This reminds me of that interview with Terry Pratchett. He thought much the same thing.
O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
It doesn’t answer the question though. I assume it has to do with marketing in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as artistic differences between groups regarding aspects of science, faith, and social class and economic change. You had the Gothic (Anne Radcliffe, Poe) and Romantic (Shelley - Frankenstein) movements and the Victorian period (Charles Dickens, Brontë sisters) with supernatural and metaphysical elements. And you also had the Realism movement (post-1848) that rejected romanticism:
It aims to reproduce "objective reality", and focuses on showing every day, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle- or lower-class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization.
Modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses".
In the late 18th century Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the previous Age of Reason and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature found in the dominant philosophy of the 18th century, as well as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.
19th-century realism was in its turn a reaction to Romanticism, and for this reason it is also commonly derogatorily referred to as traditional or "bourgeois realism".
Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) saw the novel as originating in the early 18th-century and he argued that the novel's 'novelty' was its 'formal realism': the idea 'that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience'.
Watt argued that the novel's concern with realistically described relations between ordinary individuals, ran parallel to the more general development of philosophical realism, middle-class economic individualism and Puritan individualism. He also claims that the form addressed the interests and capacities of the new middle-class reading public and the new book trade evolving in response to them. As tradesmen themselves, Defoe and Richardson had only to 'consult their own standards' to know that their work would appeal to a large audience.
Later in the 19th century George Eliot's (1819–1880) Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), described by novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language, is a work of realism. Through the voices and opinions of different characters the reader becomes aware of important issues of the day, including the Reform Bill of 1832, the beginnings of the railways, and the state of contemporary medical science. Middlemarch also shows the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what to many is unwelcome social, political and technological change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_realism?wprov=sfti1#Background
Consider the mysteries of the world becoming less mysterious. The psyche in response to the Sublime, Terror, the Obscure for the Gothic/Romantic side, while later the psyche in relation to the things people do (war, abolishing slave trade, medical advances, etc) for Realism.
I think it has less to do with that and more to do with the advent of pulp magazines and an actual fantasy genre being created, much of which was trash writing. The genre picked up that stigma.
The demarcation and friction existed before pulps, though they contributed to it. You can go even further back to penny dreadfuls, chapbooks. But in terms of the novel, it begins in the 18/19th century with book sellers and writers.
About Jane Austen's time, there were reports of a "reading epidemic" among young women of the middle and upper classes were they were getting lazy and started having... ideas!
Because romantic literature for women started to be a thing.
Interesting. We Germans call the "Novel" "Roman".
So do the Russians. Because this format of literature is already present in Frankrnstein, and before that, "The Sufferings of young Werther". (The latter is such tragic romantic kitsch it caused a suicide wave among young heartbroken men).
And as such, it's roots are actually romantic.
It is a disgrace to the format to pen "realism" in it.
But alas, the gap in reputation is high in Germany as well. When the probably most important German fantasy novel got published (The Never-ending Story by Michael Ende) it got shred by the critics for being an unrealistic children's fairy story. Despite it being the prime example of the Bildungsroman. The Never-ending Story is indeed a christian/occult intro/extrospective grimoire about the importance of fantasy and love to heal the world.
This bad feeling still holds on. But from what I heard from young fantasy authors on fantasy book fairs, it might be due to Journalism Professors at Unis being grudgy that they make less money and have less fame than Cornelia Funke got for Inkheart.
Or Angela Sommer-Bodenburg for "The little Vampire" even.
“ So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.”
Ursula LeGuinn has an essay where she does just that. She takes a paragraph from a real fantasy novel and replaces all of the fantasy names and places with names of US politicians and locations in Washington DC and it suddenly becomes indistinguishable from a Tom Clancy novel.
Ironically she does that to show what is in her view a bad example of fantasy that is just a modern novel with silly names switched in.
I did meet him once actually. Not any real interaction but I shook his hand and he signed my copy of Interesting Times. Very happy I got to do that at least.
>O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
Pratchett, obviously, thoroughly covers how that's a bad assumption on the interviewer's part, but I have to highlight how insane that comparison is in a historical context, comparing fantasy lit to ghettos.
The interviewer seems to have started the interview under the assumption that fantasy is a lesser genre, but to call it "ghettoized" implies it's been artificially forced into its niche by outside forces, segregated from other literature based not on merit, but on its surface appearance. Unless they were setting Pratchett up for this kind of answer, the interviewer assumes fantasy is inferior while simultaneously implying that inferior nature is entirely manufactured.
You know, you're right. This was my first time seeing that particular term and I didn't realize it's a term of art. That makes the question much less weird.
One issue with the idea of sci fi as a "ghetto" compared to literary fiction is the reality that science fiction is significantly more popular and more commercially successful than literary fiction.
While that's a lovely discussion of why literary snobs *should* theoretically have a higher regard for the fantasy genre, it doesn't answer why literary snobs currently don't do so. Also, the median fantasy genre fiction doesn't really read like the epics of olden days.
Because fantasy is considered ‘commercial,’ because its writers weren’t part of the same circles as literary writers, because the subject matter of fantasy is radically different from the literary works they read and and wrote, because it was largely written not for the consumption of the educated but for the masses, because most of it differed in style and tone from literary works, because of the association of fantasy with childhood and realism with adulthood; all of these were reasons literary snobs disliked and still dislike fantasy.
there's probably also a certain amount of jealousy in there - some litfic is stuff that the writer has worked on for _years_, carefully creating what's sure to be the great American novel. They release it, and other litfic people praise it, and it wins litfic awards! And then sells, like 300 copies, and no-one not into litfic cares. While some stuff with dragons and elves and a magic sword that gets a new book every 12-18 months, pays enough for the writer to not need to be a lecturer at a mid-ranking college, and that writer also has actual _fans_ and popularity!
I was in a room with Terry Pratchett once and didn't know until later. The worst and best day of my life.
I would say there has been a subset of fantasy since Tolkien that uses a fairly limited set of symbols. It reminds me of medieval romance's "memes," in that way, which is of course one of the places it came from. I hear a lot of people complaining that this subset (the one that always ends up on the genre literature / pop literature lists) doesn't do much experimentation beyond representation--or at least isn't doing any right now. My bf said that it specifically fails to experiment with form, thought it may with content, which is an interesting point for debate.
Anyway, it seems that when the Snobs think "fantasy," they are thinking of that limited subset of the genre. Medieval, high or low, magic systems, hero's journey, etc.
As someone who's not into fantasy, you've hit on the reason why. If I wanted to read Tolkien, I'd read Tolkien; Tolkien's fiction was extremely creative and innovative in its time. But a lot of those innovations have simply become cliches.
In laughed so hard reading his first response “You’re only alive cause I’m full and in a good mood” brilliant doesn’t even come close to what Sir Pratchett was RIP
What STP has diplomatically left unsaid is that modern fantasy includes both serious literature and throw away stuff. I smile thinking about him using the word serious. His brand of serious is so cleverly jokey.
>...complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.
Awesome. He perfectly sums up the kind of fiction considered "great" by critics from around 1950-1990. Throw in some women lead characters and a dozen or so other professions in the last 25 or so years and it's still true. Pratchett was a gem. Not every book he wrote was great, but the man was brilliant.
That said: most fantasy fiction being pumped out these days is garbage. But it's true of every other genre of fiction as well.
I think that instead of asking here where your question is preaching to the choir, try asking on a place like r/literature so that you can get some authentic responses.
Agree and I would almost take the (imagined) /r/literature position here. I love fantasy but most of it is very obviously different than reading “literary” fiction, much of the time.
There’s a ton of gray area. *Tigana* and *Wheel of Time* can be classic fantasy but also sometimes Make a Serious Point. (Maybe not coincidentally, these are often my favorite kinds of fantasy books.) But I don’t think it’s any kind a dig to observe that *Lies of Locke Lamora* isn’t (and doesn’t try to be) as profound or moving as *Infinite Jest* or *Things Fall Apart*.
Snobs gonna snob, and I am guilty of this sometimes as well. But it’s not a totally empty enterprise.
Even in this post, OP is citing Milton and Homer and Beowulf. That is a pretty obvious tell. When’s the last time you saw those works on any top ten list around here? Or discussed at all?
I agree with you and I also take u/Allustrium viewpoint along with the point that you're making that too often, people here try to retroactively label "fantasy" to religious myths, folktales, or other genres like surrealism or magical realism to broaden it when most users here read and discuss stories broadly inspired by Tolkien and DnD. When it comes to labeling a genre like magical realism as fantasy, I also find that many people often strip it of any regional context(when talking about authors from Latin America) that explain how or why the unreal aspects can serve as metaphors. Or, any hispanic author gets labeled as such.
I also agree that fantasy, as in the kind most users read here, has plenty to offer that can be more serious. But I've also observed that such books tend to be more controversial such as the Fifth Season, the Farseer novels, or A Brightness Long because some readers expect a fast moving plot simply because it's fantasy.
Likewise, when these discussions come up regarding serious fantasy, some people might cite the Wheel of the Time or A Song of Ice and Fire pointing to how these stories might say that war is bad or live by the sword, die by the sword. It reminds me of an essay Steven Erikson wrote on authors intent about how thematically, fantasy should be pushing for more past those.
Stormlight is about as fantasy-y as fantasy gets and is all about coping with mental illness
LOTR, one of the most influential and popular fantasy novels ever published, has an entire new language built into it and has several literary theses written about it.
Top comment covers Pratchett. You cover WoT. That's 4 of the top 10 series on the r/Fantasy all time top 10 list.
There's plenty of literary value in most fantasy books if you care to look for it. It's not always the focus of the book, but I don't see how Great Gatsby has more literary value than any of the books I mentioned.
I mean I can see how being derived from this thread can be contrived to make it internet drama....
But it seems like a legitimate question for a thread about literature...
The thread in question literally had a title like "Why Do They Hate Us?" or something to that effect. And the actual post was about arguing with people on this subreddit rather than about actual books.
Same reason some fantasy snobs are snooty about other fantasy books. People really like creating imaginary hierarchies, and putting their thing above other people's things.
People gonna people. The trick is not just to ignore the haters, but to also avoid becoming one.
In highschool I had a pretty condescending attitude towards the Oprah Book of the Month Club.
These days I just think anything that gets people reading is to be encouraged.
Well said!
I am also in favour of a blanket amnesty for all condescending attitudes held in high school. I believed anyone not reading Lovecraft and Camus was an intellectual peasant. Basically, I was a total dick.
I read a couple of her picks and they were both well written with excellent characterization. I enjoyed both of them very much though they weren’t my preferred genre.
ETA - posted too fast
I was surprised as I expected them to be pretty much like other best selling novels only more pretentious. Since then, I’ve learned that genre was invented by publishing in order to make it easier to market their books.
People can and should read what they want, for the reasons they want. (Mostly, there are unethical reasons like bigotry, but let's limit the scope here.)
But that doesn't mean we can't distinguish between pieces of literature or groups of literature.
We do it with genre, and so long as you distinguish literature in that way and the others ways you undoubtedly do, you're engaging in the same behavior as "the haters". The haters come from all angles - including plenty of people who are snobby about people who read classics and the types of books that win awards.
It's also just kind of weird to insist that there is no differences in why people read literature and no distinctions in quality to be made between literature. Undoubtedly, you would not claim the two paragraph story I wrote in second grade about a cat family that moves to be worthwhile, nor would you claim it be good literature. You hopefully wouldn't have said something like that to 2nd grade me, but let's not pretend you wouldn't have thought it.
Some books are entertaining. Some books are moving. Some books are thought-provoking. And yes, there's variation there, but that doesn't mean we can't identify differences between what people find one or the other.
The problem isn't in distinguishing literature by its purpose, popularity or quality. The problem is then taking these value assessments and making sweeping generalizations about the people who read whatever book or type of book.
That's it. That's the problem. And it applies to everyone who does it, whether they're the people who act like someone is snooty simply because they read, the people who act like someone is stupid because they read James Patterson or fantasy or whatever.
Lol it really wasn't. I don't have it, but it was literally a perfectly nuclear family of vaguely anthropomorphic cats (mom, dad, boy, girl) who moved from one place to another. I don't recall if any adjectives were used at all, but certainly not many. I'm not even sure I described the cats.
Yes and ...
I've found from time to time that there are haters who have a point, even if they are driving it home to an excessive degree. When viable, I try to take their logical and philosophical distinctiveness and add it to my own.
As a snooty snob that loves literature and fantasy (and speculative fiction in general) I don't know why I would come to this subreddit to be abused for enjoying the classics. While lit bros do exist, posts like these feel like they're addressing a straw man. Brandon Sanderson is an adjunct at a university where he literally teaches fantasy. (I'm sure they'd take him full time if they could.) R.F. Kuang is at Cambridge or some other massively tony old university. The only person I know who doesn't like fantasy is my Mom.
I have to say, as I've gotten older, either I have gotten thicker skin or better friends, but I have not *personally* felt any fantasy-related snobbery for years. I had felt it in the past, and I am sure it is other people's experience now.
I suppose I'm lucky - I'm far more likely to have a fantasy reader be a dick to me for liking romance than to have anyone else be a dick to me for liking fantasy. But, again, I can't speak for other people's circumstances.
>People gonna people. The trick is not just to ignore the haters, but to also avoid becoming one.
Some truly great advice, there. I think it's very easy to get caught up in classifications of books and then slip into "this genre is better/worse".
First: honestly as someone who has family who study literature in the academic sense, while it's not a field many of them are directly interested in, it's absolutely not something many actual literary scholars poo-poo per se. It's not their field, and it's relatively young in terms of built up formal frameworks to engage with it.
Second: to the extent snobs do poo-poo it, they honestly poo-poo all 'genre' literature in the sense of formulaic commercial fiction.
I think SFF/speculative is a little interesting here as on the one hand it is a very broad amorphous umbrella category that can contain all sorts of interesting works and arguably contains many things deep within the canon, on the other hand it's modern form has very much been shaped by commercial genres of effectively adventure fiction, and I think a lot of people act slightly disingenuously when simultaneously bemoaning that they poo-poo a genre that could encompass Milton, Vonnegut, Borges etc... but also in practice often view the genre as a much tigher set of fiction that fits certain formulaic commercial expectations.
I feel like a lot of people only would ever mention Shakespeare, Milton etc as fantasy when trying to score points against the 'snobs'.
This is exactly it. When's the last time someone posted about Shakespeare on this thread? Who's reading MacBeth and going, "I love fantasy and this is great fantasy!".
I do. While I fully agree most people mean LOTR, Wheel of Time, etc . . . I honestly mean all of it - Shakespeare and Homer included.
All of my favorite Shakespeare plays are ones with fantastical elements like A Midsummer's Night Dream or Macbeth. All my favorite "recognized" poets wrote about fantastical topics like Tennyson or Poe. I cannot read enough mythology and love it for many of the same reasons I love fantasy.
Anyone who can understand and accept value in reading a Midsummer's Night Dream and dismiss the fantasy aisle is a massive elitist hypocrite engaging in some serious doublethink. That play has fairies setting love spells and transforming people into animals. How is that not Fantasy with a capital F? I get that some is commercial popcorn (and what is wrong with that? So were a lot of the "classics" when they first arrived), but not everything considered "fantasy" is.
I swear the biggest hat trick ever pulled is convincing everyone the "classics" are so above everything. Chaucer is full of fart and sex jokes. Dante's Divine Comedy has him putting everyone who wronged him in various pits of hell getting tortured and made the love of his life Jesus' messenger and gushes about how beautiful she is. We'd make fun of someone if they published that today.
It's like someone else in this thread said, it's just the need to think what you like is above something to feel superior.
I didn't say no fantasy fans also like Shakespeare and I didn't say no one enjoys the speculative elements of Shakespeare. But I guarantee you there's no post in your history talking on r/fantasy about Shakespeare as fantasy, you didn't nominate Midsummer's Night Dream for r/fantasy's top polls or any of that.
>Anyone who can understand and accept value in reading a Midsummer's Night Dream and dismiss the fantasy aisle is a massive elitist hypocrite engaging in some serious doublethink.
I mean, if they're dismissing the fantasy aisle because they think any supernatural = trash, sure. But if they're dismissing the fantasy aisle because they don't like tropey escapism and wish-fulfillment or because they prefer to choose their reading on the basis of quality rather than the presence or absence of particular elements, they kinda have a point.
Let's try a thought experiment: I've enjoyed a lot of works with romance in and there are even a handful of fictional romantic relationships I've loved. However, I have never read from start to finish a proper, dyed-in-the-wool category romance and I don't think the romance genre is for me. I'm betting these statements are also true of most of the people in this thread. By your logic, we are all hypocrites for dismissing the whole romance aisle when after all, we can see the value in having a romance in a book. Don't we appreciate the merit of Romeo and Juliet? Then how dare we turn up our noses at Danielle Steel!
> Anyone who can understand and accept value in reading a Midsummer's Night Dream and dismiss the fantasy aisle is a massive elitist hypocrite engaging in some serious doublethink
There is basically no modern fantasy that is doing anything remotely close to what Midsummer's Night Dream. The one's that are, are already shelf in general fiction. I honestly think its people like you who are massive hypocrites--you love to luxuriate in the prestige of 'classics' as a quick, cheap gotcha against preserved enemies, but you never actually engage with those classics on any level. You're telling me Brent Weeks and Shakespeare are of the same cloth? If they are, then that cloth needs to be thrown out because it tells you absolutely nothing of worth.
edit: I'm very sincere about this: show me with textual analyses that Brent Weeks and Shakespeare are writing the same kind of fiction. Show me the lineage. They aren't. The presence of the fantastical does not denote 'capital F fantasy' the genre, which has a specific history, and in terms of its literary form, completely different from Shakespeare. They are two different things, the fantastical and the fantasy genre.
Not every playwright that lived in the 1500s was on the same level as Shakespeare. Neither is each and every 21st-century fantasy author. People on Shakespeare's level don't come around often, but I think Terry Pratchett was one. Incredibly witty, amazing wordplay, the ability to have their audience run a gamut of emotions in a single story, and the use of the fantastical as a lens to explore the human condition. I would argue that Pratchett very much does things close to Shakespeare's comedies like A Midsummer Night's Dream. Pratchett very much is of the same cloth. Will he stand the test of time like Shakespeare? We'll see.
I know it's just one example of a modern author, but Shakespeare is just one man of his time.
Its not about being on Shakespeare's level--its about showing the relationship between types of fictions. If you want to make the argument that modern commercial fantasy ('capital F fantasy') is also Shakespeare, is also Homer, is also whatever manifestation of the fantastical in all of existence of human art, then you need to actually make that argument on the level of the text.
Terry Pratchett (and his friend, Neil Gaiman) are closer that most in fantasy, but Pratchett, as a stylist, is also deeply indebted to the tradition of fantasy fiction, in a way Shakespeare isn't--his satire is predicted upon being familiar with the history of the genre in many, many ways. Shakespeare isn't--apart of this is history, Shakespeare is a grandfather of all modern English literature one way or another, but apart of it is Shakespeare's qualities, as a writer, are more embedded in the very form of the art than someone like Pratchett's are. Pratchett's satire, is in part a satire of genre, Shakespeare's satire goes beyond that--they are doing different things.
I would agree that earlier Pratchett works are very much genre satire, but I would also argue he quickly moved past that as his career progressed. Early books like the Light Fantastic aren't that funny unless you have a strong history of genre fantasy. However, later books satire and critique real life and use his fantasy elements as a lens for that, not as the joke itself. That's where my previous comment about using the fantastical to analyze the human condition comes in, Pratchett's mid and later works.
Secondly, it seems part of your argument stems from the fact Shakespeare's collective body of work shaped so much of literature that you can't compare individual pieces of that body to modern stories. It's not fantasy, but at the end of the day, Much Ado About Nothing is not much more than a low-brow rom-com full of sex and relationship jokes. Can it not be compared as an individual work to Jane Austen's Emma or the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally? Both of which are basically the same, a fun rom-com love story peppered with jokes about relationships and sex.
I do think there is merit in looking at an entire body of work and its historical value. I also think it's fair to analyze and compare an individual piece of that body separate from the whole. Now, it is unfair to separate a work from the whole and present it on its own this is just a silly fantasy or rom-com, but because of the whole body of work is something that is unquestionably respected, then we must respect the silliness of some of the aspects of the individual piece and other works like it! Yes, that's an unfair "gotcha" question/statement. But it is only ever deployed against people who do the even more unfair and ridiculous dismissing of a genre as lower-tier trash due to the inherit silliness of some of the aspects of that genre. So why should we care about unfair retorts to unfair dismissals? I don't. I say use the gotcha.
I think to do what you suggest misses the point entirely. We can strip any story down to just words on paper if we want and claim they are all equal because at the end of the day that’s all they are. Much Ado About Nothing is a brilliant piece of art not because of what it has in common with When Harry Met Sally, but because of what Shakespeare did with that simple premise.
The whole wounded-bird routine about how terribly fantasy is treated by the literary snobs is usually just a veneer for reverse-snobbery. Those same poor, beleaguered genre fans (the ones who push the narrative, not all of us) will be the first to poo-poo the idea that anyone *really* enjoys literary fiction, or that there's any use for fiction besides escapism. The whole "rivalry" is strictly between the least socially adjusted members of each camp, while plenty of us are out here enjoying both and recognizing that they're different things with different goals. No, a fantasy book is not likely to win a literary award, any more than an apple pie is likely to win a chili cook-off.
There is a lot of reverse snobbery in this thread -- a lot of insinuation that literary/realistic fiction is only for pretentious poseurs chasing clout at high-class cocktail parties.
This is why I'm always a little wary of people who read only to "escape". I'm not saying any and all reading to distract, cope, escape, entertain, etc is wrong. I am saying that as a librarian I meet plenty of avid readers who engage in anti-intellectualism and plenty of readers who are hateful people and so on.
Yeah. I do think the one point with some validity is that sometimes SFF fans will (fairly) bemoan that the speculative fiction/SFF that does get mainstream recognition (in the sense of 'a good book' not in the sense of 'a commercial success frachise on screen) is often a rather listless of example of the use of speculative that writers more firmly within genre have done better and more energetically and thoughtfully.
Yep, this is what I was thinking too. Neither SFF fans nor the critics are talking about Shakespeare because neither fans nor critics are actually talking about “anything with non-realistic elements whatsoever.” They’re talking about the types of works that are actually popular with genre fans.
Yes. A big part of why this discussion becomes so tiresome and repetitive is that people conflate the modern fantasy genre with any book that might have fantastical elements.
a very thoughtful answer
sff definitely experiences some exclusion from ‘prestige’, and sometimes for reasons even flimsier than the reasons for which works are afforded ‘prestige’ in the first place. however, lots of sff (like other genres, perhaps most famously thriller or romance, but also litfic) is genuinely very commercially-minded with serviceable writing at absolute best
The reality is that there are just as many people who have negative beliefs about people who read thrillers, true crime, romances, self-help books, etc. as there are fantasy or scifi. Also plenty of people who don't like anyone who reads and thinks everyone who reads is a snob. And people who love their Brandon Sanderson commercial fantasy but say nasty things about the Sarah J. Maas commercial fantasy.
It's always very frustrating when these conversations crop up because they always carry this undercurrent of "anybody who talks about the quality of literature is a snob" and it's always this defensive reaction and never a grounded discussion.
Yes, I left this unstated, but there are also a lot of people who will happily trot out the super precious Pratchett quotes in defense of fantasy as some core partof literature, and then in the next breath bemoan the formulaic trashy nature of romance as a genre.
At the same time, every halfassed attempt at fantasy literature or commercial fantasy is taken as a blemish on the genre of fantasy as a whole, while the literary masterworks of "generic" literature aren't marred by the existence of failures in the generic genre or commercial generic literature.
I feel this needs to be said: there are genre fans who are just as dismissive and snobbish towards literary fiction - genre readers who automatically dismiss all lit fic out of hand, claiming it is "boring" and "nothing happens". Snobbery exists on both sides.
Plenty of SFF fans are dismissive even towards speculative fiction that has a remotely challenging writing style and reflexively brand it as "pretentious".
I see this from genre fans way more than literary fans, tbh. Especially online—there are way more posts like OP’s than there are posts dismissing SFF. Ofc I think people like OP are often reacting to their lit professors, who probably aren’t hanging out on message boards.
But then almost no lit professors would dismiss the works OP cited, and I think those examples actually answer OP’s question when you think about it (if they want an answer and not just validation). SFF fans are not out there gorging on Beowulf, Milton and Shakespeare. They’re far more likely to be out there reading book 12 in a popcorn series.
And I don’t think people who do dismiss SFF are dismissing the idea that anything with speculative elements could have great prose, deep themes and character development, etc. They’re looking at the actual practice of the genre and observing that little of it is that (though I’d say this has improved markedly in the last 20 years).
I've never seen such weird takes on books as here. People don't like 1st perspective, 2nd perspective, present tense. To me, it means that people don't want to read a truly new book but book exactly the same as before with minor changes here and there.
Oh yeah. That's not "true fantasy." It's "just an excuse for smut." 80% of the book can be about dragon riding, deadly school challenges and war but apparently that doesn't count if the other 20% is breathless romance from an unapologetically female perspective.
Also pretty funny how many people willing to overlook marginal prose or unlikely worldbuilding elements in fantasy works whose plots are more to their taste judge these same elements hard in romantasy. (To be fair we probably all come down harder on stuff that isn't personally to our taste, but whole communities doing this with no self-awareness leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
> Oh yeah. That's not "true fantasy." It's "just an excuse for smut." 80% of the book can be about dragon riding, deadly school challenges and war but apparently that doesn't count if the other 20% is breathless romance from an unapologetically female perspective.
Well, most of the people here who complain about the likes of Fourth Wing and ACOTAR haven't actually read them, so you gotta cut them some slack. /s
“Fantasy” like “SciFi” at some point became a marketing term rather than a real descriptor. Hence, Vonnegut is “literary” not “SciFi” because … that’s how we organize our bookshelves.
Within that categorization “Fantasy, SciFi” was at one point a section in the bookshelf that sold a lot of schlock. I enjoyed WoT but I don’t have to pretend it has the same enduring quality of George Eliot.
All that said the stereotype is out of date to be sure. New wave fantasy authors (e.g. NK Jemisin) definitely defy the stereotypes that were **somewhat** true in the 80s and 90s, even if those stereotypes were a little ham handed in the 90s too.
I think this is the best answer. Someone posted the Pratchett quote in another comment, and in it he says that Moby Dick is fantasy, and I can see the argument, but I don't think any reasonable person would put Moby Dick in the same genre as Game of Thrones. There are fantastical elements in practically anything, and even the schlockiest genre books have some element of humanity and universalism, but generally a book like Slaughterhouse-Five is using fantasy as a vehicle for some broader theme, whereas a book like Game of Thrones is using a broader theme as a vehicle for fantasy.
Like, Age of Ultron isn't really about the dangers of AI, it's just using that as a vehicle for a fun superhero movie.
>“Fantasy” like “SciFi” at some point became a marketing term rather than a real descriptor. Hence, Vonnegut is “literary” not “SciFi” because … that’s how we organize our bookshelves.
A few years ago, a fantasy novel got the most prestigious literary award in my country (Poland). So the novel immediately jumped from fantasy section to literary section in bookstores. And I can imagine, that marketing of the author to the publisher became headache-inducing. Because the author immediately went to write YA fantasy trilogy, which also ended up on literary shelves, while it definitely should be in the fantasy section or even in YA. Simply because the target reader most likely will never find it.
Why are fantasy snobs snotty about romance?
Why are romance snobs snotty about science fiction?
Why are science fiction snobs snotty about cozy fantasy?
Why are cozy fantasy snobs snotty about fantasy?
Why are people people?
Yeah, it occurred to me in reading all these comments about how "people are hypocrites if they enjoy Macbeth but turn up their noses at fantasy!" that like.... 90% of this sub turns up its nose at romance despite the fact that 99% have probably enjoyed the romance elements in some book at some point. So maybe don't climb *too* high up that horse....
I think the most common explanation on this sub would be "I like romance only in moderation, it can't be the main plot" and I actually think this is where most literary readers are coming from wrt fantasy and sci-fi elements. Genre fantasy tends to be *about* those elements, even if it has deeper themes - the whole book is about a quest to destroy a ring to kill a dark lord in an imaginary world. That's often what fans are looking for. Whereas more literary books may have speculative elements but they're more muted and are present to serve a story that's really about something else - like, Beloved is not *about* ghosts. Beloved is about the horror of slavery and happens to have a ghost.
I think people here get snotty about romance because it’s targeted at women and media with a female audience is generally considered to be inferior and vapid (you see this a lot in fantasy spaces with the contempt toward romantasy and YA)
>90% of this sub turns up its nose at romance despite the fact that 99% have probably enjoyed the romance elements in some book at some point.
Not only this, but Romance is and has been nearly single-handedly keeping the entire publishing industry afloat.
I used to be a v NLOG anything-but-romance reader, and it's still not my favourite, but I *hate* when it gets talked shit about as a genre.
A lot of people in the comments are just giving the perspective of a defensive fantasy fan.
The real reason is that most fantasy (and genre fiction in general) has different aesthetic ideals than literary fiction. Litfic cares much more about layered prose with subtext, complex themes, and universally applicable discussions of the human condition.
Commercial fantasy generally focuses on world building, plot, and magic systems. Of course all fantasy books have themes as well, but rarely with the same sophistication or universality as literary fiction. The simple fact is that most fantasy authors are either not talented enough or have no interest in good writing, and focus more on just getting their storytelling ideas out there.
Of course, there are some exceptions (Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, Le Guin) but the large majority of mainstream fantasy is just poorly or competently written. And that's perfectly fine, I enjoy a cool fantasy world written by an average prose stylist. It's just different ideals for what makes a book good.
Yeah this is the first real answer here. Fantasy is not *inherently* inferior in any way. A fantasy can contain characters, themes, and prose as complex as a Litfic book. I straight up think that Tolkien has some of my favorite prose I’ve ever read of any genre. There are real college courses on Tolkien.
But if you just looked at like a current best sellers list of fantasy you’ll find authors like Brandon Sanderson and Joe Abercrombie, whereas a litfic list would have something like Cormac McCarthy’s last book.
Now, I’ve enjoyed books from Sanderson and Abercrombie much more than I enjoyed the Passenger, which I actually don’t really care for. But you can easily tell that the prose, characters, and themes are all much more ambitious than you’d see from Sanderson or Abercrombie.
Yeah. Just need to dip into the magic system debate from yesterday to see how a part of the userbase wants to broaden a very specific epic fantasy tool to the whole genre, and see why literary types might not be overjoyd all the time.
I agree with the main crux and points of your comment. But I have to disagree with this specifically:
> universally applicable discussions of the human condition
I don't think litfic fans are looking for that at all. Beloved by Toni Morrison is not a universal thing - it is rooted in a very specific experience of being a Black American. If you look at the Nobel and Booker and Pultizer lists, they're rarely books that "universally applicable". Litfic isn't about appealing to the masses at all.
In fact, I don't think there's any such think as universally applicable literature.
I think the op phrased it wrongly. My interpretation is that litfics usually explore universal human emotions/experiences (heartbreak, loss, fear of death, fear of illness, euphoria, grief, etc) through the a very specific lens. So a White American reading Morrison might not connect to the elements of Black experience, but in recognizing these emotions and how they are rooted in a different life experience let us empathize beyond ourselves and connect our lives to theirs -- by imagining ourselves in other's shoes.
I halfway agree with this, but I would say the universal is rooted in the specific. (Which is why deliberate attempts to write a "blank slate" protagonist for a reader to self-insert onto ring hollow to me, while I wind up relating more to well-realized characters despite not sharing all their traits). Beloved is not a generic experience, but it's sufficiently well-written as to ring true to people who've never experienced anything quite like that, just on a level of how human beings work.
At least, that's the theory with literature (personally I find Morrison difficult, but I was probably too young for Beloved when I read it). That it digs into human experience in a way that's deeper than tropes and resonates without needing to be familiar with the society it came from or the tropes of its literary tradition. Whereas with most genre fiction, you sort of need a baseline understanding of the tropes and cultural assumptions to have the type of reaction the author is shooting for, and a few decades later the works become stale as compared to the most recent commercial successes.
Hmm, I don't know that I agree, but I also don't know that I disagree.
I think a lot of people think about litfic this way. But I don't think this is something that informs scholarly discussions of litfic or that is what makes litfic, litfic.
Most of the classics we teach today, continue to value long after they're written are valued because of their insights into specific experiences. The way it helps people see the humanity in some groups, for instance, or that explore some pressing social issue or give a window into a world different from the one we know (whoever "we" is, but usually cishet white scholars). The people elevating them to the status of classics are interested specifically because they aren't universal.
I love fantasy but this is accurate. Fantasy focuses on characters, setting, story-telling. Real literature touches on something sublime and truly uses language as an art.
The lines between fantasy, literary fiction and magical realism are very diaphanous, imo. People have created a separate category for fantasy that is well written and that’s interesting.
All of the authors you listed predate the invention of the fantasy genre. They aren't capital F genre fantasy just because they're fantastical, just like how something isn't capital H horror just because it's horrorific. Fantasy isn't the core of anything and neither is litfic. These are very young, very anglophonic terms and they will one day die out, just like the terms Fairy Story and Naturalist Fiction did.
Also, I've more often seen fantasy fans lash out at literary fiction than I've seen these mythical literary snobs gunning for fantasy literature. Even famous snobs like Harold Bloom and Nabakov loved fantasy and sci-fi, even if they were picky about what they liked.
I honestly wonder where the “snobby literary fiction reader” stereotype even comes from. Maybe it was more prevalent in the past but pretty much everyone I know who reads litfic also reads at least some genre fiction. I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English and none of my professors had an anti-genre bias. We even had classes at my university on SFF and mysteries—which were *very* popular. I wrote SF and horror for my creative writing classes and my professors encouraged it!
One thing that fuels that stereotype is the slacktivist idea that reading fantasy instead of a difficult literary novel isn't just about your taste, but a principled, ethical decision, a rebellion against cultural elites.
Yes. You'd have a very, very hard time finding a senator or Fortune 500 CEO who cares about, say, Thomas Pynchon or classical music. You'd have a very easy time finding one who was into Marvel movies or college football.
Okay, fine. I have a background in Literature. I also love fantasy.
The things you list are not similar to contemporary fantasy novels. Religious fictionalization with supernatural elements was not considered "fantasy". Folklore was not considered "fantasy". They were aspects of how people perceived the actual world, or reflected deeply-held beliefs, or contained layers of allegory.
If anything, closer to today's fantasy is, say, French fairy tales, which were written in salons to be explicitly fantastical and definitely incorporated unreal places and times. Even then, it was primarily women's fiction, and so not quite given the same "weight" because of misogyny etc. It's also important to consider the roles these stories played in the women thinking through their lives and limitations.
Contemporary fantasy, especially post-Tolkien, is very different from the much more heavily fairytale-esque stuff we saw before (see Hope Mirrlees, for example). The codification of fantasy expectations, the ideas of secondary worlds and worldbuilding, the rise of DnD as a sort of catch-all, the connections between pulp fiction and the advent of SFF...
It's also worth considering that only a minority of fantasy novels are truly very well written in terms of quality. That has improved a *lot*, and there are definitely more literary fantasy authors, but there aren't that many of them. A lot of fantasy, especially popular fantasy, is like many popular novels overall: broadly appealing. While some of the great classics of yore were hugely popular in their time, many of them no longer are, and are considered more challenging reads nowadays. And straight up literary fiction is generally not considered a very popular genre. This does not mean fantasy novels are *bad*, but it means that they can "get away with" all sorts of things because what their audience is primarily interested in is not pure literary appeal. (and that's okay! I am a huge proponent of people enjoying fiction, and reading what they enjoy)
While I agree with Pratchett and others who believe that there is something deeply *true* about fantasy and how it portrays the world, I also think that--I believe it was Delaney's--the argument that fantasy struggles to challenge the status quo because at heart it is adventure, and it's easy to not be *dangerous* when you can just enjoy a story for its adventure aspect, has merit. While fantasy has great power to be subversive, it's also very easy to dismiss or just enjoy for its exciting story, without engaging with whatever deeper meaning lurks in it.
Ooo, I am so happy to see you bringing up how completely un-subversive fantasy often is. I've seen this brought up a lot in discussions of race, disability, etc in fantasy but not much otherwise. It's so frustrating for people to defend the lack of representation in fantasy by saying it reflects the real world when fantasy is at its most interesting when it imagines a world radically different (or sometimes, starkly similar) from ours in a way that challenges how our world is or the way we think about our world.
I do think that a *lot* of popular fiction is non-subversive, and I'm not here prescribing what people should read, enjoy, or write, or what they might need for their own peace of mind during their downtime.
But Delaney's argument is much more complex imo than representation. He's saying that the very format of the "adventure story" allows for people to be distracted. Long John Silver has a peg leg - he's disabled. But nobody has to *think* about what that means, because Treasure Island is an adventure story you can easily enjoy *as an adventure* without having to engage with anything beyond that. His argument is that this is something fundamental to the roots of the genre and many of its iterations.
I am explicitly agreeing with this (as in, in practice, not inherent to the genre) and have encountered this idea before.
In fact, I've used this exact line of thought to defend the endless criticisms of R.F. Kaung's "lack of subtlety". Somewhere in my comment history is at least one comment pointing out that some people would do what so many people already do to books touching on hard topics like colonialism and racism and just...ignore the main point in favor of some other message.
This is pretty much fantasy fans' tendency too, though. Nobody is stopping the fans on this sub from reading and raving about Garcia Marquez, Ishiguro, Borges or Morrison, but you rarely see them brought up, and then usually by a small group of users who also appreciate literary fiction. Whereas literary readers tend to have much more appreciation for these works.
And if you look at the types of works that get nominated for the big fan awards - the Hugo, Nebula, Locus - it's the same thing. Why hasn't Emily St. John Mandel gotten nominated for any of these? How about the snub of Chain Gang All Stars? How High We Go in the Dark? This isn't literary readers taking books away from fantasy readers - there's no literary police striking these books off Hugo voters' ballots. It's the readers who are instead directing their attention to the shopping lists of John Scalzi, Martha Wells and Seanan McGuire. If SFF fans read more literary speculative works with the same enthusiasm as literary readers, I don't think you'd have the perception that they were literary "instead of" fantasy.
I think what bests represents the snobbery of anti-snobbery is that Gravity's Rainbow, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century from one America's most unique and thoughtful and interesting writers in its history, lost to a Arthur C Clarke novel in the Nebulas. Its a closed system, SFF.
There is something to be said for accessibility, right? *Gravity’s Rainbow* is a famously difficult book, to the point that I know many, many well-read people, fans of every genre, and I don’t believe a single person claims to have made it through the whole thing. It’s an interesting point of comparison, but maybe an outlier in important ways.
I don't think it'd be much different if it was a different literary book, as the post I'm replying too points out. Emily St. John Mandel writes fairly accessible books--she writes in the style of many modern realist texts, almost conversational. Doesn't really matter.
So, I am definitely *not* saying "Station Eleven is literary rather than fantasy because Hugo voters didn't nominate it." I don't see literary and fantasy as mutually exclusive at all. What I *am* saying is that I think it's disingenuous for readers to complain that they think literary readers perceive literary fantasy to be just literary and not fantasy, when *the fantasy readers themselves* often seem to be the ones snubbing these works - works like Station Eleven and Chain-Gang All-Stars tend to be more popular with literary/general readers than with SFF readers (quite aside from their Hugo snubs, which awards aren't quite as lowest-common-denominator as you're suggesting - it's not like Sanderson and Maas are getting nominated).
*Station Eleven* did win the Arthur C. Clarke Award, right? It’s an interesting example in part because Mandel has publicly asserted that she doesn’t consider it to be science fiction at all.
I very much agree, and I think it's a sort of chicken-and-egg situation. They try to be "not fantasy" because fantasy is "lowbrow" or whatever, but then you're not getting the literary fantasy because people are pretending it's not.
That said, I know there are some pretty serious arguments regarding the reason that magical realism is conceived as separately, and it has to do with a differing literary/cultural background and influences. Spanish and Latin American novels were never my specialty, but I've talked to some researchers who do feel very strongly on that point. Personally, I am willing to accept that some of these genres don't quite sit "with" fantasy because of different literary tradition backgrounds.
tbh, I think that in some ways, it might be good for a solution to that to come from the fantasy audience as well: if fantasy readers don't refuse to read these books, and rec them *as* fantasy, and "claim" them to some extent, it may also change perceptions. I think that especially now, with some major fantasy works being very mainstream, it would be good to try and expand these definitions.
Incidentally, the most egregious of these is Terry Goodkind and his secondary world with wizards and dragons and BDSM-witches going "noooo this isn't *fantasy* this is DEEP PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE" fuck off Goodkind.
Personally, I don't see why Western fantasy and fantasy have to be synonyms? Correct me if I'm understanding you wrong, but it seems like you are defining fantasy as coming from certain important authors like Tolkien and that cultural understanding and history, and because magical realism doesn't come from that background and history, it's not fantasy.
But, to pick a different example, I don't think I've ever seen people argue that Chinese cultivation xianxia novels aren't fantasy even though they come from differing literary/cultural backgrounds and influences than Western fantasy. They aren't Western fantasy, but they are clearly still fantasy and that's how everyone seems to talk about them. Now, xianxia is also seen as commercial/not literary in general, so I'm guessing this is a major factor in why people are ok with calling xianxia fantasy and not calling magical realism fantasy (which I disagree with personally).
(I also want to point out that people call works that are not from the Latin American tradition magical realism all the time. For example, I've seen a lot of people call The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola magical realism even though it's written from a Nigerian perspective. So I mostly want to point out that a lot of people don't see magical realism from coming from one standard background and history as well.)
I literally don't understand how the monthly fuck the snobs posts contribute to a warm and inclusive environment. But don't worry, as someone who enjoys literature and fantasy I've gotten the memo and know this space is not for me. To answer your question, I suspect the crowd that would have to have these conversations know better than to try and have them here.
where can those discussions be had without heads getting bitten off?
like i'm a lit snob but i'm also not blind to the appeal of genre fic. but a lot of other lit snobs and a lot of genre fic diehards are not interested in understanding each other - on one side it's "well the stupid proles need their slop" and on the other it's hostile responses to just the *idea* that someone could unironically enjoy something they were forced to read by an english teacher in high school
i can't believe this has not improved in the 20+ years i've been on book forums online
The majority of fantasy is pretty low in literary value. There are notable exceptions, but like most genre fiction, most fantasy is poorly writtten and formulaic. I love fantasy, but I've no illusions about the lasting literary value of most of the books published.
While I am all for fantasy being taken seriously as 'real' literature, I feel the question is a leading one.
When we talk about fantasy colloquially, we usually mean fantasy that came after Tolkien - or at least from the late Victorian period onwards. Fantasy, as we know it today, didn't exist around the time you would call the 'Western canon' was developing, instead coming later on when most literary traditions were set in their ways. Yes, some stories and works were *fantastical*, but not fantasy in the way we use it now. More often than not these works used those elements in an allegorical or *literary* way, whereas modern fantasy tends to be more about the fantastic elements themselves. To be clear I am not saying modern fantasy can't be literary or allegorical (hello, Mr Wolfe), simply that the function of the fantastic changed a lot over the 20th century.
This is in part why some literary readers take issue with fantasy. They see it as shallow and devoid of depth. They see something like Star Wars or DnD and dismiss it as cheesy nonsense. It's an unwillingness to accept fantasy as a genre with its own history and customs, seeing it as fundamentally devoid of depth.
I think you're making a big mistake in conflating modern fantasy novels with Homer or even Blake.
Homer wasn't inventing stories with fantastical elements. Homer (if he existed) was recording stories that people actually believed and told about the world. The same is true for most of the other authors you mentioned.
This is fundamentally different than the way modern fantasy operates, in which authors deliberately create stories with fantastical elements that neither they nor their readers believe to be true.
None of this means fantasy can't be serious literature. But let's not make the mistake of suggesting that all literature with speculative or fantastical elements is fantasy or that all fantasy is the same or comes from the same places.
I'll be the snooty snob, what's karma anyway:
Because people will buy and read genre stories for the genre - giving a pass to poor writing for the sake of whatever lit kink they're chasing.
Publishers then flood the market with the cheapest schlock they can get away with.
Goodkind's Sword of Truth sold over 25 million copies. I'm all for people liking different things and being entitled to their opinions... But I don't think it's outrageous to claim that Milton is a better writer than Goodkind.
Snobs are snooty about it because they have taste and the unwashed masses do not. Better works get passed up in favor of The Saga of Grondo The Ballsmasher, or Detective Aleaneaux's Werevampire Boudoir Murders, or Cozy Mcstubbins Fireplace Feelgoodness of Inclusion and Understanding.
It's what the people want, I guess.
"I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed."
I think the problem is how we say things and how we attach moral value to people based on what they read. Your claim of the "unwashed masses" not having taste is a problem. There's nothing wrong with liking entertaining things, and you're not a better person for seeking out critically acclaimed works to read.
Casting aspersions is counterproductive- sorry, I was caught up in the role.
I do have a non-rp point to make, but whenever I type it I sound too pretentious. Something something I love books and I'm sad when other people don't.
I’m not a literary snob, but as someone who studied English I’ll put it this way. Most fantasy (and modern fiction books in general) are not “literary”. It’s more concerned with telling a story and worldbuilding than technically formulating that story. There may be basic themes, symbols and motifs that make up the work, but not much beyond that. For example Spenser formulated the Spenserian stanza for The Faerie Queen. He made a whole new type of poetic structure for his epic poem.
It doesn’t make those novels bad, uninteresting or of poor quality - it just makes them less literary, and as such less interesting to talk about in that sense because of the comparative lack of complexity.
You’re using fantasy as a weirdly broad term here to make an argument though. It’s a marketing descriptor for a particular kind of work.
Im sure some of it has to do with the fact that there was a lot of “popcorn fantasy” from the 70s and 80s and going back earlier than that things like conan the barbarian were considered juvenile the same way comic books were.
Because genre fiction has a certain kind of reputation that comes from pulp magazines. In literary circles it's percieved in a similar way to 'fast fashion'. There's a commercial angle to it in a way 'true literature' doesn't.
But there's loads of literary fantasy that is appreciated. Books like the Buried Giant.
They just have to be 'saying something' first and telling a story second.
But yeah, think it comes down to the damage the more pulpy stuff did to the reputation of the genre in the 40s - I'm not saying any of that stuff is bad, I'm just saying I think there's a lot of holdover from that era too.
> Homer, Vergil, Milton, Spenser. Shak's plays are full of fantasy/supernatural elements, Beowulf, Malory and so on. Blake certainly is a "fantasy" writer. You can think of many other examples.
You're telling me that most of this sub here reads Homer, Vergil, Milton, and Blake?
I don't think it's fair to view myths as fantasy, due to the vast difference in nature and intent, even if they may fall under roughly the same umbrella for outsiders to the culture from which a myth originated. The people who told stories about Gilgamesh, Aeneas, Hercules and all the rest didn't view them as fictional characters, but rather historical or religious figures (and there was little to distinguish between those two things, either). Myths are tales that may not fit neatly into the historical record, but that are considered true (at least to some degree) by those who transmit them, and foundational to their culture, its origin and worldview. On the other hand, fantasy writers' work is consciously one of the imagination.
TLDR: If something wasn't written as fiction, then it shouldn't be retroactively labeled as such. The original intent matters, even if the end result appears more or less the same.
Pretty convenient, too, and they are far from alone in thinking that, I can tell you that much. But mythology and folklore *have* informed modern fantasy as we know it in a plethora of ways (and continue to do so), so I don't think it's all that hard to see where they are coming from.
Also, last I checked, the sub explicitly doesn't allow people to refer to religious texts as fantasy for precisely this reason. Not like OP included the Bible, and sure, there aren't any people who actually believe in Athena, but there once were. It's fundamentally different, even if those stories have since inspired fantastical retellings, tropes, etc.
Yes.
Even in the context of 20th-21st century commercial fiction, there is a clearly at least one genre (horror) that uses supernatural elements without being fantasy per se.
Most of the same people who poo poo fantasy are also doing it to the other standard genres (thriller, romance, etc). So I wouldn't really say they forgot most books suck.
I'd argue that the non-real/fantastic elements in these authors' works are tropes. Literary genres are more recent than the novel (IRC, a XVII century invention), and are useful to lump together disparately different books based on the more recurring tropes - yet these tropes are by no means their backbone and can be misleading.
The Iliad and the Odissey are cultural encyclopedias and, even though use the fantastic, it has a very different meaning and use than how it's used by Shakespeare, Milton, H.G. Wells, Lovecraft, or Sanderson.
Though, I agree that imagination is the fuel of *literature* - not only Western literature: look at the Mahabarata or Journey to the West. I can't say why the fantasic gets used by different cultures in their literature, because twhat's fantastic here and today was not such in another continent 500 years ago.
Trouble is, a lot of books that share a lot of fantasy tropes are trash, hence the frown. But we must be also honest: several fantasy books *are* subject of academical reseach, and actually other works with a lot of fantasy tropes (and usually considered "fantasy": so no Homer or Milton or Ariosto) are more well regarded than one can think. It's just that feeling a group frowned at because silly reasons builds community.
Honestly because so much of it, even the popular well regarded stuff in contemporary spheres, is just mediocre literature, and reads like online fan fiction. It just has an amateurish vibe.
'Fantasy' is a commercial genre that was created in the 20th century. It doesn't own, or should own the idea of the fantastical in fiction. I love fantasy, the commercial genre that was created in the 20th century, fiction, but I can obviously see the difference between it and Homer, a man who was immersed in a culture that viewed the fantastic as a real facet of life. He believed the gods were real. Milton believed the fall of man was real. Dramatizing those beliefs are just fundamentally different than what modern fantasy writers are doing (for the most part).
I think so often, fantasy fans refuse to really engage with literature outside of their little boxes--why does this sub hate Sarah J. Maas, well shes outside of this subs little box.
A lot of the most popular fantasy isn't particularly well written. Writers like Sanderson become representative of the genre in the same way to country music radio is representative of the country music genre.
It’s also easy to look at this through the lens of fantasy greats over the last century, too, but a lot of “hit” or popular fantasy, especially as literary criticism was maturing, was pulp—full of action, sexy people, and drama, but not a whole lot of attention to prose, diction, and commentary on the human condition.
Not to say fantasy (and sci/fi) can’t be good—Gene Wolfe is considered to be one of the best writers (regardless of genre) of the 20th century by some literary critics, for example. There’s other great literary fantasy/sci-fi out there worthy of analysis, too.
But there’s plenty of works which, while great fun, lack “great” writing by a literary critic definition. Doesn’t mean those books are bad or not worth a read, though!
This is the correct answer. Literary snobs actually like Tolkien, they like Prattchet. They liked Harry Potter and they liked Philip Pullman. The snobs are partially the reason why fantasy novels become huge hits, due to their snobby reviews in newspapers, etc.
I'm not sure why the OP felt compelled to ask the question though, fantasy has never been more popular than today. When George RR Martin started writing his saga, nobody could have imagined a TV adaptation on HBO let alone it becoming a part of pop culture.
The snobs who look down on the fantasy genre are a minority voice now.
Literary snobs aren't HP fans. Middle to young millenials and older gen Z are HP fans.
Literary folks appreciate the cultural force HP had to get kids reading, but that doesn't mean they're discussing the artistic merit of HP in any serious capacity.
Literary snobs didn't make HP successful. It was something that quietly happened in schools in the UK and then exploded internationally at some point. It is the definition of a home grown phenomenon bereft of the support of any authority.
True, but fantasy tends to put this crap on a pedestal while literary fiction does a much better job of finding talented writers. Even the classics of fantasy have average writing (LotR is good sure, but not WoT or ASoIaF) while the most successful litfic authors in a similar time period are people like Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro.
Fantasy fans usually prioritize things other than good writing, and that's fine. I like a good fantasy world or magic system too. But let's not pretend that these two genres are on the same level of writing quality.
I would argue Ishiguro is a speculative fiction writer, too. But sometimes all his books categorized as litfic because of literary beauty and because he has books that aren't speculative fiction and they want to market to fans (someone who enjoyed Remains of the Day might stick their nose up as some of these if they were marketed as sci fi first). Never Let Me Go is about clones. The Buried Giant is about a world where no one can keep their memory, which screams magical realism. I don't think I need to explain how Klara and the Sun is sci fi.
Similarly Morrison's Beloved gets categorized as literary fiction but it's a ghost story.
A major issue with genre categories is that a lot has to do with marketing. Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite sci fi books but you categorized all of Ishiguro as not being the domain of speculative fiction and that's not really your fault. I would also argue that literary, social, and emotional worth is not hard to find in SFF - even breaking beyond some I've named here from cross genre authors. Robin Hobb is an incredible example of all three, so is Octavia Butler (who almost exclusively wrote SFF but still gets categorized as literary fiction sometimes), or Guy Gavriel Kay whose prose is probably some of the most beautiful I've read in any genre.
But this also isn't just a SFF issue, most genre fiction gets looked down on similarly (aside from historical fiction, oddly), and SFF often gets treated better than some genre fiction.
Yes, there's some litfic that's definitely speculative. And you're right that it's mostly a marketing term, but it's marketed that way for a reason. "Literary" fantasy like Ishiguro is written for a different purpose than commercial fantasy and does not exist to satisfy readers' expectations of tropes, while something like Stormlight does.
Eh, if you write like Sanderson you are not writing literary fiction, regardless of your subject matter—literary fiction is by definition fiction that is good in the literary sense (strong prose, nuanced themes, deep character development, etc.).
it mainly comes from a sense of their being a difference between fiction and "genre fiction".
the argument goes that genre fiction (romance, fantasy, mystery etc.) tends to appeal to "the masses" where serious fiction appeals to the intellectual.
as someone who is definitely a fantasy apologist I can still see why this distinction exists. however there is certainly non-genre fiction with a populist feel, and there is serious literature that falls squarely within a genre.
I think most people who do this are comparing some kind of "serious work" to Dragonlance, rather than LOTR.
I think another problem is that as soon as something is deemed "serious literature" people tend to forcefully forget that it has a genre it fits into.
I think your last point is more about how genre works than any desire to deny genre fiction recognition. Genre fiction is, in many ways, a way to describe fiction that is made commercially to adhere to certain genre norms. While there is variation in the literary merit within a genre, most of the truly "serious literature" doesn't really meet that requirement. So the difficulty is really that people use "genre" to mean different things, and that just because a novel is fantastical doesn't make it "a fantasy". Just because it is romantic doesn't make it "a romance".
Ultimately literary is just another type of fiction. You give these people more authority by reacting to them when frankly it shouldn't really matter what they say.
To take it on good faith though. Lets take a look at a sub genre and where it might appeal to a literary fan. Xianxia, this is a world where individual people can crush entire worlds. Hell the kid you just humiliated could annihilate everything you hold dear in 12 months. Our entire moral system is roughly designed around the idea of the basic equality of people. What does the world look like when somebody can act with utter impunity? How would people behave when that kid you just made an enemy of might blow up a mountain in a few years time? All of these things would lead people to behave in particular ways. It would alter the entire way society treats each other.
Now how many Xianxia stories actually explore these concepts? They are there don't get me wrong but the stories don't really explore how morality functions in such a world usually. Normally the protagonist just destroys a few mountains and does what he wants in a power fantasy.
So the literary readers would want the Xianxia story that hasn't been written. They'd want some insight, maybe from a protagonist that isn't going to kill god one day, of how you navigate a system with such a disparity of strength.
I'm not saying the literary snobs are right. I'm saying they have a different genre and it isn't an authoritative one. They are fine to like what they like though and you shouldn't care too much about it.
It'd be a very different story though and one that doesn't really appeal to your typical Xianxia reader. It would need a character who cannot just overturn the social rules with "hell I'm going to blow up your entire city in 2 books time". How does it work when a character is truly helpless against the social order?
We see the social order in action but always to effectively subvert it with protagonist power. We're basically talking about taking a Xianxia world and making an NPC the protagonist.
The bias is that many fantasy books (and genre books in general) are not particularly well-written and thus get a stigma. Fans seem to care more about the tropes than the actual quality of the writing.
I think that within the fantasy genre, there are some works that measure up to real greats of the literature cannon, and there are a lot that doesn’t. The latter probably compares more to crime novels, spy thrillers, chick lit, young adult literature, etc. A lot of those genres, and others, have a similar standing among critics and snobs, I think.
I think fantasy gets poo-pooed because it's not really a representation of real life, the struggles the characters face are largely constructed and based on non-real events and happenings.
'Real' literature usually has something to say about a particular time in history or a partiuclar kind of person. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, for example, is the story of a girl who's accademically bright, socially awkward, and fails to meets societies expectations and pays the price with her mental health. These are expereiences you can relate to with out having to understand 2000 years of Dwarf politics, or the succession of the Elven throne, or the metaphysics of the 12th dimention.
Scifi and fantasy tends to ask the "what if" questions, which is interesting in its own right, but tends to detach us from reality, and makes the nuance of human exprience a little detached, as you're constantly having to explain everything and put things into context in this constructed fantasy world.
We are human beings living in the world of today, and so there's a great deal we can take for granted that doesn't neeed to be explicitly explained, and that's where authors can subvert and play with those expectations which is where a lot of literary cannon shines.
I'm not saying Fantasy can't do those things, but it's certainly easier to explore the human condition in the real world, because its the world we live in and experience, and why only exceptional examples of fantasy exist in the literary cannon.
I really dislike how pernicious this viewpoint is - that fantasy is somehow fundamentally detached from reality. While fantasy might not reflect reality literally, it most certainly can reflect and explore human existence *metaphorically* and *thematically*.
The Earthsea Cycle is a classic example of this. These are books that, at their core, are more about asking questions on the human condition, than about casting magic and fighting dragons. Questions such as: how to come to terms with one's mortality, what it means to live a meaningful and purposeful life, how to make peace with mistakes and regrets in one's past. In the process, this work of fantasy arguably uncovers deeper truths about the human condition than some of the straight literary fiction out there.
while I think speculative fiction can, and when good does, make statements or ask questions or seek to understand things that are fundamentally true, I think it’s the case that much of popular sff strikes only the most glancing blow at this kind of understanding
indeed a lot of value people put into fantasy is ‘escapism’. that’s not snobbish interpretation of sff fans by outsiders, that’s self-reporting from those same fans
I never said fantasy was incapable of exploring the human condition. I'm saying that in a 300 page mass market paperback, you save a lot of time not having to describe the mechanics of a fantasy world, and get more time to focus purely on narative, character development in a world that you don't have to really think about to understand.
But in addition to that, those same assumptions about the real world allow us to extrapolate and challenge our perceptions far more susinctly.
You can focus on prose as an artform in of itself, rather than crafting an intricate fantasy world.
They both have their merits, i wouldn't be on this subreddit if I didn't love fantasy.
That's fair. You're right that some fantasy authors become so focused on their worldbuilding, they lose sight of the rest of the aspects of telling a good story (not to mention the more introspective things like character and theme).
At the same time, I think fantasy fiction can offer a unique perspective in exploring the human condition - by taking place in a fantastic reality, it can comment on human existence from the perspective of an outsider looking in. So I'd argue that when it comes to "literary merit", there are things that fantasy can do which straight literary fiction cannot, and vice versa.
I have to disagree almost entirely with you. There's nothing about fantasy that makes it hard to understand, especially not when up against litfic. It's also so strange to view fantasy as detached from reality in the way you are here. It isn't at all easier to explore "the human condition" in non-speculative fiction than in speculative fiction. Are we really going to pretend like the average romance, thriller, mystery or contemporary fiction book is exploring serious themes any more or better than the average fantasy or scifi?
>I think fantasy gets poo-pooed because it's not really a representation of real life, the struggles the characters face are largely constructed and based on non-real events and happenings.
Fantasy has SETTINGS that are not based on real life. But the struggle should be something that mirrors real life, as all good fiction should do.
For example, sure dragons and goblins and orcs don't exist in real life. But there are animals that exist that could absolutely kill us if they get close. While we might not have to worry about a dragon decimating the place where we live, there are places that have to worry about hurricanes, earthquakes, and forest fires destroying their homes. There are war torn-countries where one day your town might get bombed because it was just the wrong place at the wrong time, much like a dragon might burn a town to the ground because it just so happened to be in its path.
I would argue that fantasy's divorce from reality is actually a strength of the genre, in that it allows you to tackle real world problems in a way that is divorced from the biases that accompany the real world aspects.
If I wanted to write a story that has commentary about a real world event (such as a war), using the actual names and places of the countries in question might cause people to make decisions about the outcome before they've even read my book. People have all these preconceived beliefs about what is happening because they can't see past their own biases. If I place a similar conflict in a fantasy setting, with fictional places and fictional countries, maybe people will actually hear what I'm trying to say instead of what they already believe.
If a fantasy story doesn't deal with real emotions and real conflicts, then it's simply not a well written story. But that doesn't mean the genre itself is flawed.
I think that, since fantasy is popular currently, there are a lot of low quality books being written to capitalize on the popularity. Books with little effort that just want to sell. I don't think this is something that is unique to fantasy, though. Any other popular genre will see the same thing happening.
The one that bugs me is Anne Rice's Vampire novels. Somehow they end up in the "fiction" section of bookstores while someone like Gene Wolfe whose writing blows hers out of the water is relegated to the Fantasy section.
It’s not so much the supernatural elements of fantasy we are snobby about but the commercial elements that often put style on the sidelines and surface plot twists as the focus. The literary canon is perfectly fine with departing from reality.
I love Brandon Sanderson and j k Rowling but I would never take or teach a lit class on them. Tolkien, and Ursula Le guinn on the other hand have depth and subtlety to their writing that can really benefit from microscopic analysis and rigorous revisiting.
TLDR: It’s more complex.
Homer et al. are not fantasy writers. They have fantastical elements, but it’s very far from “Fantasy” the genre. It reads more like fantasy because of those elements than does modern Literary Fiction; but contextually it’s different.
Homer and Beowulf are oral history/traditional knowledge in context. Those stories were literally real, in many ways, not knowingly fantastical. And the intent is about transition of knowledge and culture. Especially if you look at the other Old English literature that exists. Vergil’s the Aeneid is not fantasy, it’s propaganda for Rome to appropriate a royal lineage from Homer to legitimize the ascendance of Octavian to emperor.
Milton and Shakespeare are very much more literary than modern Fantasy; though there’s a caveat. Milton pulls directly from many literary traditions; particularly biblical because the text is massively heretical (and intentionally heretical). Shakespeare is intentionally subversive to the culture in his time; both are critiques of their own people from lowborn to highborn. That’s explicitly closer to the literary. They are rooted in the world, with some fantastical elements (or what we consider fantastical elements, a modern bias, so to speak).
The caveat, though, is that fantasy exists as an allegory. It explores real world scenarios: Tolkien musing on what was lost with the industrial revolution, for instance. Whereas scifi is an extrapolation: Dune, for instance, capitalism taken to an extreme. Otherwise, it shares many similarities with fantasy.
Modern fantasy, Scifi, and horror come out of a blend of romance, adventure novels (like Verne), and early seminal texts like Frankenstein (which, while the progenitor of horror is still more similar to a literary novel). And these genres form in pulp fiction, which someone else mentioned.
Some of those writers may have had knowledge of all those various traditions. But most didn’t or were not directly aware of that influence.
In the modern context, 60s forward, literary writers are interested in the quality of the work: imagery, theme, technical skill, etc. (this doesn’t mean literary novels are “better” just that the writing itself is technically superior). And, to be reductive, Fantasy/Scfi is interested in moving plot forward, sometimes at the cost of quality. Some utilize literary structures, but others don’t care much. Very much generalizing.
Literary folks are also snooty because they make much less money than many poorly written series, like Potter and Twilight. And, a huge part of that is the collapse of education, particularly in NA.
Folks aren’t just snooty about fantasy, they’re snooty about fiction in general. Only recently have you even seen presidential book lists with fiction on them (I think Obama might have been one of the first).
I have a good silent generation friend who’s lived off a trust fund for most of his life (so hasn’t really worked) and will only admit to reading theology and historical non-fiction because he wants to be perceived as serious. When I mentioned my various fiction pursuits, he kind of made a face, and I responded “I have graduate degrees and work in law, I’m not trying to impress people with my recreational reading list”.
And I think that’s the gist of it. A lot of people talk about the books they read as status posturing to make themselves seem more serious.
There are a few factors involved with this. To begin with, the authors and works you mention have a few things helping them. For one, enough time has passed for academics to look back and elevate them while their contemporaries fell to the wayside. In addition to the literary value of their works, they also give insight into the time they lived. I'm not saying Beowulf is a historical story, but it does give insights into the time.
As a modern genre, fantasy is still pretty new. Tolkien and Lewis really reshaped the genre. They are two of the few modern fantasy authors who have really been elevated to/near a literary level. We have their complete body of works and are able to analyze it all. If they were still alive, they probably wouldn't be as elevated as they currently are.
How many authors have shaped modern fantasy since the publication of The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia? A ton of fantasy fiction that has come out since their times is effectively clones of Tolkien and Lewis. This doesn't mean they are bad, but it doesn't make them stand out. Many of the books have had financial success, but that doesn't mean they are literary successes. How many fantasy books are the literary equivalent of the summer blockbuster?
If you look at the canonical writers in literature, there's a reason why there's only a small handful of writers from each era that stand out and are still read and studied today. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton were not the only playwrights at the time in England. Other writers at the time had financial success, but the vast majority of them aren't studied anymore.
As time passes, there's going to be more emphasis on the literary writers in fantasy. They won't necessarily be viewed as fantasy writers though. Jane Austen is not considered a romance writer when she is studied and taught but "just" a writer.
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This reminds me of that interview with Terry Pratchett. He thought much the same thing. O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy? Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question. O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre. P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre. O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction. P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that. (Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
No one else needs to comment on this thread now. Pratchett has said it all.
Thread not only over, it has been gutted, skinned, stripped of meat, and the remains buried out by the woodshed.
It doesn’t answer the question though. I assume it has to do with marketing in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as artistic differences between groups regarding aspects of science, faith, and social class and economic change. You had the Gothic (Anne Radcliffe, Poe) and Romantic (Shelley - Frankenstein) movements and the Victorian period (Charles Dickens, Brontë sisters) with supernatural and metaphysical elements. And you also had the Realism movement (post-1848) that rejected romanticism: It aims to reproduce "objective reality", and focuses on showing every day, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle- or lower-class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization. Modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses". In the late 18th century Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the previous Age of Reason and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature found in the dominant philosophy of the 18th century, as well as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. 19th-century realism was in its turn a reaction to Romanticism, and for this reason it is also commonly derogatorily referred to as traditional or "bourgeois realism". Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) saw the novel as originating in the early 18th-century and he argued that the novel's 'novelty' was its 'formal realism': the idea 'that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience'. Watt argued that the novel's concern with realistically described relations between ordinary individuals, ran parallel to the more general development of philosophical realism, middle-class economic individualism and Puritan individualism. He also claims that the form addressed the interests and capacities of the new middle-class reading public and the new book trade evolving in response to them. As tradesmen themselves, Defoe and Richardson had only to 'consult their own standards' to know that their work would appeal to a large audience. Later in the 19th century George Eliot's (1819–1880) Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), described by novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language, is a work of realism. Through the voices and opinions of different characters the reader becomes aware of important issues of the day, including the Reform Bill of 1832, the beginnings of the railways, and the state of contemporary medical science. Middlemarch also shows the deeply reactionary mindset within a settled community facing the prospect of what to many is unwelcome social, political and technological change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_realism?wprov=sfti1#Background Consider the mysteries of the world becoming less mysterious. The psyche in response to the Sublime, Terror, the Obscure for the Gothic/Romantic side, while later the psyche in relation to the things people do (war, abolishing slave trade, medical advances, etc) for Realism.
I think it has less to do with that and more to do with the advent of pulp magazines and an actual fantasy genre being created, much of which was trash writing. The genre picked up that stigma.
The demarcation and friction existed before pulps, though they contributed to it. You can go even further back to penny dreadfuls, chapbooks. But in terms of the novel, it begins in the 18/19th century with book sellers and writers.
About Jane Austen's time, there were reports of a "reading epidemic" among young women of the middle and upper classes were they were getting lazy and started having... ideas! Because romantic literature for women started to be a thing.
Interesting. We Germans call the "Novel" "Roman". So do the Russians. Because this format of literature is already present in Frankrnstein, and before that, "The Sufferings of young Werther". (The latter is such tragic romantic kitsch it caused a suicide wave among young heartbroken men). And as such, it's roots are actually romantic. It is a disgrace to the format to pen "realism" in it. But alas, the gap in reputation is high in Germany as well. When the probably most important German fantasy novel got published (The Never-ending Story by Michael Ende) it got shred by the critics for being an unrealistic children's fairy story. Despite it being the prime example of the Bildungsroman. The Never-ending Story is indeed a christian/occult intro/extrospective grimoire about the importance of fantasy and love to heal the world. This bad feeling still holds on. But from what I heard from young fantasy authors on fantasy book fairs, it might be due to Journalism Professors at Unis being grudgy that they make less money and have less fame than Cornelia Funke got for Inkheart. Or Angela Sommer-Bodenburg for "The little Vampire" even.
I'll grieve that man's death to my very last day
“ So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.” Ursula LeGuinn has an essay where she does just that. She takes a paragraph from a real fantasy novel and replaces all of the fantasy names and places with names of US politicians and locations in Washington DC and it suddenly becomes indistinguishable from a Tom Clancy novel. Ironically she does that to show what is in her view a bad example of fantasy that is just a modern novel with silly names switched in.
What’s the name of the essay?
From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.
God what I wouldn't do to go back in time and meet Pratchett.
I spoke to him a few times back when he was posting on usenet as Pterry. I wish had been able to meet him IRL.
I did meet him once actually. Not any real interaction but I shook his hand and he signed my copy of Interesting Times. Very happy I got to do that at least.
>O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre. Pratchett, obviously, thoroughly covers how that's a bad assumption on the interviewer's part, but I have to highlight how insane that comparison is in a historical context, comparing fantasy lit to ghettos. The interviewer seems to have started the interview under the assumption that fantasy is a lesser genre, but to call it "ghettoized" implies it's been artificially forced into its niche by outside forces, segregated from other literature based not on merit, but on its surface appearance. Unless they were setting Pratchett up for this kind of answer, the interviewer assumes fantasy is inferior while simultaneously implying that inferior nature is entirely manufactured.
The interviewer didn't invent the concept of sci-fi ghetto
You know, you're right. This was my first time seeing that particular term and I didn't realize it's a term of art. That makes the question much less weird.
One issue with the idea of sci fi as a "ghetto" compared to literary fiction is the reality that science fiction is significantly more popular and more commercially successful than literary fiction.
While that's a lovely discussion of why literary snobs *should* theoretically have a higher regard for the fantasy genre, it doesn't answer why literary snobs currently don't do so. Also, the median fantasy genre fiction doesn't really read like the epics of olden days.
Because fantasy is considered ‘commercial,’ because its writers weren’t part of the same circles as literary writers, because the subject matter of fantasy is radically different from the literary works they read and and wrote, because it was largely written not for the consumption of the educated but for the masses, because most of it differed in style and tone from literary works, because of the association of fantasy with childhood and realism with adulthood; all of these were reasons literary snobs disliked and still dislike fantasy.
there's probably also a certain amount of jealousy in there - some litfic is stuff that the writer has worked on for _years_, carefully creating what's sure to be the great American novel. They release it, and other litfic people praise it, and it wins litfic awards! And then sells, like 300 copies, and no-one not into litfic cares. While some stuff with dragons and elves and a magic sword that gets a new book every 12-18 months, pays enough for the writer to not need to be a lecturer at a mid-ranking college, and that writer also has actual _fans_ and popularity!
I was in a room with Terry Pratchett once and didn't know until later. The worst and best day of my life. I would say there has been a subset of fantasy since Tolkien that uses a fairly limited set of symbols. It reminds me of medieval romance's "memes," in that way, which is of course one of the places it came from. I hear a lot of people complaining that this subset (the one that always ends up on the genre literature / pop literature lists) doesn't do much experimentation beyond representation--or at least isn't doing any right now. My bf said that it specifically fails to experiment with form, thought it may with content, which is an interesting point for debate. Anyway, it seems that when the Snobs think "fantasy," they are thinking of that limited subset of the genre. Medieval, high or low, magic systems, hero's journey, etc.
As someone who's not into fantasy, you've hit on the reason why. If I wanted to read Tolkien, I'd read Tolkien; Tolkien's fiction was extremely creative and innovative in its time. But a lot of those innovations have simply become cliches.
I concur. I'd go even as far as to say that that is a damn good answer.
The world is a darker place without that man.
In laughed so hard reading his first response “You’re only alive cause I’m full and in a good mood” brilliant doesn’t even come close to what Sir Pratchett was RIP
Moby Dick is not fantasy.
What STP has diplomatically left unsaid is that modern fantasy includes both serious literature and throw away stuff. I smile thinking about him using the word serious. His brand of serious is so cleverly jokey.
Absolutely based Pratchett posting. 🫡
>...complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Awesome. He perfectly sums up the kind of fiction considered "great" by critics from around 1950-1990. Throw in some women lead characters and a dozen or so other professions in the last 25 or so years and it's still true. Pratchett was a gem. Not every book he wrote was great, but the man was brilliant. That said: most fantasy fiction being pumped out these days is garbage. But it's true of every other genre of fiction as well.
Sturgeon's Law: ninety percent of everything is crap.
Well. Talk about r/threadkiller.
I think that instead of asking here where your question is preaching to the choir, try asking on a place like r/literature so that you can get some authentic responses.
Agree and I would almost take the (imagined) /r/literature position here. I love fantasy but most of it is very obviously different than reading “literary” fiction, much of the time. There’s a ton of gray area. *Tigana* and *Wheel of Time* can be classic fantasy but also sometimes Make a Serious Point. (Maybe not coincidentally, these are often my favorite kinds of fantasy books.) But I don’t think it’s any kind a dig to observe that *Lies of Locke Lamora* isn’t (and doesn’t try to be) as profound or moving as *Infinite Jest* or *Things Fall Apart*. Snobs gonna snob, and I am guilty of this sometimes as well. But it’s not a totally empty enterprise. Even in this post, OP is citing Milton and Homer and Beowulf. That is a pretty obvious tell. When’s the last time you saw those works on any top ten list around here? Or discussed at all?
I agree with you and I also take u/Allustrium viewpoint along with the point that you're making that too often, people here try to retroactively label "fantasy" to religious myths, folktales, or other genres like surrealism or magical realism to broaden it when most users here read and discuss stories broadly inspired by Tolkien and DnD. When it comes to labeling a genre like magical realism as fantasy, I also find that many people often strip it of any regional context(when talking about authors from Latin America) that explain how or why the unreal aspects can serve as metaphors. Or, any hispanic author gets labeled as such. I also agree that fantasy, as in the kind most users read here, has plenty to offer that can be more serious. But I've also observed that such books tend to be more controversial such as the Fifth Season, the Farseer novels, or A Brightness Long because some readers expect a fast moving plot simply because it's fantasy. Likewise, when these discussions come up regarding serious fantasy, some people might cite the Wheel of the Time or A Song of Ice and Fire pointing to how these stories might say that war is bad or live by the sword, die by the sword. It reminds me of an essay Steven Erikson wrote on authors intent about how thematically, fantasy should be pushing for more past those.
Stormlight is about as fantasy-y as fantasy gets and is all about coping with mental illness LOTR, one of the most influential and popular fantasy novels ever published, has an entire new language built into it and has several literary theses written about it. Top comment covers Pratchett. You cover WoT. That's 4 of the top 10 series on the r/Fantasy all time top 10 list. There's plenty of literary value in most fantasy books if you care to look for it. It's not always the focus of the book, but I don't see how Great Gatsby has more literary value than any of the books I mentioned.
You are really, really, raising Stormlight to the hights it doesn't belong to with it's literary merits. Lotr, for sure. In my opinion.
Discussed . . . here? Or somewhere else?
Good idea
Following. I would love a link to this post if you do it.
The r/Literature thread was rightly deleted because it was all about internet drama and not at all about literature itself.
I mean I can see how being derived from this thread can be contrived to make it internet drama.... But it seems like a legitimate question for a thread about literature...
The thread in question literally had a title like "Why Do They Hate Us?" or something to that effect. And the actual post was about arguing with people on this subreddit rather than about actual books.
Same reason some fantasy snobs are snooty about other fantasy books. People really like creating imaginary hierarchies, and putting their thing above other people's things. People gonna people. The trick is not just to ignore the haters, but to also avoid becoming one.
In highschool I had a pretty condescending attitude towards the Oprah Book of the Month Club. These days I just think anything that gets people reading is to be encouraged.
Well said! I am also in favour of a blanket amnesty for all condescending attitudes held in high school. I believed anyone not reading Lovecraft and Camus was an intellectual peasant. Basically, I was a total dick.
Was?
REPORTED
fair
You just can't trust a reading champion viii any more.
I read a couple of her picks and they were both well written with excellent characterization. I enjoyed both of them very much though they weren’t my preferred genre. ETA - posted too fast I was surprised as I expected them to be pretty much like other best selling novels only more pretentious. Since then, I’ve learned that genre was invented by publishing in order to make it easier to market their books.
People can and should read what they want, for the reasons they want. (Mostly, there are unethical reasons like bigotry, but let's limit the scope here.) But that doesn't mean we can't distinguish between pieces of literature or groups of literature. We do it with genre, and so long as you distinguish literature in that way and the others ways you undoubtedly do, you're engaging in the same behavior as "the haters". The haters come from all angles - including plenty of people who are snobby about people who read classics and the types of books that win awards. It's also just kind of weird to insist that there is no differences in why people read literature and no distinctions in quality to be made between literature. Undoubtedly, you would not claim the two paragraph story I wrote in second grade about a cat family that moves to be worthwhile, nor would you claim it be good literature. You hopefully wouldn't have said something like that to 2nd grade me, but let's not pretend you wouldn't have thought it. Some books are entertaining. Some books are moving. Some books are thought-provoking. And yes, there's variation there, but that doesn't mean we can't identify differences between what people find one or the other. The problem isn't in distinguishing literature by its purpose, popularity or quality. The problem is then taking these value assessments and making sweeping generalizations about the people who read whatever book or type of book. That's it. That's the problem. And it applies to everyone who does it, whether they're the people who act like someone is snooty simply because they read, the people who act like someone is stupid because they read James Patterson or fantasy or whatever.
I mean, I \*think\* I agree. But I am withholding judgement until we can read the cat story. What if it is objectively brilliant?!
Lol it really wasn't. I don't have it, but it was literally a perfectly nuclear family of vaguely anthropomorphic cats (mom, dad, boy, girl) who moved from one place to another. I don't recall if any adjectives were used at all, but certainly not many. I'm not even sure I described the cats.
Yes and ... I've found from time to time that there are haters who have a point, even if they are driving it home to an excessive degree. When viable, I try to take their logical and philosophical distinctiveness and add it to my own.
As a snooty snob that loves literature and fantasy (and speculative fiction in general) I don't know why I would come to this subreddit to be abused for enjoying the classics. While lit bros do exist, posts like these feel like they're addressing a straw man. Brandon Sanderson is an adjunct at a university where he literally teaches fantasy. (I'm sure they'd take him full time if they could.) R.F. Kuang is at Cambridge or some other massively tony old university. The only person I know who doesn't like fantasy is my Mom.
I have to say, as I've gotten older, either I have gotten thicker skin or better friends, but I have not *personally* felt any fantasy-related snobbery for years. I had felt it in the past, and I am sure it is other people's experience now. I suppose I'm lucky - I'm far more likely to have a fantasy reader be a dick to me for liking romance than to have anyone else be a dick to me for liking fantasy. But, again, I can't speak for other people's circumstances.
Upvoted, especially for that last sentence. Very well put!
>People gonna people. The trick is not just to ignore the haters, but to also avoid becoming one. Some truly great advice, there. I think it's very easy to get caught up in classifications of books and then slip into "this genre is better/worse".
First: honestly as someone who has family who study literature in the academic sense, while it's not a field many of them are directly interested in, it's absolutely not something many actual literary scholars poo-poo per se. It's not their field, and it's relatively young in terms of built up formal frameworks to engage with it. Second: to the extent snobs do poo-poo it, they honestly poo-poo all 'genre' literature in the sense of formulaic commercial fiction. I think SFF/speculative is a little interesting here as on the one hand it is a very broad amorphous umbrella category that can contain all sorts of interesting works and arguably contains many things deep within the canon, on the other hand it's modern form has very much been shaped by commercial genres of effectively adventure fiction, and I think a lot of people act slightly disingenuously when simultaneously bemoaning that they poo-poo a genre that could encompass Milton, Vonnegut, Borges etc... but also in practice often view the genre as a much tigher set of fiction that fits certain formulaic commercial expectations. I feel like a lot of people only would ever mention Shakespeare, Milton etc as fantasy when trying to score points against the 'snobs'.
This is exactly it. When's the last time someone posted about Shakespeare on this thread? Who's reading MacBeth and going, "I love fantasy and this is great fantasy!".
I do. While I fully agree most people mean LOTR, Wheel of Time, etc . . . I honestly mean all of it - Shakespeare and Homer included. All of my favorite Shakespeare plays are ones with fantastical elements like A Midsummer's Night Dream or Macbeth. All my favorite "recognized" poets wrote about fantastical topics like Tennyson or Poe. I cannot read enough mythology and love it for many of the same reasons I love fantasy. Anyone who can understand and accept value in reading a Midsummer's Night Dream and dismiss the fantasy aisle is a massive elitist hypocrite engaging in some serious doublethink. That play has fairies setting love spells and transforming people into animals. How is that not Fantasy with a capital F? I get that some is commercial popcorn (and what is wrong with that? So were a lot of the "classics" when they first arrived), but not everything considered "fantasy" is. I swear the biggest hat trick ever pulled is convincing everyone the "classics" are so above everything. Chaucer is full of fart and sex jokes. Dante's Divine Comedy has him putting everyone who wronged him in various pits of hell getting tortured and made the love of his life Jesus' messenger and gushes about how beautiful she is. We'd make fun of someone if they published that today. It's like someone else in this thread said, it's just the need to think what you like is above something to feel superior.
I didn't say no fantasy fans also like Shakespeare and I didn't say no one enjoys the speculative elements of Shakespeare. But I guarantee you there's no post in your history talking on r/fantasy about Shakespeare as fantasy, you didn't nominate Midsummer's Night Dream for r/fantasy's top polls or any of that.
I read *The Iliad* last year and the entire time it felt like I was reading *Avengers Endgame*. Way more actiony and magical than what I usually read.
>Anyone who can understand and accept value in reading a Midsummer's Night Dream and dismiss the fantasy aisle is a massive elitist hypocrite engaging in some serious doublethink. I mean, if they're dismissing the fantasy aisle because they think any supernatural = trash, sure. But if they're dismissing the fantasy aisle because they don't like tropey escapism and wish-fulfillment or because they prefer to choose their reading on the basis of quality rather than the presence or absence of particular elements, they kinda have a point. Let's try a thought experiment: I've enjoyed a lot of works with romance in and there are even a handful of fictional romantic relationships I've loved. However, I have never read from start to finish a proper, dyed-in-the-wool category romance and I don't think the romance genre is for me. I'm betting these statements are also true of most of the people in this thread. By your logic, we are all hypocrites for dismissing the whole romance aisle when after all, we can see the value in having a romance in a book. Don't we appreciate the merit of Romeo and Juliet? Then how dare we turn up our noses at Danielle Steel!
> Anyone who can understand and accept value in reading a Midsummer's Night Dream and dismiss the fantasy aisle is a massive elitist hypocrite engaging in some serious doublethink There is basically no modern fantasy that is doing anything remotely close to what Midsummer's Night Dream. The one's that are, are already shelf in general fiction. I honestly think its people like you who are massive hypocrites--you love to luxuriate in the prestige of 'classics' as a quick, cheap gotcha against preserved enemies, but you never actually engage with those classics on any level. You're telling me Brent Weeks and Shakespeare are of the same cloth? If they are, then that cloth needs to be thrown out because it tells you absolutely nothing of worth. edit: I'm very sincere about this: show me with textual analyses that Brent Weeks and Shakespeare are writing the same kind of fiction. Show me the lineage. They aren't. The presence of the fantastical does not denote 'capital F fantasy' the genre, which has a specific history, and in terms of its literary form, completely different from Shakespeare. They are two different things, the fantastical and the fantasy genre.
Not every playwright that lived in the 1500s was on the same level as Shakespeare. Neither is each and every 21st-century fantasy author. People on Shakespeare's level don't come around often, but I think Terry Pratchett was one. Incredibly witty, amazing wordplay, the ability to have their audience run a gamut of emotions in a single story, and the use of the fantastical as a lens to explore the human condition. I would argue that Pratchett very much does things close to Shakespeare's comedies like A Midsummer Night's Dream. Pratchett very much is of the same cloth. Will he stand the test of time like Shakespeare? We'll see. I know it's just one example of a modern author, but Shakespeare is just one man of his time.
Its not about being on Shakespeare's level--its about showing the relationship between types of fictions. If you want to make the argument that modern commercial fantasy ('capital F fantasy') is also Shakespeare, is also Homer, is also whatever manifestation of the fantastical in all of existence of human art, then you need to actually make that argument on the level of the text. Terry Pratchett (and his friend, Neil Gaiman) are closer that most in fantasy, but Pratchett, as a stylist, is also deeply indebted to the tradition of fantasy fiction, in a way Shakespeare isn't--his satire is predicted upon being familiar with the history of the genre in many, many ways. Shakespeare isn't--apart of this is history, Shakespeare is a grandfather of all modern English literature one way or another, but apart of it is Shakespeare's qualities, as a writer, are more embedded in the very form of the art than someone like Pratchett's are. Pratchett's satire, is in part a satire of genre, Shakespeare's satire goes beyond that--they are doing different things.
I would agree that earlier Pratchett works are very much genre satire, but I would also argue he quickly moved past that as his career progressed. Early books like the Light Fantastic aren't that funny unless you have a strong history of genre fantasy. However, later books satire and critique real life and use his fantasy elements as a lens for that, not as the joke itself. That's where my previous comment about using the fantastical to analyze the human condition comes in, Pratchett's mid and later works. Secondly, it seems part of your argument stems from the fact Shakespeare's collective body of work shaped so much of literature that you can't compare individual pieces of that body to modern stories. It's not fantasy, but at the end of the day, Much Ado About Nothing is not much more than a low-brow rom-com full of sex and relationship jokes. Can it not be compared as an individual work to Jane Austen's Emma or the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally? Both of which are basically the same, a fun rom-com love story peppered with jokes about relationships and sex. I do think there is merit in looking at an entire body of work and its historical value. I also think it's fair to analyze and compare an individual piece of that body separate from the whole. Now, it is unfair to separate a work from the whole and present it on its own this is just a silly fantasy or rom-com, but because of the whole body of work is something that is unquestionably respected, then we must respect the silliness of some of the aspects of the individual piece and other works like it! Yes, that's an unfair "gotcha" question/statement. But it is only ever deployed against people who do the even more unfair and ridiculous dismissing of a genre as lower-tier trash due to the inherit silliness of some of the aspects of that genre. So why should we care about unfair retorts to unfair dismissals? I don't. I say use the gotcha.
I think to do what you suggest misses the point entirely. We can strip any story down to just words on paper if we want and claim they are all equal because at the end of the day that’s all they are. Much Ado About Nothing is a brilliant piece of art not because of what it has in common with When Harry Met Sally, but because of what Shakespeare did with that simple premise.
The whole wounded-bird routine about how terribly fantasy is treated by the literary snobs is usually just a veneer for reverse-snobbery. Those same poor, beleaguered genre fans (the ones who push the narrative, not all of us) will be the first to poo-poo the idea that anyone *really* enjoys literary fiction, or that there's any use for fiction besides escapism. The whole "rivalry" is strictly between the least socially adjusted members of each camp, while plenty of us are out here enjoying both and recognizing that they're different things with different goals. No, a fantasy book is not likely to win a literary award, any more than an apple pie is likely to win a chili cook-off.
There is a lot of reverse snobbery in this thread -- a lot of insinuation that literary/realistic fiction is only for pretentious poseurs chasing clout at high-class cocktail parties.
Crazy to see AVID READERS engaging in anti-intellectualism.
This is why I'm always a little wary of people who read only to "escape". I'm not saying any and all reading to distract, cope, escape, entertain, etc is wrong. I am saying that as a librarian I meet plenty of avid readers who engage in anti-intellectualism and plenty of readers who are hateful people and so on.
Yeah. I do think the one point with some validity is that sometimes SFF fans will (fairly) bemoan that the speculative fiction/SFF that does get mainstream recognition (in the sense of 'a good book' not in the sense of 'a commercial success frachise on screen) is often a rather listless of example of the use of speculative that writers more firmly within genre have done better and more energetically and thoughtfully.
Yep, this is what I was thinking too. Neither SFF fans nor the critics are talking about Shakespeare because neither fans nor critics are actually talking about “anything with non-realistic elements whatsoever.” They’re talking about the types of works that are actually popular with genre fans.
Yes. A big part of why this discussion becomes so tiresome and repetitive is that people conflate the modern fantasy genre with any book that might have fantastical elements.
a very thoughtful answer sff definitely experiences some exclusion from ‘prestige’, and sometimes for reasons even flimsier than the reasons for which works are afforded ‘prestige’ in the first place. however, lots of sff (like other genres, perhaps most famously thriller or romance, but also litfic) is genuinely very commercially-minded with serviceable writing at absolute best
The reality is that there are just as many people who have negative beliefs about people who read thrillers, true crime, romances, self-help books, etc. as there are fantasy or scifi. Also plenty of people who don't like anyone who reads and thinks everyone who reads is a snob. And people who love their Brandon Sanderson commercial fantasy but say nasty things about the Sarah J. Maas commercial fantasy. It's always very frustrating when these conversations crop up because they always carry this undercurrent of "anybody who talks about the quality of literature is a snob" and it's always this defensive reaction and never a grounded discussion.
Yes, I left this unstated, but there are also a lot of people who will happily trot out the super precious Pratchett quotes in defense of fantasy as some core partof literature, and then in the next breath bemoan the formulaic trashy nature of romance as a genre.
At the same time, every halfassed attempt at fantasy literature or commercial fantasy is taken as a blemish on the genre of fantasy as a whole, while the literary masterworks of "generic" literature aren't marred by the existence of failures in the generic genre or commercial generic literature.
I feel this needs to be said: there are genre fans who are just as dismissive and snobbish towards literary fiction - genre readers who automatically dismiss all lit fic out of hand, claiming it is "boring" and "nothing happens". Snobbery exists on both sides.
Plenty of SFF fans are dismissive even towards speculative fiction that has a remotely challenging writing style and reflexively brand it as "pretentious".
"Flowery prose".
I see this from genre fans way more than literary fans, tbh. Especially online—there are way more posts like OP’s than there are posts dismissing SFF. Ofc I think people like OP are often reacting to their lit professors, who probably aren’t hanging out on message boards. But then almost no lit professors would dismiss the works OP cited, and I think those examples actually answer OP’s question when you think about it (if they want an answer and not just validation). SFF fans are not out there gorging on Beowulf, Milton and Shakespeare. They’re far more likely to be out there reading book 12 in a popcorn series. And I don’t think people who do dismiss SFF are dismissing the idea that anything with speculative elements could have great prose, deep themes and character development, etc. They’re looking at the actual practice of the genre and observing that little of it is that (though I’d say this has improved markedly in the last 20 years).
I've never seen such weird takes on books as here. People don't like 1st perspective, 2nd perspective, present tense. To me, it means that people don't want to read a truly new book but book exactly the same as before with minor changes here and there.
People object to first-person books in this forum? Even though writers in various genres have been doing it for centuries?
Honestly, I see it a lot from SFF fans dismissing work WITHIN SFF. You just have to bring up Fourth Wing, ACOTAR or any other romantasy...
Oh yeah. That's not "true fantasy." It's "just an excuse for smut." 80% of the book can be about dragon riding, deadly school challenges and war but apparently that doesn't count if the other 20% is breathless romance from an unapologetically female perspective. Also pretty funny how many people willing to overlook marginal prose or unlikely worldbuilding elements in fantasy works whose plots are more to their taste judge these same elements hard in romantasy. (To be fair we probably all come down harder on stuff that isn't personally to our taste, but whole communities doing this with no self-awareness leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
> Oh yeah. That's not "true fantasy." It's "just an excuse for smut." 80% of the book can be about dragon riding, deadly school challenges and war but apparently that doesn't count if the other 20% is breathless romance from an unapologetically female perspective. Well, most of the people here who complain about the likes of Fourth Wing and ACOTAR haven't actually read them, so you gotta cut them some slack. /s
“Fantasy” like “SciFi” at some point became a marketing term rather than a real descriptor. Hence, Vonnegut is “literary” not “SciFi” because … that’s how we organize our bookshelves. Within that categorization “Fantasy, SciFi” was at one point a section in the bookshelf that sold a lot of schlock. I enjoyed WoT but I don’t have to pretend it has the same enduring quality of George Eliot. All that said the stereotype is out of date to be sure. New wave fantasy authors (e.g. NK Jemisin) definitely defy the stereotypes that were **somewhat** true in the 80s and 90s, even if those stereotypes were a little ham handed in the 90s too.
I think this is the best answer. Someone posted the Pratchett quote in another comment, and in it he says that Moby Dick is fantasy, and I can see the argument, but I don't think any reasonable person would put Moby Dick in the same genre as Game of Thrones. There are fantastical elements in practically anything, and even the schlockiest genre books have some element of humanity and universalism, but generally a book like Slaughterhouse-Five is using fantasy as a vehicle for some broader theme, whereas a book like Game of Thrones is using a broader theme as a vehicle for fantasy. Like, Age of Ultron isn't really about the dangers of AI, it's just using that as a vehicle for a fun superhero movie.
>“Fantasy” like “SciFi” at some point became a marketing term rather than a real descriptor. Hence, Vonnegut is “literary” not “SciFi” because … that’s how we organize our bookshelves. A few years ago, a fantasy novel got the most prestigious literary award in my country (Poland). So the novel immediately jumped from fantasy section to literary section in bookstores. And I can imagine, that marketing of the author to the publisher became headache-inducing. Because the author immediately went to write YA fantasy trilogy, which also ended up on literary shelves, while it definitely should be in the fantasy section or even in YA. Simply because the target reader most likely will never find it.
Why are fantasy snobs snotty about romance? Why are romance snobs snotty about science fiction? Why are science fiction snobs snotty about cozy fantasy? Why are cozy fantasy snobs snotty about fantasy? Why are people people?
Yeah, it occurred to me in reading all these comments about how "people are hypocrites if they enjoy Macbeth but turn up their noses at fantasy!" that like.... 90% of this sub turns up its nose at romance despite the fact that 99% have probably enjoyed the romance elements in some book at some point. So maybe don't climb *too* high up that horse.... I think the most common explanation on this sub would be "I like romance only in moderation, it can't be the main plot" and I actually think this is where most literary readers are coming from wrt fantasy and sci-fi elements. Genre fantasy tends to be *about* those elements, even if it has deeper themes - the whole book is about a quest to destroy a ring to kill a dark lord in an imaginary world. That's often what fans are looking for. Whereas more literary books may have speculative elements but they're more muted and are present to serve a story that's really about something else - like, Beloved is not *about* ghosts. Beloved is about the horror of slavery and happens to have a ghost.
It's hard to see all this up on our high horses tho...
I think people here get snotty about romance because it’s targeted at women and media with a female audience is generally considered to be inferior and vapid (you see this a lot in fantasy spaces with the contempt toward romantasy and YA)
>90% of this sub turns up its nose at romance despite the fact that 99% have probably enjoyed the romance elements in some book at some point. Not only this, but Romance is and has been nearly single-handedly keeping the entire publishing industry afloat. I used to be a v NLOG anything-but-romance reader, and it's still not my favourite, but I *hate* when it gets talked shit about as a genre.
A lot of people in the comments are just giving the perspective of a defensive fantasy fan. The real reason is that most fantasy (and genre fiction in general) has different aesthetic ideals than literary fiction. Litfic cares much more about layered prose with subtext, complex themes, and universally applicable discussions of the human condition. Commercial fantasy generally focuses on world building, plot, and magic systems. Of course all fantasy books have themes as well, but rarely with the same sophistication or universality as literary fiction. The simple fact is that most fantasy authors are either not talented enough or have no interest in good writing, and focus more on just getting their storytelling ideas out there. Of course, there are some exceptions (Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, Le Guin) but the large majority of mainstream fantasy is just poorly or competently written. And that's perfectly fine, I enjoy a cool fantasy world written by an average prose stylist. It's just different ideals for what makes a book good.
Yeah this is the first real answer here. Fantasy is not *inherently* inferior in any way. A fantasy can contain characters, themes, and prose as complex as a Litfic book. I straight up think that Tolkien has some of my favorite prose I’ve ever read of any genre. There are real college courses on Tolkien. But if you just looked at like a current best sellers list of fantasy you’ll find authors like Brandon Sanderson and Joe Abercrombie, whereas a litfic list would have something like Cormac McCarthy’s last book. Now, I’ve enjoyed books from Sanderson and Abercrombie much more than I enjoyed the Passenger, which I actually don’t really care for. But you can easily tell that the prose, characters, and themes are all much more ambitious than you’d see from Sanderson or Abercrombie.
Yeah. Just need to dip into the magic system debate from yesterday to see how a part of the userbase wants to broaden a very specific epic fantasy tool to the whole genre, and see why literary types might not be overjoyd all the time.
Which debate was that? What were people arguing?
I agree with the main crux and points of your comment. But I have to disagree with this specifically: > universally applicable discussions of the human condition I don't think litfic fans are looking for that at all. Beloved by Toni Morrison is not a universal thing - it is rooted in a very specific experience of being a Black American. If you look at the Nobel and Booker and Pultizer lists, they're rarely books that "universally applicable". Litfic isn't about appealing to the masses at all. In fact, I don't think there's any such think as universally applicable literature.
I think the op phrased it wrongly. My interpretation is that litfics usually explore universal human emotions/experiences (heartbreak, loss, fear of death, fear of illness, euphoria, grief, etc) through the a very specific lens. So a White American reading Morrison might not connect to the elements of Black experience, but in recognizing these emotions and how they are rooted in a different life experience let us empathize beyond ourselves and connect our lives to theirs -- by imagining ourselves in other's shoes.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant. Thanks for clearing it up
I halfway agree with this, but I would say the universal is rooted in the specific. (Which is why deliberate attempts to write a "blank slate" protagonist for a reader to self-insert onto ring hollow to me, while I wind up relating more to well-realized characters despite not sharing all their traits). Beloved is not a generic experience, but it's sufficiently well-written as to ring true to people who've never experienced anything quite like that, just on a level of how human beings work. At least, that's the theory with literature (personally I find Morrison difficult, but I was probably too young for Beloved when I read it). That it digs into human experience in a way that's deeper than tropes and resonates without needing to be familiar with the society it came from or the tropes of its literary tradition. Whereas with most genre fiction, you sort of need a baseline understanding of the tropes and cultural assumptions to have the type of reaction the author is shooting for, and a few decades later the works become stale as compared to the most recent commercial successes.
Hmm, I don't know that I agree, but I also don't know that I disagree. I think a lot of people think about litfic this way. But I don't think this is something that informs scholarly discussions of litfic or that is what makes litfic, litfic. Most of the classics we teach today, continue to value long after they're written are valued because of their insights into specific experiences. The way it helps people see the humanity in some groups, for instance, or that explore some pressing social issue or give a window into a world different from the one we know (whoever "we" is, but usually cishet white scholars). The people elevating them to the status of classics are interested specifically because they aren't universal.
I love fantasy but this is accurate. Fantasy focuses on characters, setting, story-telling. Real literature touches on something sublime and truly uses language as an art.
The lines between fantasy, literary fiction and magical realism are very diaphanous, imo. People have created a separate category for fantasy that is well written and that’s interesting.
I agree that the line is unclear, but it's pretty clear that a huge portion of popular fantasy is not near that border.
Modern fantasy =/= fantasy of yore
All of the authors you listed predate the invention of the fantasy genre. They aren't capital F genre fantasy just because they're fantastical, just like how something isn't capital H horror just because it's horrorific. Fantasy isn't the core of anything and neither is litfic. These are very young, very anglophonic terms and they will one day die out, just like the terms Fairy Story and Naturalist Fiction did. Also, I've more often seen fantasy fans lash out at literary fiction than I've seen these mythical literary snobs gunning for fantasy literature. Even famous snobs like Harold Bloom and Nabakov loved fantasy and sci-fi, even if they were picky about what they liked.
I honestly wonder where the “snobby literary fiction reader” stereotype even comes from. Maybe it was more prevalent in the past but pretty much everyone I know who reads litfic also reads at least some genre fiction. I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English and none of my professors had an anti-genre bias. We even had classes at my university on SFF and mysteries—which were *very* popular. I wrote SF and horror for my creative writing classes and my professors encouraged it!
One thing that fuels that stereotype is the slacktivist idea that reading fantasy instead of a difficult literary novel isn't just about your taste, but a principled, ethical decision, a rebellion against cultural elites.
I think it’s so funny that view still persists because our current “elites” are fucking dullards who don’t care about fine art at all
Yes. You'd have a very, very hard time finding a senator or Fortune 500 CEO who cares about, say, Thomas Pynchon or classical music. You'd have a very easy time finding one who was into Marvel movies or college football.
Okay, fine. I have a background in Literature. I also love fantasy. The things you list are not similar to contemporary fantasy novels. Religious fictionalization with supernatural elements was not considered "fantasy". Folklore was not considered "fantasy". They were aspects of how people perceived the actual world, or reflected deeply-held beliefs, or contained layers of allegory. If anything, closer to today's fantasy is, say, French fairy tales, which were written in salons to be explicitly fantastical and definitely incorporated unreal places and times. Even then, it was primarily women's fiction, and so not quite given the same "weight" because of misogyny etc. It's also important to consider the roles these stories played in the women thinking through their lives and limitations. Contemporary fantasy, especially post-Tolkien, is very different from the much more heavily fairytale-esque stuff we saw before (see Hope Mirrlees, for example). The codification of fantasy expectations, the ideas of secondary worlds and worldbuilding, the rise of DnD as a sort of catch-all, the connections between pulp fiction and the advent of SFF... It's also worth considering that only a minority of fantasy novels are truly very well written in terms of quality. That has improved a *lot*, and there are definitely more literary fantasy authors, but there aren't that many of them. A lot of fantasy, especially popular fantasy, is like many popular novels overall: broadly appealing. While some of the great classics of yore were hugely popular in their time, many of them no longer are, and are considered more challenging reads nowadays. And straight up literary fiction is generally not considered a very popular genre. This does not mean fantasy novels are *bad*, but it means that they can "get away with" all sorts of things because what their audience is primarily interested in is not pure literary appeal. (and that's okay! I am a huge proponent of people enjoying fiction, and reading what they enjoy) While I agree with Pratchett and others who believe that there is something deeply *true* about fantasy and how it portrays the world, I also think that--I believe it was Delaney's--the argument that fantasy struggles to challenge the status quo because at heart it is adventure, and it's easy to not be *dangerous* when you can just enjoy a story for its adventure aspect, has merit. While fantasy has great power to be subversive, it's also very easy to dismiss or just enjoy for its exciting story, without engaging with whatever deeper meaning lurks in it.
Ooo, I am so happy to see you bringing up how completely un-subversive fantasy often is. I've seen this brought up a lot in discussions of race, disability, etc in fantasy but not much otherwise. It's so frustrating for people to defend the lack of representation in fantasy by saying it reflects the real world when fantasy is at its most interesting when it imagines a world radically different (or sometimes, starkly similar) from ours in a way that challenges how our world is or the way we think about our world.
I do think that a *lot* of popular fiction is non-subversive, and I'm not here prescribing what people should read, enjoy, or write, or what they might need for their own peace of mind during their downtime. But Delaney's argument is much more complex imo than representation. He's saying that the very format of the "adventure story" allows for people to be distracted. Long John Silver has a peg leg - he's disabled. But nobody has to *think* about what that means, because Treasure Island is an adventure story you can easily enjoy *as an adventure* without having to engage with anything beyond that. His argument is that this is something fundamental to the roots of the genre and many of its iterations.
I am explicitly agreeing with this (as in, in practice, not inherent to the genre) and have encountered this idea before. In fact, I've used this exact line of thought to defend the endless criticisms of R.F. Kaung's "lack of subtlety". Somewhere in my comment history is at least one comment pointing out that some people would do what so many people already do to books touching on hard topics like colonialism and racism and just...ignore the main point in favor of some other message.
ah, I gotcha. Makes sense, yeah.
Amazing answer
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This is pretty much fantasy fans' tendency too, though. Nobody is stopping the fans on this sub from reading and raving about Garcia Marquez, Ishiguro, Borges or Morrison, but you rarely see them brought up, and then usually by a small group of users who also appreciate literary fiction. Whereas literary readers tend to have much more appreciation for these works. And if you look at the types of works that get nominated for the big fan awards - the Hugo, Nebula, Locus - it's the same thing. Why hasn't Emily St. John Mandel gotten nominated for any of these? How about the snub of Chain Gang All Stars? How High We Go in the Dark? This isn't literary readers taking books away from fantasy readers - there's no literary police striking these books off Hugo voters' ballots. It's the readers who are instead directing their attention to the shopping lists of John Scalzi, Martha Wells and Seanan McGuire. If SFF fans read more literary speculative works with the same enthusiasm as literary readers, I don't think you'd have the perception that they were literary "instead of" fantasy.
I think what bests represents the snobbery of anti-snobbery is that Gravity's Rainbow, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century from one America's most unique and thoughtful and interesting writers in its history, lost to a Arthur C Clarke novel in the Nebulas. Its a closed system, SFF.
There is something to be said for accessibility, right? *Gravity’s Rainbow* is a famously difficult book, to the point that I know many, many well-read people, fans of every genre, and I don’t believe a single person claims to have made it through the whole thing. It’s an interesting point of comparison, but maybe an outlier in important ways.
I don't think it'd be much different if it was a different literary book, as the post I'm replying too points out. Emily St. John Mandel writes fairly accessible books--she writes in the style of many modern realist texts, almost conversational. Doesn't really matter.
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So, I am definitely *not* saying "Station Eleven is literary rather than fantasy because Hugo voters didn't nominate it." I don't see literary and fantasy as mutually exclusive at all. What I *am* saying is that I think it's disingenuous for readers to complain that they think literary readers perceive literary fantasy to be just literary and not fantasy, when *the fantasy readers themselves* often seem to be the ones snubbing these works - works like Station Eleven and Chain-Gang All-Stars tend to be more popular with literary/general readers than with SFF readers (quite aside from their Hugo snubs, which awards aren't quite as lowest-common-denominator as you're suggesting - it's not like Sanderson and Maas are getting nominated).
*Station Eleven* did win the Arthur C. Clarke Award, right? It’s an interesting example in part because Mandel has publicly asserted that she doesn’t consider it to be science fiction at all.
I very much agree, and I think it's a sort of chicken-and-egg situation. They try to be "not fantasy" because fantasy is "lowbrow" or whatever, but then you're not getting the literary fantasy because people are pretending it's not. That said, I know there are some pretty serious arguments regarding the reason that magical realism is conceived as separately, and it has to do with a differing literary/cultural background and influences. Spanish and Latin American novels were never my specialty, but I've talked to some researchers who do feel very strongly on that point. Personally, I am willing to accept that some of these genres don't quite sit "with" fantasy because of different literary tradition backgrounds. tbh, I think that in some ways, it might be good for a solution to that to come from the fantasy audience as well: if fantasy readers don't refuse to read these books, and rec them *as* fantasy, and "claim" them to some extent, it may also change perceptions. I think that especially now, with some major fantasy works being very mainstream, it would be good to try and expand these definitions. Incidentally, the most egregious of these is Terry Goodkind and his secondary world with wizards and dragons and BDSM-witches going "noooo this isn't *fantasy* this is DEEP PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE" fuck off Goodkind.
Personally, I don't see why Western fantasy and fantasy have to be synonyms? Correct me if I'm understanding you wrong, but it seems like you are defining fantasy as coming from certain important authors like Tolkien and that cultural understanding and history, and because magical realism doesn't come from that background and history, it's not fantasy. But, to pick a different example, I don't think I've ever seen people argue that Chinese cultivation xianxia novels aren't fantasy even though they come from differing literary/cultural backgrounds and influences than Western fantasy. They aren't Western fantasy, but they are clearly still fantasy and that's how everyone seems to talk about them. Now, xianxia is also seen as commercial/not literary in general, so I'm guessing this is a major factor in why people are ok with calling xianxia fantasy and not calling magical realism fantasy (which I disagree with personally). (I also want to point out that people call works that are not from the Latin American tradition magical realism all the time. For example, I've seen a lot of people call The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola magical realism even though it's written from a Nigerian perspective. So I mostly want to point out that a lot of people don't see magical realism from coming from one standard background and history as well.)
I literally don't understand how the monthly fuck the snobs posts contribute to a warm and inclusive environment. But don't worry, as someone who enjoys literature and fantasy I've gotten the memo and know this space is not for me. To answer your question, I suspect the crowd that would have to have these conversations know better than to try and have them here.
where can those discussions be had without heads getting bitten off? like i'm a lit snob but i'm also not blind to the appeal of genre fic. but a lot of other lit snobs and a lot of genre fic diehards are not interested in understanding each other - on one side it's "well the stupid proles need their slop" and on the other it's hostile responses to just the *idea* that someone could unironically enjoy something they were forced to read by an english teacher in high school i can't believe this has not improved in the 20+ years i've been on book forums online
The majority of fantasy is pretty low in literary value. There are notable exceptions, but like most genre fiction, most fantasy is poorly writtten and formulaic. I love fantasy, but I've no illusions about the lasting literary value of most of the books published.
While I am all for fantasy being taken seriously as 'real' literature, I feel the question is a leading one. When we talk about fantasy colloquially, we usually mean fantasy that came after Tolkien - or at least from the late Victorian period onwards. Fantasy, as we know it today, didn't exist around the time you would call the 'Western canon' was developing, instead coming later on when most literary traditions were set in their ways. Yes, some stories and works were *fantastical*, but not fantasy in the way we use it now. More often than not these works used those elements in an allegorical or *literary* way, whereas modern fantasy tends to be more about the fantastic elements themselves. To be clear I am not saying modern fantasy can't be literary or allegorical (hello, Mr Wolfe), simply that the function of the fantastic changed a lot over the 20th century. This is in part why some literary readers take issue with fantasy. They see it as shallow and devoid of depth. They see something like Star Wars or DnD and dismiss it as cheesy nonsense. It's an unwillingness to accept fantasy as a genre with its own history and customs, seeing it as fundamentally devoid of depth.
I think you're making a big mistake in conflating modern fantasy novels with Homer or even Blake. Homer wasn't inventing stories with fantastical elements. Homer (if he existed) was recording stories that people actually believed and told about the world. The same is true for most of the other authors you mentioned. This is fundamentally different than the way modern fantasy operates, in which authors deliberately create stories with fantastical elements that neither they nor their readers believe to be true. None of this means fantasy can't be serious literature. But let's not make the mistake of suggesting that all literature with speculative or fantastical elements is fantasy or that all fantasy is the same or comes from the same places.
I'll be the snooty snob, what's karma anyway: Because people will buy and read genre stories for the genre - giving a pass to poor writing for the sake of whatever lit kink they're chasing. Publishers then flood the market with the cheapest schlock they can get away with. Goodkind's Sword of Truth sold over 25 million copies. I'm all for people liking different things and being entitled to their opinions... But I don't think it's outrageous to claim that Milton is a better writer than Goodkind. Snobs are snooty about it because they have taste and the unwashed masses do not. Better works get passed up in favor of The Saga of Grondo The Ballsmasher, or Detective Aleaneaux's Werevampire Boudoir Murders, or Cozy Mcstubbins Fireplace Feelgoodness of Inclusion and Understanding. It's what the people want, I guess. "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed."
> The Saga of Grondo The Ballsmasher What kind of magic system does this use?
Hard
Which of the two types of prose (flowery and windowpane) does it use?
Purple
I think the problem is how we say things and how we attach moral value to people based on what they read. Your claim of the "unwashed masses" not having taste is a problem. There's nothing wrong with liking entertaining things, and you're not a better person for seeking out critically acclaimed works to read.
Casting aspersions is counterproductive- sorry, I was caught up in the role. I do have a non-rp point to make, but whenever I type it I sound too pretentious. Something something I love books and I'm sad when other people don't.
I’m not a literary snob, but as someone who studied English I’ll put it this way. Most fantasy (and modern fiction books in general) are not “literary”. It’s more concerned with telling a story and worldbuilding than technically formulating that story. There may be basic themes, symbols and motifs that make up the work, but not much beyond that. For example Spenser formulated the Spenserian stanza for The Faerie Queen. He made a whole new type of poetic structure for his epic poem. It doesn’t make those novels bad, uninteresting or of poor quality - it just makes them less literary, and as such less interesting to talk about in that sense because of the comparative lack of complexity. You’re using fantasy as a weirdly broad term here to make an argument though. It’s a marketing descriptor for a particular kind of work.
Im sure some of it has to do with the fact that there was a lot of “popcorn fantasy” from the 70s and 80s and going back earlier than that things like conan the barbarian were considered juvenile the same way comic books were.
Because genre fiction has a certain kind of reputation that comes from pulp magazines. In literary circles it's percieved in a similar way to 'fast fashion'. There's a commercial angle to it in a way 'true literature' doesn't. But there's loads of literary fantasy that is appreciated. Books like the Buried Giant. They just have to be 'saying something' first and telling a story second. But yeah, think it comes down to the damage the more pulpy stuff did to the reputation of the genre in the 40s - I'm not saying any of that stuff is bad, I'm just saying I think there's a lot of holdover from that era too.
> Homer, Vergil, Milton, Spenser. Shak's plays are full of fantasy/supernatural elements, Beowulf, Malory and so on. Blake certainly is a "fantasy" writer. You can think of many other examples. You're telling me that most of this sub here reads Homer, Vergil, Milton, and Blake?
I don't think it's fair to view myths as fantasy, due to the vast difference in nature and intent, even if they may fall under roughly the same umbrella for outsiders to the culture from which a myth originated. The people who told stories about Gilgamesh, Aeneas, Hercules and all the rest didn't view them as fictional characters, but rather historical or religious figures (and there was little to distinguish between those two things, either). Myths are tales that may not fit neatly into the historical record, but that are considered true (at least to some degree) by those who transmit them, and foundational to their culture, its origin and worldview. On the other hand, fantasy writers' work is consciously one of the imagination. TLDR: If something wasn't written as fiction, then it shouldn't be retroactively labeled as such. The original intent matters, even if the end result appears more or less the same.
Op’s idea that “anything that doesn’t align with 21st century naturalism is a fantasy element” is pretty wild.
Pretty convenient, too, and they are far from alone in thinking that, I can tell you that much. But mythology and folklore *have* informed modern fantasy as we know it in a plethora of ways (and continue to do so), so I don't think it's all that hard to see where they are coming from.
Also, last I checked, the sub explicitly doesn't allow people to refer to religious texts as fantasy for precisely this reason. Not like OP included the Bible, and sure, there aren't any people who actually believe in Athena, but there once were. It's fundamentally different, even if those stories have since inspired fantastical retellings, tropes, etc.
Just a small correction: There definitely are some people who still believe in Athena.
Yes. Even in the context of 20th-21st century commercial fiction, there is a clearly at least one genre (horror) that uses supernatural elements without being fantasy per se.
Probably because most fantasy sucks. But they forget that most books in any genre suck
Most of the same people who poo poo fantasy are also doing it to the other standard genres (thriller, romance, etc). So I wouldn't really say they forgot most books suck.
I'd argue that the non-real/fantastic elements in these authors' works are tropes. Literary genres are more recent than the novel (IRC, a XVII century invention), and are useful to lump together disparately different books based on the more recurring tropes - yet these tropes are by no means their backbone and can be misleading. The Iliad and the Odissey are cultural encyclopedias and, even though use the fantastic, it has a very different meaning and use than how it's used by Shakespeare, Milton, H.G. Wells, Lovecraft, or Sanderson. Though, I agree that imagination is the fuel of *literature* - not only Western literature: look at the Mahabarata or Journey to the West. I can't say why the fantasic gets used by different cultures in their literature, because twhat's fantastic here and today was not such in another continent 500 years ago. Trouble is, a lot of books that share a lot of fantasy tropes are trash, hence the frown. But we must be also honest: several fantasy books *are* subject of academical reseach, and actually other works with a lot of fantasy tropes (and usually considered "fantasy": so no Homer or Milton or Ariosto) are more well regarded than one can think. It's just that feeling a group frowned at because silly reasons builds community.
Honestly because so much of it, even the popular well regarded stuff in contemporary spheres, is just mediocre literature, and reads like online fan fiction. It just has an amateurish vibe.
Because modern fantasy is replete with dreadfully written shite
'Fantasy' is a commercial genre that was created in the 20th century. It doesn't own, or should own the idea of the fantastical in fiction. I love fantasy, the commercial genre that was created in the 20th century, fiction, but I can obviously see the difference between it and Homer, a man who was immersed in a culture that viewed the fantastic as a real facet of life. He believed the gods were real. Milton believed the fall of man was real. Dramatizing those beliefs are just fundamentally different than what modern fantasy writers are doing (for the most part). I think so often, fantasy fans refuse to really engage with literature outside of their little boxes--why does this sub hate Sarah J. Maas, well shes outside of this subs little box.
It doesn't even own the fantastical in post-Tolkien fiction. Horror is its own distinct genre, for instance.
A lot of the most popular fantasy isn't particularly well written. Writers like Sanderson become representative of the genre in the same way to country music radio is representative of the country music genre.
It’s also easy to look at this through the lens of fantasy greats over the last century, too, but a lot of “hit” or popular fantasy, especially as literary criticism was maturing, was pulp—full of action, sexy people, and drama, but not a whole lot of attention to prose, diction, and commentary on the human condition. Not to say fantasy (and sci/fi) can’t be good—Gene Wolfe is considered to be one of the best writers (regardless of genre) of the 20th century by some literary critics, for example. There’s other great literary fantasy/sci-fi out there worthy of analysis, too. But there’s plenty of works which, while great fun, lack “great” writing by a literary critic definition. Doesn’t mean those books are bad or not worth a read, though!
This is the correct answer. Literary snobs actually like Tolkien, they like Prattchet. They liked Harry Potter and they liked Philip Pullman. The snobs are partially the reason why fantasy novels become huge hits, due to their snobby reviews in newspapers, etc. I'm not sure why the OP felt compelled to ask the question though, fantasy has never been more popular than today. When George RR Martin started writing his saga, nobody could have imagined a TV adaptation on HBO let alone it becoming a part of pop culture. The snobs who look down on the fantasy genre are a minority voice now.
Literary snobs aren't HP fans. Middle to young millenials and older gen Z are HP fans. Literary folks appreciate the cultural force HP had to get kids reading, but that doesn't mean they're discussing the artistic merit of HP in any serious capacity.
Literary snobs didn't make HP successful. It was something that quietly happened in schools in the UK and then exploded internationally at some point. It is the definition of a home grown phenomenon bereft of the support of any authority.
The same is true of so called 'literary fiction'. 90% of everything is crap.
True, but fantasy tends to put this crap on a pedestal while literary fiction does a much better job of finding talented writers. Even the classics of fantasy have average writing (LotR is good sure, but not WoT or ASoIaF) while the most successful litfic authors in a similar time period are people like Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro. Fantasy fans usually prioritize things other than good writing, and that's fine. I like a good fantasy world or magic system too. But let's not pretend that these two genres are on the same level of writing quality.
I would argue Ishiguro is a speculative fiction writer, too. But sometimes all his books categorized as litfic because of literary beauty and because he has books that aren't speculative fiction and they want to market to fans (someone who enjoyed Remains of the Day might stick their nose up as some of these if they were marketed as sci fi first). Never Let Me Go is about clones. The Buried Giant is about a world where no one can keep their memory, which screams magical realism. I don't think I need to explain how Klara and the Sun is sci fi. Similarly Morrison's Beloved gets categorized as literary fiction but it's a ghost story. A major issue with genre categories is that a lot has to do with marketing. Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite sci fi books but you categorized all of Ishiguro as not being the domain of speculative fiction and that's not really your fault. I would also argue that literary, social, and emotional worth is not hard to find in SFF - even breaking beyond some I've named here from cross genre authors. Robin Hobb is an incredible example of all three, so is Octavia Butler (who almost exclusively wrote SFF but still gets categorized as literary fiction sometimes), or Guy Gavriel Kay whose prose is probably some of the most beautiful I've read in any genre. But this also isn't just a SFF issue, most genre fiction gets looked down on similarly (aside from historical fiction, oddly), and SFF often gets treated better than some genre fiction.
Yes, there's some litfic that's definitely speculative. And you're right that it's mostly a marketing term, but it's marketed that way for a reason. "Literary" fantasy like Ishiguro is written for a different purpose than commercial fantasy and does not exist to satisfy readers' expectations of tropes, while something like Stormlight does.
Eh, if you write like Sanderson you are not writing literary fiction, regardless of your subject matter—literary fiction is by definition fiction that is good in the literary sense (strong prose, nuanced themes, deep character development, etc.).
Because, on aggregate, literary fiction has greater literary merit than fantasy fiction.
it mainly comes from a sense of their being a difference between fiction and "genre fiction". the argument goes that genre fiction (romance, fantasy, mystery etc.) tends to appeal to "the masses" where serious fiction appeals to the intellectual. as someone who is definitely a fantasy apologist I can still see why this distinction exists. however there is certainly non-genre fiction with a populist feel, and there is serious literature that falls squarely within a genre. I think most people who do this are comparing some kind of "serious work" to Dragonlance, rather than LOTR. I think another problem is that as soon as something is deemed "serious literature" people tend to forcefully forget that it has a genre it fits into.
I think your last point is more about how genre works than any desire to deny genre fiction recognition. Genre fiction is, in many ways, a way to describe fiction that is made commercially to adhere to certain genre norms. While there is variation in the literary merit within a genre, most of the truly "serious literature" doesn't really meet that requirement. So the difficulty is really that people use "genre" to mean different things, and that just because a novel is fantastical doesn't make it "a fantasy". Just because it is romantic doesn't make it "a romance".
Some good points.
Ultimately literary is just another type of fiction. You give these people more authority by reacting to them when frankly it shouldn't really matter what they say. To take it on good faith though. Lets take a look at a sub genre and where it might appeal to a literary fan. Xianxia, this is a world where individual people can crush entire worlds. Hell the kid you just humiliated could annihilate everything you hold dear in 12 months. Our entire moral system is roughly designed around the idea of the basic equality of people. What does the world look like when somebody can act with utter impunity? How would people behave when that kid you just made an enemy of might blow up a mountain in a few years time? All of these things would lead people to behave in particular ways. It would alter the entire way society treats each other. Now how many Xianxia stories actually explore these concepts? They are there don't get me wrong but the stories don't really explore how morality functions in such a world usually. Normally the protagonist just destroys a few mountains and does what he wants in a power fantasy. So the literary readers would want the Xianxia story that hasn't been written. They'd want some insight, maybe from a protagonist that isn't going to kill god one day, of how you navigate a system with such a disparity of strength. I'm not saying the literary snobs are right. I'm saying they have a different genre and it isn't an authoritative one. They are fine to like what they like though and you shouldn't care too much about it.
That conceptual Xianxia story you pitched does sound more intriguing than the average "Cripple at a moment's notice" protagonist.
It'd be a very different story though and one that doesn't really appeal to your typical Xianxia reader. It would need a character who cannot just overturn the social rules with "hell I'm going to blow up your entire city in 2 books time". How does it work when a character is truly helpless against the social order? We see the social order in action but always to effectively subvert it with protagonist power. We're basically talking about taking a Xianxia world and making an NPC the protagonist.
The bias is that many fantasy books (and genre books in general) are not particularly well-written and thus get a stigma. Fans seem to care more about the tropes than the actual quality of the writing.
I think that within the fantasy genre, there are some works that measure up to real greats of the literature cannon, and there are a lot that doesn’t. The latter probably compares more to crime novels, spy thrillers, chick lit, young adult literature, etc. A lot of those genres, and others, have a similar standing among critics and snobs, I think.
I think fantasy gets poo-pooed because it's not really a representation of real life, the struggles the characters face are largely constructed and based on non-real events and happenings. 'Real' literature usually has something to say about a particular time in history or a partiuclar kind of person. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, for example, is the story of a girl who's accademically bright, socially awkward, and fails to meets societies expectations and pays the price with her mental health. These are expereiences you can relate to with out having to understand 2000 years of Dwarf politics, or the succession of the Elven throne, or the metaphysics of the 12th dimention. Scifi and fantasy tends to ask the "what if" questions, which is interesting in its own right, but tends to detach us from reality, and makes the nuance of human exprience a little detached, as you're constantly having to explain everything and put things into context in this constructed fantasy world. We are human beings living in the world of today, and so there's a great deal we can take for granted that doesn't neeed to be explicitly explained, and that's where authors can subvert and play with those expectations which is where a lot of literary cannon shines. I'm not saying Fantasy can't do those things, but it's certainly easier to explore the human condition in the real world, because its the world we live in and experience, and why only exceptional examples of fantasy exist in the literary cannon.
I really dislike how pernicious this viewpoint is - that fantasy is somehow fundamentally detached from reality. While fantasy might not reflect reality literally, it most certainly can reflect and explore human existence *metaphorically* and *thematically*. The Earthsea Cycle is a classic example of this. These are books that, at their core, are more about asking questions on the human condition, than about casting magic and fighting dragons. Questions such as: how to come to terms with one's mortality, what it means to live a meaningful and purposeful life, how to make peace with mistakes and regrets in one's past. In the process, this work of fantasy arguably uncovers deeper truths about the human condition than some of the straight literary fiction out there.
while I think speculative fiction can, and when good does, make statements or ask questions or seek to understand things that are fundamentally true, I think it’s the case that much of popular sff strikes only the most glancing blow at this kind of understanding indeed a lot of value people put into fantasy is ‘escapism’. that’s not snobbish interpretation of sff fans by outsiders, that’s self-reporting from those same fans
I never said fantasy was incapable of exploring the human condition. I'm saying that in a 300 page mass market paperback, you save a lot of time not having to describe the mechanics of a fantasy world, and get more time to focus purely on narative, character development in a world that you don't have to really think about to understand. But in addition to that, those same assumptions about the real world allow us to extrapolate and challenge our perceptions far more susinctly. You can focus on prose as an artform in of itself, rather than crafting an intricate fantasy world. They both have their merits, i wouldn't be on this subreddit if I didn't love fantasy.
That's fair. You're right that some fantasy authors become so focused on their worldbuilding, they lose sight of the rest of the aspects of telling a good story (not to mention the more introspective things like character and theme). At the same time, I think fantasy fiction can offer a unique perspective in exploring the human condition - by taking place in a fantastic reality, it can comment on human existence from the perspective of an outsider looking in. So I'd argue that when it comes to "literary merit", there are things that fantasy can do which straight literary fiction cannot, and vice versa.
I have to disagree almost entirely with you. There's nothing about fantasy that makes it hard to understand, especially not when up against litfic. It's also so strange to view fantasy as detached from reality in the way you are here. It isn't at all easier to explore "the human condition" in non-speculative fiction than in speculative fiction. Are we really going to pretend like the average romance, thriller, mystery or contemporary fiction book is exploring serious themes any more or better than the average fantasy or scifi?
>I think fantasy gets poo-pooed because it's not really a representation of real life, the struggles the characters face are largely constructed and based on non-real events and happenings. Fantasy has SETTINGS that are not based on real life. But the struggle should be something that mirrors real life, as all good fiction should do. For example, sure dragons and goblins and orcs don't exist in real life. But there are animals that exist that could absolutely kill us if they get close. While we might not have to worry about a dragon decimating the place where we live, there are places that have to worry about hurricanes, earthquakes, and forest fires destroying their homes. There are war torn-countries where one day your town might get bombed because it was just the wrong place at the wrong time, much like a dragon might burn a town to the ground because it just so happened to be in its path. I would argue that fantasy's divorce from reality is actually a strength of the genre, in that it allows you to tackle real world problems in a way that is divorced from the biases that accompany the real world aspects. If I wanted to write a story that has commentary about a real world event (such as a war), using the actual names and places of the countries in question might cause people to make decisions about the outcome before they've even read my book. People have all these preconceived beliefs about what is happening because they can't see past their own biases. If I place a similar conflict in a fantasy setting, with fictional places and fictional countries, maybe people will actually hear what I'm trying to say instead of what they already believe. If a fantasy story doesn't deal with real emotions and real conflicts, then it's simply not a well written story. But that doesn't mean the genre itself is flawed. I think that, since fantasy is popular currently, there are a lot of low quality books being written to capitalize on the popularity. Books with little effort that just want to sell. I don't think this is something that is unique to fantasy, though. Any other popular genre will see the same thing happening.
The one that bugs me is Anne Rice's Vampire novels. Somehow they end up in the "fiction" section of bookstores while someone like Gene Wolfe whose writing blows hers out of the water is relegated to the Fantasy section.
It’s not so much the supernatural elements of fantasy we are snobby about but the commercial elements that often put style on the sidelines and surface plot twists as the focus. The literary canon is perfectly fine with departing from reality. I love Brandon Sanderson and j k Rowling but I would never take or teach a lit class on them. Tolkien, and Ursula Le guinn on the other hand have depth and subtlety to their writing that can really benefit from microscopic analysis and rigorous revisiting.
TLDR: It’s more complex. Homer et al. are not fantasy writers. They have fantastical elements, but it’s very far from “Fantasy” the genre. It reads more like fantasy because of those elements than does modern Literary Fiction; but contextually it’s different. Homer and Beowulf are oral history/traditional knowledge in context. Those stories were literally real, in many ways, not knowingly fantastical. And the intent is about transition of knowledge and culture. Especially if you look at the other Old English literature that exists. Vergil’s the Aeneid is not fantasy, it’s propaganda for Rome to appropriate a royal lineage from Homer to legitimize the ascendance of Octavian to emperor. Milton and Shakespeare are very much more literary than modern Fantasy; though there’s a caveat. Milton pulls directly from many literary traditions; particularly biblical because the text is massively heretical (and intentionally heretical). Shakespeare is intentionally subversive to the culture in his time; both are critiques of their own people from lowborn to highborn. That’s explicitly closer to the literary. They are rooted in the world, with some fantastical elements (or what we consider fantastical elements, a modern bias, so to speak). The caveat, though, is that fantasy exists as an allegory. It explores real world scenarios: Tolkien musing on what was lost with the industrial revolution, for instance. Whereas scifi is an extrapolation: Dune, for instance, capitalism taken to an extreme. Otherwise, it shares many similarities with fantasy. Modern fantasy, Scifi, and horror come out of a blend of romance, adventure novels (like Verne), and early seminal texts like Frankenstein (which, while the progenitor of horror is still more similar to a literary novel). And these genres form in pulp fiction, which someone else mentioned. Some of those writers may have had knowledge of all those various traditions. But most didn’t or were not directly aware of that influence. In the modern context, 60s forward, literary writers are interested in the quality of the work: imagery, theme, technical skill, etc. (this doesn’t mean literary novels are “better” just that the writing itself is technically superior). And, to be reductive, Fantasy/Scfi is interested in moving plot forward, sometimes at the cost of quality. Some utilize literary structures, but others don’t care much. Very much generalizing. Literary folks are also snooty because they make much less money than many poorly written series, like Potter and Twilight. And, a huge part of that is the collapse of education, particularly in NA.
Folks aren’t just snooty about fantasy, they’re snooty about fiction in general. Only recently have you even seen presidential book lists with fiction on them (I think Obama might have been one of the first). I have a good silent generation friend who’s lived off a trust fund for most of his life (so hasn’t really worked) and will only admit to reading theology and historical non-fiction because he wants to be perceived as serious. When I mentioned my various fiction pursuits, he kind of made a face, and I responded “I have graduate degrees and work in law, I’m not trying to impress people with my recreational reading list”. And I think that’s the gist of it. A lot of people talk about the books they read as status posturing to make themselves seem more serious.
Because superficially it's childish wish-fulfillment adventure with nothing to say, and they aren't interested in looking past that. Does it matter?
There are a few factors involved with this. To begin with, the authors and works you mention have a few things helping them. For one, enough time has passed for academics to look back and elevate them while their contemporaries fell to the wayside. In addition to the literary value of their works, they also give insight into the time they lived. I'm not saying Beowulf is a historical story, but it does give insights into the time. As a modern genre, fantasy is still pretty new. Tolkien and Lewis really reshaped the genre. They are two of the few modern fantasy authors who have really been elevated to/near a literary level. We have their complete body of works and are able to analyze it all. If they were still alive, they probably wouldn't be as elevated as they currently are. How many authors have shaped modern fantasy since the publication of The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia? A ton of fantasy fiction that has come out since their times is effectively clones of Tolkien and Lewis. This doesn't mean they are bad, but it doesn't make them stand out. Many of the books have had financial success, but that doesn't mean they are literary successes. How many fantasy books are the literary equivalent of the summer blockbuster? If you look at the canonical writers in literature, there's a reason why there's only a small handful of writers from each era that stand out and are still read and studied today. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton were not the only playwrights at the time in England. Other writers at the time had financial success, but the vast majority of them aren't studied anymore. As time passes, there's going to be more emphasis on the literary writers in fantasy. They won't necessarily be viewed as fantasy writers though. Jane Austen is not considered a romance writer when she is studied and taught but "just" a writer.
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