Fantasy literature

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Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, the majority of fantasy works have been written. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of video games, music, painting, and the like.

1 History
2 See also
3 Bibliography
4 External links

[edit] History

It is difficult to define the precise 'beginning' of fantasy literature, as stories involving magic and terrible monsters have existed since time immemorial. On the whole, the genre, as a distinct type, began to become visible in the Victorian times, in the works of writers such as William Morris, Lord Dunsany, and George Macdonald,

Many assert that South African-born, English professor of philology, J. R. R. Tolkien, was crucial to the mass-popularization of the fantasy genre, with his hugely successful publications, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself was largely inspired by an ancient body of Anglo-Saxon myths — particularly Beowulf — but it was after his work that the genre began to identified and receive the name of "fantasy".

Preeminent authors in the genre who undertook popular fantasy works after Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings phenomenon of the 1950s and 1960s are listed below. Their most famous works are also listed.

Ursula K. Le Guin : the Earthsea series
Guy Gavriel Kay : The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy
Terry Brooks: the Shannara series
David Eddings: The Belgariad and The Malloreon
Raymond E. Feist : The Riftwar series
Dave Duncan: The King's Blades series
Piers Anthony : the Xanth series
Robert Jordan : The Wheel of Time series
Terry Goodkind : The Sword of Truth series

Many other, slightly less notable fantasy authors have published under the popular TSR label, usually in the Forgotten Realms sanctum.

In recent years, the ratio of female-to-male authors in a typically-stocked bookstore has skyrocketed, with female authors surpassing the volume of their male counterparts.^[specify]

[edit] See also

[edit] Bibliography

Todorov, Tzvetan [1970] (1973). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University. ISBN 0-8295-0245-9.