fantasy fiction
fantasy fiction,During the second half of the 20th cent. fantasy fiction has become one of the most productive and commercially successful of literary genres in English. In one sense this is not surprising. Literature containing elements of the fantastic is as old as literature in English (or in any language), and includes such works as Beowulf , with its fire-spewing dragon and man-eating ogres, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , with its enchantresses and shape-shifting giant, or Sir Thomas Malory 's Le Morte D'Arthur , Edmund Spenser 's The Faerie Queene , or Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest , with their respective complements of enchanted swords, elvish knights, fairies, and wizards. The literature of the fantastic at any date can draw on a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of concepts and characters from the age-old, international, and pre-literary genre of the...
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