The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series

252 Pages·2015·1.38 MB·English

by  Jamie Williamson (auth.)

The Evolution of
Modern Fantasy
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The Evolution of
Modern Fantasy
From Antiquarianism to the
Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
Jamie Williamson
Palgrave
macmillan
the evolution of modern fantasy
Copyright © Jamie Williamson, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-51808-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-70433-0 ISBN 978-1-137-51579-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137515797
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Williamson, Jamie.
The evolution of modern fantasy : from antiquarianism to the Ballantine
adult fantasy series / by Jamie Williamson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Fantasy literature—
History and criticism. I. Title.
PN56.F34W55 2015
809.3'8766— dc23 2015003219
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: July 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I would like to dedicate this to my mother, who flew this earth
while this book was nearing completion
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Contents
Preface ix
1 Introduction: Charting the Terrain 1
Assembling a Genre 2
Criticism: Fantasy and Fantasy 7
The BAFS Template and the Problems of
Retrojected Homogeneity 12
“Faery, or romance literature” 23
A Time and a Place 39
2 The Eighteenth Century: The Forgotten Past 47
The Canonical Narrative 47
Revisions of the Classical Inheritance 49
Quasi-O riental Fictions 51
Revisions in the English Poetic Tradition 55
The Forgotten Past and Lost Antiquities 58
Syncretism and William Blake’s Mythology 65
Conclusion 66
3 Romantic Transformations 69
Introduction 69
Earlier Romantic Narrative Poetry 71
Later Romantic Narrative Poetry: Neo- Elizabethan Processing 77
Romantic Prose Fiction 82
German Romanticism and Phantasmion 85
4 From Verse to Prose: The Victorian Period 91
Introduction 91
Victorian Verse Fantasy 96
Victorian Fairy Tales for Children 106
Victorian Fantasy for Adults 113
The Prose Romances of William Morris 117
viii CONTENTS
5 Twentieth Century: The Literary Canon 127
Introduction 127
Children’s Fantasy 129
The Literary Branch of the BAFS Canon 132
The Celtic Revival 134
Before the War: Cabell and Some Others 143
After the War: Eddison and Some Others 148
Tolkien 155
Conclusion: The Question of Influence 160
6 Twentieth Century: Popular Fantasy 167
Introduction 167
Dark Fantasy and Weird Tales: Lovecraft and Smith 169
Sword and Sorcery: Howard, Leiber, and Some Others 172
Unknown 178
After Unknown to the Beginnings of the Genre 180
Conclusion 186
7 Conclusion: 1960– 80 191
The “First” Fantasy Writers 191
1960–7 4 192
1975–8 0 195
Conclusion 198
Notes 201
Index 233
Preface
The original impetus behind the present study when it was originally con-
ceived, now nearly two decades ago, was the need, as it seemed to me, for a
more adequate historical framework for the critical discussion of modern
fantasy, specifically “fantasy” as connoted by the core literary work that
was assembled in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of the Sword and Sor-
cery revival and Tolkien-m ania. While critical and academic discussion of
fantasy has proliferated in those nearly two decades, and there have been
some excellent studies, the historical framework for conceptualizing what
ultimately arrived at Tolkien has still not been notably rethought since the
1970s studies of Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp. While the Carter and
de Camp studies have their points, they are equally inadequate in many
ways.
The present study takes as its core point of departure, and as the focus
of its latter chapters, what I have termed the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series
(BAFS) canon, the body of reprinted work that was, during the crucial
formative stage of the fantasy genre, “canonized” as the “tradition” behind
Tolkien. While Carter and de Camp are now names of a bygone era, and
much of this canon has only been sporadically in print since the mid-1 970s,
the basic construction of the “tradition” still more or less holds. In his 1997
study Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination, what seems to be the last to
center itself in the pregenre canon, Richard Mathews assumes Carter’s his-
torical framework largely intact, although the actual critical discussion is
engaging and a considerable advance on Carter’s.
Among the issues explored in the following pages is the fact that the pre-
genre canonical writers did not compose any conscious literary movement,
did not collectively see themselves as members of a “genre,” and in fact did
not call their work “fantasy.” This is an issue that does not seem to have
attracted much discussion, though it seems to me that it needs to be con-
sidered in looking at the BAFS canon. Fantasy is often effectively posited as
a sort of timeless Platonic Form, involving magic and invented preindus-
trial worlds. The canon was constructed by way of this Form: track back
from Tolkien until you find the “first one.” The results of this approach are
not entirely without merit: it did collectivize a body of material that has