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Fantasy is not science, nor philosophy, and not real (of course). This may seem obvious, but what I am trying to do is creating an exact, non-contradictory definition of fantasy, not as an art genre, but as an object of study. Not by science, but by fantastic natural history.

Fantasy - Wikipedia

“Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore.”

Fantasy, Magic (not meaning prestidigitation), Mythology, and Folklore can be understood as equivalent, overlaping concepts. Wikipedia’s entry is mostly tautological, circular, thus.

However, this is an article about the artistic genre, and one could say that it refers to art expression (written, musical, cinematic, other) that uses these references. This is enough for this use case, but we do not advance in an objective conceptualization of fantasy.

Fantasy (psychology) - Wikipedia

“(…) fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery.”

This entry about the concept of fantasy in psychology gives a more elaborared view of it. However, what differentiates fantasy from other instances of human creativity? The article continues: “Fantasies are associated with scenarios that are absolutely impossible.”

Wikipedia’s entry on Fantasy (psychology) does not give any reference to this concept, and proceeds listing the importance of Fantasy for various theoretical approaches (Freud, Klein, Lacan), or pathologies (narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia). It is not unified.

More revealing is Wikipedia’s “History of Fantasy” (about the literary genre).

“(…) the supernatural and the fantastic were an element of literature from its beginning. The modern genre is distinguished from tales and folklore (…)”

It makes a clear distintion between ancient myths and folklore, and so-called “modern fantasy”, whose first explicit representant was Scottish author George MacDonald in the late XIX century, with his novels “The Princess and the Goblin” and “Phantastes”.

Important precursors were Dickens, Thackeray, Andersen, Ruskin, Morris. And MacDonald’s work enormously influenced Tolkien and Lewis. One key word in this historic description of Fantasy is “speculative”. And a defining characteristic of modern fantasy is the “fantasy world”.

Distinctive differences of modern fantasy are the postulate of a secondary fantasy world apart from reality; fictitious by design; and narratives from a (group of) author(s) with an interpretative aim. Myths or folklore does not have any of these characteristics.

The entry goes on in a detailed description of the development of Fantasy as a literary genre, since writings about tales and legends from Middle Ages. However, one fun example of how medieval mind understood the fantastic can be seen in the novel “Baudolino” by Umberto Eco.

Most of this Wikipedia’s entry is based upon https://twitter.com/john_clute and John Grant’s https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/, published in 1997, and fully available on the internet.

More to come, be patient.

Originally a Twitter Thread by Baldolino Calvino🏳️‍🌈🚩🇧🇷✨♻️🌱, with the help of Thread Reader, in Oct 1 • 15 tweets • 4 min read

Published in Calvino’s Tumblr.