Secondary World Fantasy

Abstract

English literature is full of the impulse to make little worlds within or without our own. Chaucer’s poetry is crammed with alternative realities — the antique world of The Knight’s Tale, the multiple psychological realms of The Canterbury Tales themselves, the visionary landscapes, built or unbuilt, of The House of Fame, The Romaunt of the Rose or The Parliament of Fowls, the shifting perspectives of Troilus and Criseyde or The Miller’s Tale. We could trace the impulse through the manifold dream landscapes of Spenser (which contrast with the comparative uniformity of context in their sources Ariosto and Tasso), the megalomaniac desire to revise their worlds in Marlowe’s or Jonson’s overreaching heroes, the perspectival mosaic in Shakespeare’s plays, the joining of two realities in the conceits of metaphysical poetry, or even the love of the English novel for a wide and various social scene. Such worlds are provinces or extensions of our own, but we also find the direct use of fantastic secondary worlds, where ‘reality’ is other than ours, in Beowulf, the Middle English Pearl and Sir Gawain, in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.