If you enjoy collecting books about elves and goblins, wizards and witches, dragons and dragon slayers, damsels in distress and knights in shining armor who have been unfairly usurped from their thrones, congratulations--your private library is being constructed around one of the most popular of all literary genres, fantasy:
It often is very difficult to separate fantasy from science fiction, especially in sub-genres like science fantasy. Perhaps the best working definition for a distinction between the two genres is that put forward by famed author Isaac Asimov: science fiction, given its grounding in science, is possible; fantasy, which has no grounding in reality, is not.
The fantasy genre draws upon some of humanity's oldest archetypes, archetypes which are found in the foundational literature of all cultures:
Despite the great antiquity of the genre, fantasy--like many other fictional genres (e.g., romance, science fiction and westerns)--often is not taken seriously as literature. As Matt Sanchez has noted,
...fantasy could be said to be the progenitor from which the other forms came from. Fantasy's habit of taking real-life situations and characters and introducing them into a world where unexpected (and unexplainable) things happen has resonated with readers since the earliest days.
The very first recorded literary works in history were fantasy: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (which featured the first appearances of Sinbad and Aladdin) and countless others were the prototypes upon which modern literature was formed.
Despite this, fantasy today retains an image of literary inconsequence....
Over the next several days we will examine this genre in more detail, including an exploration of why this genre is such a popular choice for books in series....
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