Hard Low Fantasy
Hard low fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy literature characterized by its realistic and gritty portrayal of the fantastical elements within a low-magic or non-magical world. It often features minimal supernatural elements and a focus on the harsh realities of the setting. This subgenre emphasizes a more grounded and historically accurate depiction of the world, often with a darker and more brutal tone.
6 Key excerpts on "Hard Low Fantasy"
- Carrie Hintz, Eric L. Tribunella(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
...It includes other animal characters. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1916 edition). Secondary Worlds and High Fantasy Some of the most important works of fantasy create “secondary” worlds, running parallel to our world. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, for example, there are literally billions of interconnected worlds, although the protagonists move between only a few of them. The trilogy begins in a somewhat realistic setting in Oxford, England, and yet his protagonists Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, along with other characters, have visible daemons (or souls) in the form of animal companions. The characters move between worlds by means of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) or with the help of a subtle knife forged three hundred years earlier, which belongs to Lyra’s friend (and ultimately lover) Will. At the end of the series, however, the doors between worlds are shut forever. High fantasy is the subset of fantasy most associated with elevated quests and lofty struggles between good and evil. Lois Kuznets outlines the characteristics of high fantasy as follows: • it “puts a premium on the presence of the ‘marvelous’” (19) • it is dependent on the writer’s “subcreation” of a world sustained enough “to serve as a fitting background for a story in which the forces of good and evil clash and in which evil is, at least temporarily, defeated” (19) • it features a protagonist who is “ordinary in ways with which most modern readers can identify” but who “must perform heroic acts in the course of the story, which usually has a romance-quest structure” (20) • it “must never convey within its text any sense that the fantasy world is unreal or that the hero’s experience is untrue” (20), which excludes any fantasy that takes place in a character’s mind or a dream. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and Lewis’s Narnia books are examples of high fantasy because of their moral seriousness and the struggle they depict between good and evil...
eBook - ePubExploring Children′s Literature
Reading for Knowledge, Understanding and Pleasure
- Nikki Gamble(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...It continues to be popular, though there is a greater range of new publishing currently. The enthusiastic reception of the film sequences, Harry Potter (2001–11) and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001–4), has shown that fantasy has a widespread appeal, which crosses age and gender boundaries. But in spite of its popularity, some still regard fantasy as being inferior to other types of literature. Peter Hunt (Hunt and Lenz, 2001) explains that it is often criticized on the grounds of being formulaic, childish and escapist. While there may be a proliferation of second-rate ‘sword and sorcery fiction’, there is also a wealth of original fantasy writing: imaginative stories with compelling plots which confront the reader with sophisticated ethical and philosophical issues. A good fantasy is deeply rooted in human experience. Indeed, many fantasy authors write what might be termed the ‘literature of ideas’: stories which explore profound ideas. Peter Dickinson (1986: 39) warns of the problems of fantasies that do not have their roots in reality: Finally let me point out the obvious, which is that, as with all other literary forms, there is a great deal of dud fantasy around. A lot of books which don’t really do the trick, many are devoid of new ideas. They are as repetitious as pony books. Space gymkhanas. Ponies for Boys. In fact this matters more than with other forms because an old idea is a dead idea and as fantasy is fundamentally about ideas, a dead idea is a dead book. Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, echoes this view: I think of His Dark Materials as stark realism. The trouble with pigeonholing books by genre is that once they have a particular label attached they only attract readers who like that sort of label. Fantasy is particularly affected by this. I very much want to reach readers who don’t normally read fantasy at all. I don’t like fantasy...
eBook - ePubFairy Tales of London
British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present
- Hadas Elber-Aviram(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...As Edward James observed, Lord of the Rings ‘looms over all the fantasy written in English. . . since its publication’. 215 Tolkien’s unprecedented popularity has often spurred scholars to define fantasy synonymously with Rural Fantasy. Fredric Jameson probably had Middle Earth in mind when he wrote of the fantasy genre as a ‘vision of an immense historical degradation’. 216 Brian Atterbery declared plainly that ‘One way to characterize the genre of fantasy is the set of texts that in some way or other resemble The Lord of the Rings. ’ 217 Darko Suvin argued that ‘the common denominator of Fantasy seems to me the resolute refusal of any technology, urbanization, and finances associated with the capitalism of Industrial Revolution and “paleotechnic” (Mumford) machinery’. 218 Thus defined, fantasy literature emerges as a deeply conservative, anti-metropolitan and reactionary mode of writing. Notwithstanding, recent years have seen a renewed interest in narratives of Urban Fantasy, even if that is not the name by which its latest fictions have been labelled. Moorcock has observed ‘a trend away from traditional rural Tolkienesque fables towards well-written stories with a strong urban focus’. 219 He regards this turn as newly emergent, a ‘modern school of urban fantasy’ that ‘appeals to readers not merely seeking escape but looking for versions of their own experience’. 220 Dirk Vanderbeke similarly argues that whereas ‘such counter-worlds’ of fantasy are traditionally ‘set in a pastoral or rural environment’, 221 recent fantasies have located ‘doorways into a world that is and isn’t ours. . . in the modern city and metropolis’. 222 Scholars have linked this urban turn to the ‘British Boom’ in speculative fiction, 223 pioneered by urban writers such as China Miéville, Ken Macleod, M. John Harrison and Neil Gaiman. What present scholarship lacks is a deeper exploration of this school’s historical development...
eBook - ePub- Jule Selbo(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Without these challenges, the fantastical stories featuring superheroes will not contain the requisite conflict. FIGURE 9.2 Chris Hemsworth in Thor (2011) Common Subgenres and Hybrids in the Fantasy Genre These subgenres are very specific in the worlds in which the stories take place. The fantasy genre, as already noted, demands the construction of specific environments that have rules/laws and boundaries: Superhero Gothic Grotesque Space opera (also a subgenre in sci-fi) As noted previously, fantasy is not a specific “story” genre. The genre is focused more on the “ideas,” the environment of the story and character creation. The screenwriter is tasked with choosing either the fantastical uncanny approach (the protagonist enters the fantastical world through some portal or means of changing reality and directly experiences and struggles in the fantasy world) or the fantastical marvelous approach (the fantastical world just “is” and the narrative takes place in a fantastical world that is accepted as reality). Therefore it is of great importance to consider the “story genre” that is paired with the fantasy genre. In most cases the story genre will lead so that the goals of the characters are clear. Other examples of films in the fantasy genre include Labyrinth (1986), Pirates of the Caribbean (2003–2011), Hook (1991), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), Life of Pi (2012), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Legend (1985), The NeverEnding Story (1984), Coraline (2009), Mary Poppins (1964), Enchanted (2007), Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Elf (2003), Nanny McPhee (2005), Splash (1984), Jumanji (1995), Field of Dreams (1989) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). The Mental Space of Fantasy The screenwriter, in creating the mental space of fantasy for the audience, may want to first decide if the narrative will be set up in the fantastical uncanny or the fantastical marvelous camp...
...I have commented elsewhere on the difficulties that arise from overly prescriptive attitudes towards genre identity. 1 As Andrew Rayment puts it, ‘Armitt could, perhaps, be considered a kind of spokesperson’ for those critics for whom the ‘attempt to shoehorn a text into a binding yet artificial category is a “travesty” of compartmentalization, a “death wish” of division and sub-division’ (Rayment 2014: 10). Nevertheless, close neighbours of fantasy such as science fiction, the ghost story, the horror story and the Gothic are not discussed in detail in this book, except insofar as they help to cast clearer light on what fantasy is not. Readers interested in these undoubtedly adjacent and often overlapping genres are recommended to read companion volumes in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series such as Fred Botting’s Gothic, Maggie Ann Bowers’s Magical Realism and Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction. What is fantasy? At their most conventional, at least in structural terms, fantasy narratives such as Alice in Wonderland (1865) immerse the reader into an alternative world with its own logic, landscape and temporality and subsequently return that reader intact to the frame world of realism, in this case the river-bank where Alice has been sitting with her sister. The fantasy world is not usually assumed to have collapsed when left, although Alice’s departure is certainly accompanied by chaos as the pack of courtier cards (court guards) explodes into the air ‘and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream … and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister’ (Carroll 1929: 102). It is in this type of narrative that one experiences, most clearly, the type of ‘joyous turn’ or ‘ eucatastrophe’ which, according to Tolkien, characterizes ‘the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function’ (Tolkien 2001: 68)...
eBook - ePubAdvanced Reading Instruction in Middle School
A Novel Approach (Grades 6-8)
- Janice I. Robbins(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...You may choose to read a few sections of this novel and then contrast with brief passages from another fantasy novel that is of a different type, like one featuring kings, queens, and fairies. Modern fantasy novels often incorporate teenage characters as protagonists who assume the hero/heroine roles as opposed to the knights and princesses of fairy tales. Modern fantasy fiction writing generally incorporates these elements: + a story that could not actually happen in our known world, + a realistic setting on Earth and in contemporary times, + the use of magical powers or superhuman abilities, and + characters who are believable in the context of the fantasy. FANTASY NOVEL ELEMENTS The Setting The setting for fantasy novels is usually an imaginary world created just for the novel. It can, however, be a realistic world within which fantasy elements are introduced. The story frequently occurs in a medieval setting, characters have magical powers, and mythical beings often inhabit the setting of the story. Characters may start out in the real world but travel through some magical portal to a world beyond. Whatever the place and time, the setting remains a consistent backdrop for the unfolding story. The Characters Fantasy novels usually include some humans but also are home to gods and heroes, monsters and adventurers, wizards and witches, elves, fairies, gnomes, goblins, trolls, sprites, angels and devils, and other creatures that could not live in the known world. A fantasy novel may draw real-world characters into the fantasy setting or a world that appears to be just like the one they live in but, in fact, has odd, bizarre, and unreal characteristics. The characters in a fantasy novel are often magical creatures, archetypal figures inspired by folklore or myths. Characters may be animals or humans or things...
