as Walter Map, Giraldus Cambrensis, and Gervase of Tilbury.
The Celtic mythology of the mound-dwelling Sidhe was readily accommodated within an already confused framework that included a host of ill-diferentiated entities; labels that survived alongside fairy and elf itself include goblin, pixie, brownie, and gnome, causing considerable problems for such taxonomically inclined folklorists as Thomas
Keightley.
Fairies imported into English literature in the Elizabethan era, most notably by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made much of the notion of a fairy court, which had been foreshadowed by the representation of the fairy king Oberon in the chivalric romance Huon of Bordeaux (c1220).
Such courts became part of the fashionable apparatus of 18th-century fairy literature in France in the wake of Madame d’Aulnoy’s satires.
Antoine Galland’s translations of Arabian folklore encouraged the conflation of European fairies and Middle Eastern peris; the resultant hybrid tradition extended into the 19th century in the works of Charles Nodier, the founding father of French Romanticism, by which time the German Romantic movement had revived a powerful interest in Teutonic fairy mythology among such writers as J. K. Musaeus and Ludwig Tieck.
Fairies returned in force to British Romantic poetry in such works as Percy Shelley’s “Queen Mab” and then became a popular subject for
19th-century British painters, partly because nude fairies were more acceptable to the censorious Victorian consciousness than nude women—
a loophole exploited by theatrical “fairy pageants” that featured elabo-
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rate tableaux of nude female children. Artists like Richard Dadd, however, found a sinister side of fairy life, reflected in such poems as Christina Rossetti’s erotic fantasy “Goblin Market” and such satires as John Hunter Duvar’s Annals of the Court of Oberon (1895). A more innocent and sentimental view was preserved in children’s fiction, notably in Jean Ingelow’s landmark text Mopsa the Fairy (1869), in which a boy tries to return a lost company of fairies to their homeland. Victorian fairies took on a literary life of their own; they play a major role in re-enchanted images of the 19th century in such modern stories as Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi’s Spiderwick Chronicles, advertised as
“Vintage Victorian fantasy” and launched with The Field Guide (2003) and The Seeing Stone (2003).
Victorian fairy art and its associated tales reflected ineradicable confusions as to how large fairies were and whether or not they possessed wings—confusions that persist to the present day. Similar confusions as to what kinds of magic fairies were likely to perform were created by writers and translators for children, who often substituted “bad fairies”
for witches on the absurd assumption that it might somehow be protective—a move wryly reflected in Arthur Thrush’s The Capture of Nina Carroll (1924), in which fairies and witches are at odds. The net result of these moves was to rob the term “fairy” of its last vestiges of specific significance, although that is not entirely out of keeping with its original coinage. Modern fairies are usually friendly—in contrast to goblins—but can still play an adversarial role, as in Anne Bishop’s Tir Alainn trilogy and Nancy Springer’s Fair Peril. They have occasionally made technological progress, as in Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series and Tad Williams’s War of the Flowers, or developed punkish sensibil-ities, as in works by Francesca Lia Block and Martin Millar.
FAIRY TALES. As J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” points out, relatively few so-called fairy tales actually feature fairies. The term, which came into common parlance in the mid-18th-century, was borrowed from the French contes des fées to describe folktales that had been adapted for use as children’s fiction. A similar distinction was drawn by the Brothers Grimm when they titled their collection of
Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in contrast to J. K. Musäus’s Volksmärchen and the category of kunstmärchen [art fairy tales]. When Hans Christian Andersen’s works were marketed in Britain they were sometimes labeled Household Tales in imitation of Grimm’s terminology, but “fairy tales” eventually became standardized, especially in respect of a group
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of a dozen tales that remain familiar to almost everyone in the West—
the last vestiges of a common oral culture.
The earliest printed versions of two such tales—“Beauty and the
Beast” and “Puss-in-Boots”—appeared in Gianfrancesco Straparola’s
Le piacevoli notti [Nights of Entertainiment] (1550–53); both were reproduced, along with the first printed versions of “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Rapunzel,” in Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1634).
These Italian versions differ considerably from the versions of the same tales offered by Perrault and the Grimms, who further extended the basic stock to include “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Frog Prince,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
Attempts to account for the endurance and fascination of themes inherited by fairy tales from folk tales—attempts aided by such taxono-mists as Edwin Hartland and Vladimir Propp—have varied quite
markedly. Maureen Duffy’s The Erotic World of Faery (1972) and Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1976) employ Freudian theory to argue that fairy tales are disguised erotic fantasies and ought to continue to offer covert psychoanalytic counseling. Jack Zipes’s Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983) prefers the thesis that they were spontaneous expressions of class resentment, until the likes of the Brothers Grimm subverted their meanings by grafting on bourgeois homilies.
Although the first novel-length fairy tales were composed in the early 19th century by Charles Nodier and Sara Coleridge, the fairy tale remained firmly wedded to the short-story format as its 19th-century exponents proliferated, notable composers including E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen, Frank R. Stockton, Oscar Wilde, E. Nesbit, Laurence Housman, Netta Syrett, Bram Stoker, and Maurice Baring. The form has retained its importance even in the inhospitable economic climate of the modern adult marketplace, in anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Around a core of brief children’s tales, however, the 20th century has seen the proliferation of an ever-expanding halo of novel-length works, within which most wholly original fiction of the fairy tale variety now thrives, its progress spearheaded by such innovative and sophisticated works as John Crowley’s Little, Big, Peg Kerr’s The Wild Swans (1999), and Jean Ferris’s Once Upon a Marigold (2002).
Fairy tales must have been subject to routine transfiguration while they were recycled as folktales, but in recent times transfigured fairy tales have become astonishingly profligate, reflecting the fact that there are very few referents available for literary use with which so many po-
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tential readers are familiar. The familiar tales are often transfigured on a wholesale basis, as in collections by such writers as John Erskine, Osbert Sitwell, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Vivian Vande Velde, and Francesca Lia Block; such individual items as Frank White’s The Dryads and Other Tales (1936), Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon’s Titania Had a Mother (1944), and Rebecca Lickiss’s Never After (2002); and series of novels by such writers as Donna Jo Napoli, Sophie Masson, Gregory Maguire, Mercedes Lackey, and Adèle Geras. Such exercises sometimes adopt a calculatedly cynical viewpoint, as in The Fairies Return (Peter Davies, 1934), Twice upon a Time (1999, ed. Denise Little and Martin H. Greenberg)—which favors the villai
ns’ viewpoints—
Mitzi Sereto’s Erotic Fairy Tales (2001), and Richard Park’s The Ogre’s Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups (2002).
Notable transfigurations of individual tales include Eleanor Farjeon’s The Glass Slipper; Donald Barthelme’s Snow White; Robert Coover’s Briar Rose; D. J. MacHale’s East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1992); Leon Garfield’s The Wedding Ghost; Robin McKinley’s two versions of Sleeping Beauty; Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999); the second novella in Gioia Timpanelli’s Sometimes the Soul (2000); Elizabeth Cunningham’s How to Spin Gold; Gary D.
Schmidt’s Straw into Gold (2001); Cameron Dokey’s Beauty Sleep (2002); E. D. Baker’s The Frog Princess (2002); Gregory Frost’s Fitcher’s Brides (2002); Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl (2003); and Edith Pattou’s East (2003). Generic transfigurations like Alice Thomas Ellis’s Fairy Tale (1996) are also commonplace.
Showcase anthologies of fairy tales are very numerous; those of historical interest include examples by Jack Zipes and Marina Warner, as well as The Queen’s Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women
1780–1900 (2001), ed. Shawn C. Jarvis and Jeannine Blackwell. Heidi Anne Heiner’s SurLaLune website (established 1998) is an invaluable archive.
FALLON, JENNIFER (1959– ). Pseudonym of Australian writer Jennifer Ryan. Her fantasies—set in the secondary world of Medalon, ruled by the oppressive Sisters of the Blade—have elements of political fantasy contained within intricate plotlines. The Demon Child trilogy comprises Medalon, Treason Keep, and Harshimi (all 2000), the Second Sons trilogy The Lion of Senet (2002), Eye of the Labyrinth (2003), and Lord of the Shadows (2004). The Hythrun Chronicles, a prequel, was launched with Wolfblade (2004).
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 27