Explore the fascinating relationship between realism and fantasy in literature. Using insights from Tolkien and other influential writers, this masterclass examines how fantasy challenges our ideas of reality, tracing non-realist storytelling from Arthurian legends and Gothic fiction to contemporary genre-blending novels.
Books are usually classified by genres that reflect the distinction between realism (non-fiction, historical fiction) and fantasy (Sci-Fi, Dystopia, Romantasy). But the distinction between realism and fantasy is much harder to pin down than this would suggest. In Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (1976), Williams tells his readers that ‘realism is a difficult word’. It can be used as a term of praise (characters or situation are ‘realistically described’), or it can be used to suggestion that something has been understood only superficially: the outward appearance has been given. In 1984, Kathryn Hume defined Fantasy as ‘the deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and normal’ (Fantasy and Mimesis), which is a useful definition only if we agree on what ‘real and normal’. With the help of J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ (1947), this masterclass will discuss the ways that thinking about fantasy can help us re-examine what we mean by ‘realism’ in fiction. With any luck, we will also have some time to explore the tradition of non-realist narrative from the Medieval stories of King Arthur through eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic to the ‘high fantasy’ of Tolkien and the genre-twisting of contemporary fiction.
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