Abstract
Modern fantasy is inherently subversive in its violation of what we call possibility: earlier fantasy less so, because then that possibility included the supernatural, and the world was less known. In our more ‘scientific’ world, if a story shows us a carpet flying or a fairy starting out of the ground, we put them in a mental zoo: we like to look at them, but we feel they are no conceivable part of our experience. But the very size to which that fictional zoo has grown since about 1750 challenges that view: fantasy, it would appear, fills a need that is not satisfied by the prevailing realistic genres. Such fantasy now speaks to an area of mind that is the opposite of ‘rational’ or ‘conscious’ or ‘realistic’; and, being so opposed, it is at least implicitly subversive.
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Notes
Claude Rawson, ed., English Satire and the Satiric Tradition (Blackwell, 1984), p. viii.
See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 83–5, 158–70, 304–18.
Repr. in Nina Auerbach and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds, Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ). This work makes a (strained) case for subversiveness being marked in Victorian children’s fairy-tales by women.
David Garnett, Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo (Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 85.
David Callard, The Case of Anna Kavan: A Biography (Peter Owen, 1992), passim
John Fowles, The Magus (Pan, 1988), pp. 105–6.
Angela Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, in Micheline Wandor, ed., On Gender and Writing (Pandora, 1983 ), pp. 72–3.
Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 ), p. 18.
Josephine Saxton, The Travails of Jane Saint and Other Stories (Women’s Press, 1986), p. 9.
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (Vintage, 1996), pp. 17–18.
Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare ( Sawtry, Cambs.: Dedalus, 1992 ), p. 121.
Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 5. See also p. 205, where in detail he likens the design of a church to that of a fiction.
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© 1999 Colin Manlove
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Manlove, C. (1999). Subversive Fantasy. In: The Fantasy Literature of England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27499-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27499-4_7
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