Medievalism in contemporary Fantasy: a new Species of Romance

Abstract

Contemporary fantasists are often inspired by the texts from and with medieval context. This paper taps into Horace Walpole’s principles revealed in the preface to The Castle of Otranto to show that the works of medieval fantasy and contemporary fantasy subgenres written in 20th and 21st centuries have a lot in common with Walpole’s recipe for creating ‘a new species of romance’. When considered from the present time, the Medieval period can be seen as being halfway between fantasy and reality, in a blurry area where the two overlap, and contemporary fantasists use this trait to build their fictional worlds as effective reverberators of universal themes that remain interesting, appealing and worth repeating.