What is Fantasy?

Abstract

Fantasy literature uses poetic means to examine the limits of the possible. Although characterized by vision and rich imagination, it is not detached from reality: fantasy must begin with individuals and the world around them.1 In ancient times, mythic consciousness helped people to understand their pasts, the circumstances of their lives, and their fates, and it was from this mythic consciousness that the literature of fantasy2 developed hundreds of years later. However, while in the ancient world myth (Μύθος) aspired to describe a concrete and enduring reality, fantasy as we understand it today is essentially fiction, and therefore bound neither to the world of phenomena nor to historical truth. Admittedly, fantasy stories in contemporary literature tend to deal with existential questions, but they are mainly issues of freedom of thought, such as, how much are human beings capable of directing or controlling space and time, of changing or bending the laws of nature to their will, of independently determining their fate, of striving for achievement, of dreaming dreams, or of fulfilling secret wishes.