Fantasy is a type of fiction that includes imaginary or magical elements, such as made-up worlds and creatures that do not exist in real life.

This genre began in books and plays. Starting in the 20th century, fantasy stories spread to other forms of media, like movies, TV shows, graphic novels, manga, cartoons, and video games.

Some critics use the term "fantastic literature" to describe this genre. An older way to spell the word is "phantasy."

Fantasy is usually different from science fiction and horror because it does not focus on science or scary themes, even though these ideas can sometimes appear in fantasy stories. In popular culture, fantasy stories often take place in settings that look like Earth but have a feeling of being different or magical.

Characteristics

Fantasy stories often include magic, supernatural beings, or otherworldly settings as important parts of the story, themes, or environments. These stories commonly feature magical powers, people who use magic (like sorcerers or witches), and creatures that do not exist in the real world.

A key feature of fantasy is that the story's events do not need to follow real history or natural rules to make sense. This is different from realistic fiction, which must follow real-world history and natural laws. When writing fantasy, authors create fictional worlds, characters, and situations that might not exist in reality through a process called worldbuilding.

Many fantasy writers draw ideas from real-life myths, legends, and folklore. While magic and supernatural elements are common in fantasy, they are not always required. Fantasy is often grouped with science fiction and horror as types of speculative fiction. Fantasy differs from science fiction because fantasy stories do not need to be scientifically possible. Science fiction stories may seem unlikely but are based on logical scientific or technological ideas. To write fantasy, authors rely on readers' willingness to believe in impossible or unbelievable events for enjoyment. Although both fantasy and horror use supernatural elements, they are different. Horror stories focus on fear, often showing how characters struggle against powerful enemies or their own weaknesses.

History

Fantasy elements have been part of literature since its beginning. These elements also appear in ancient religious texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Enûma Eliš, an ancient Babylonian creation story, describes the god Marduk defeating the goddess Tiamat. This story shows a battle between good and evil, a theme common in modern fantasy. Ancient Egypt also had stories with romantic and fantasy elements. The Tales of the Court of King Khufu, preserved in the Westcar Papyrus and likely written around 1800 BCE, includes stories with historical fiction, fantasy, and satire. Egyptian funerary texts contain myths, such as those about Osiris and his son Horus.

Fantasy stories for adults were important in ancient Greek literature. The plays of Aristophanes, like The Birds, include fantasy elements, such as a man persuading birds to build a city in the clouds and challenging Zeus’s power. Works like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass helped shape the fantasy genre by blending myths with personal stories. These books describe humans changing into animals or objects. Ideas from Plato and early Christian teachings also influenced modern fantasy. Plato used stories to explain his ideas, and early Christians used parables to teach spiritual lessons. This practice of finding meaning in non-literal stories became a foundation for modern fantasy.

Fantasy elements appear in Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese traditions as well. One Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights) is a famous collection of stories from the Islamic world. Characters like Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba from this collection are well-known in Western culture. Hindu mythology, which evolved from earlier Vedic stories, includes many fantastical tales, especially in Indian epics. The Panchatantra, for example, uses animal fables and magical stories to teach political ideas. Chinese traditions influenced the fantasy style called Chinoiserie, which inspired writers like Ernest Bramah and Barry Hughart.

Beowulf, a famous Old English tale, has deeply influenced the fantasy genre. Many fantasy works have retold its story, such as John Gardner’s Grendel. Norse mythology, found in the Elder Edda and Younger Edda, includes gods like Odin, dwarves, elves, dragons, and giants. These elements appear in many fantasy stories. Folklore from Ireland, Wales, and Scotland has been used in "Celtic" fantasy stories, though some writers focus on specific traditions. Welsh stories, especially those about King Arthur and the Mabinogion, have been particularly influential.

Some works blur the line between fantasy and other genres. For example, it is unclear whether writers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight believed in the magical events in their stories. This uncertainty makes it hard to determine when fantasy, as a modern genre, began.

Modern fantasy literature is often said to have started with George MacDonald, a Scottish author who wrote Phantastes (1858) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872). These books are considered the first fantasy novels written for adults. MacDonald influenced writers like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Another important author of this time was William Morris, who wrote novels like The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Well at the World’s End (1896).

Fantasy fiction became more popular in the 20th century. Lord Dunsany helped make fantasy stories widely known, and authors like H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs began writing fantasy around this time. These writers helped create the "lost world" subgenre, which was very popular in the early 20th century. Classic children’s fantasy stories, such as Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, were also published during this period.

Fantasy for adults was not always accepted. Many writers had to hide their adult fantasy works by writing them in styles meant for children. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys included fantasy elements, though his adult works only slightly touched on fantasy. Books like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) helped make fantasy more widely accepted, even for adults.

Political and social changes can affect how a society views fantasy. In early 20th-century China, the New Culture Movement criticized traditional fantasy stories like those in the shenmo genre, calling them superstitious and outdated. After the Communist Party gained power, stories of the supernatural were also criticized. Fantasy in China only became popular again after the Cultural Revolution ended.

Fantasy became a major part of pulp magazines in the West. The first all-fantasy magazine, Weird Tales, was published in 1923. Other magazines, like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (founded in 1949), helped spread fantasy stories to a wide audience. These magazines also helped popularize science fiction, and the two genres became closely linked.

By 1950, "sword and sorcery" stories, like those featuring Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber, gained popularity. However, it was the rise of "high fantasy"—especially J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—that brought fantasy into the mainstream. Other series, like C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, helped make fantasy even more popular.

Fantasy has continued to grow in popularity in the 21st century. Series like J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, and George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire have become bestsellers, showing the lasting appeal of the fantasy genre.

Media

Many fantasy movies have become very popular, including The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson and the Harry Potter films, which are two of the top-selling movie series in history.

Fantasy role-playing games (RPGs) appear in many forms of media. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) was the first tabletop RPG and is still the most popular and influential. A 1999 survey in the United States found that 6 out of 100 people aged 12 to 35 had played RPGs. Of those who play regularly, two-thirds play D&D. In 2005, more than half of all RPG products sold were branded as Dungeons & Dragons.

The science fantasy RPG series Final Fantasy is a well-known example of the video game genre. As of 2012, it remained among the top 10 best-selling video game franchises. The first collectible card game, Magic: The Gathering, has a fantasy theme and is also a leading product in its industry.

Classification

Fantasy includes many types of stories that have specific themes, settings, or mix with other kinds of stories. These types include the following:

In her book Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), Farah Mendlesohn created a system to classify fantasy stories. She based this system on "how the magical or impossible elements appear in the story." (She also noted that some fantasy stories do not fit into any of these categories.) The system has the following categories:

Subculture

People who work in publishing, editing, writing, art, and research and who enjoy the fantasy genre meet every year at the World Fantasy Convention (WFC). The World Fantasy Awards are given at this event. The first WFC took place in 1975, and it has happened every year since then, in different cities each time.

Also, many science fiction events, such as Florida's FX Show and MegaCon, attract fans of fantasy and horror. Anime events, like Ohayocon and Anime Expo, often show movies and TV shows related to fantasy, science fantasy, and dark fantasy. Examples include Majutsushi Orphen (fantasy), Sailor Moon (urban fantasy), Berserk (dark fantasy), and Spirited Away (fantasy). Many science fiction/fantasy and anime events also focus on or include groups within the larger communities:

• the cosplay group, where people create or wear costumes based on real or imagined characters, sometimes acting out stories or plays
• the fan fiction group
• the fan video or AMV group
• the large online group, which is interested in writing or reading stories or related materials in those genres

According to 2013 data from the fantasy publisher Tor Books, men make up 67% and women 33% of writers who create historical, epic, or high fantasy stories. In comparison, among writers of urban fantasy or paranormal romance, 57% are women and 43% are men.

Analysis

Fantasy is studied in many fields, such as English and other language studies, cultural studies, comparative literature, history, and medieval studies. Some works show how ideas from the medieval period and popular culture are connected in politics, history, and literature.

The French literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov says the fantastic is a middle ground where supernatural elements appear in a story that is otherwise realistic. People are unsure if these supernatural elements are real. However, this specific idea is not widely used in English literary studies. The French term fantastique is used to describe the French concept, which is different from the English term fantastic, a word that means the same as fantasy. Differences in how countries define the fantastic have caused disagreements, such as those started by Stanislaw Lem.

In her book Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson both agrees with and challenges Todorov’s definition of the fantastic. She disagrees with the idea that fantasy is only about people’s wishes and imaginary worlds that are better than our own. Instead, she says fantasy is closely connected to real life, especially the social and cultural situations in which stories are written. She explains that the "unreal" parts of fantastic stories are created by comparing them to the rules of the time period they are written in. These parts help show the hidden limits of those rules by changing and rebuilding the structures that define society, making them seem "strange" and "new." Jackson says the fantastic reflects a quiet wish for society to change. She criticizes Todorov’s theory for being too narrow, focusing only on the literary purpose of the fantastic. She expands his theory to include a broader study of culture, arguing that the fantastic is not a genre but a type of storytelling that uses both realistic and supernatural elements to create uncertainty. Jackson also suggests using Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind to better understand how the fantastic connects to human thoughts.

There are many ways to understand the fantastic, and these views often depend on the social environment of the time. In their book The Female Fantastic: Gender and the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s, Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares explain how the social changes of the 1890s and 1920s influenced the development of fantastic literature. During this time, women were gaining more freedom and becoming more equal in society. Public fears about these changes, along with women’s new roles, led to a new style of stories that mixed the supernatural with the everyday. The fantastic exists between the supernatural and the ordinary, much like how women were no longer accepting the old rules of inequality. At the time, women’s roles were unclear, just as the rules of the fantastic genre are often unclear. This situation allowed a new kind of story to develop, where the supernatural is not clearly present or absent, just as women were not fully equal but not completely oppressed. The female fantastic shows that nothing is certain in the genre or in the gender roles of the 1920s. Many women began to mix ideas about gender, reducing the strict differences between male and female roles and allowing for more ways to understand identity. In this new way, women started to show more masculine or queer traits without facing as much opposition. The fantastic genre reflects these changes by creating stories where the supernatural is never clearly real, leaving readers unsure if the story is truly supernatural.

Related genres

• Horror
• Science fantasy (a mix of science fiction and fantasy stories)
• Science fiction (stories about imaginary scientific or technological advances)
• Superhero fiction (stories about characters with special powers or abilities)
• Supernatural fiction (stories with magical or supernatural elements)
• Afro-fantasy (a type of fantasy that includes African culture and traditions)
• Utopian and dystopian fiction (stories about perfect or terrible future societies)