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Stories involving magic and terrible monsters have existed in spoken forms before the advent of printed literature. Classical mythology is replete with fantastical stories and characters, the best known (and perhaps the most relevant to modern fantasy) being the works of Homer (Greek) and Virgil (Roman).
Genres of romantic and fantasy literature existed in ancient Egypt. [16] The Tales of the Court of King Khufu, which is preserved in the Westcar Papyrus and was probably written in the middle of the second half of the eighteenth century BC, preserves a mixture of stories with elements of historical fiction, fantasy, and satire.
Fantasy can be described as all of the following: Genre – any category of literature or other forms of art or entertainment, e.g. music, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. For example, jazz is a genre of music. Fantasy is a genre of fiction, and more specifically, a genre of speculative fiction.
In the 1960s and afterwards, elves similar to those in Tolkien's novels became staple, non-human characters, in high fantasy works and in fantasy role-playing games. Tolkien's elves were followed by Poul Anderson's grim Norse-style elves of human size, in his 1954 fantasy The Broken Sword. [7]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modern fantasy began to take shape. The history of modern fantasy literature begins with George MacDonald, the Scottish author of such novels as The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes; the latter can be considered to be the first fantasy novel written for adults. [31]
[29]: 14 Fantastic literature has also been defined as a piece of narrative in which there is a constant faltering between belief and non-belief in the supernatural or extraordinary event. In Leal's view, writers of fantasy literature, such as Borges, can create "new worlds, perhaps new planets. By contrast, writers like García Márquez, who ...
it must contain a large back-story or universe setting in which the story takes place. J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is an example of epic fantasy, [20] though the genre is not limited to the Western tradition, for example: Arabic epic literature includes One Thousand and One Nights; [21] and Indian epic poetry includes Ramayana and ...
High fantasy, or epic fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy [1] defined by the epic nature of its setting or by the epic stature of its characters, themes, or plot. [2] High fantasy is usually set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world , rather than the "real" or "primary" world. [ 2 ]