Abstract
Comic fantasy has done particularly well in England, where the impulses to laugh at absurdity and to create it are both strong: carried to an extreme, these impulses can together produce preposterous worlds of wit. Comic fantasy deals with the extreme of fantasy, the impossible: it takes what we know cannot exist or hold together, and makes it do so — just.1 Sometimes it has satiric designs on us, but in England it is often pure play, there to delight. Often packed with highly diverse details and perspectives, it rejoices in the wild variety of the world and of the mind’s creations. It has become particularly developed in England since the Romantics, with their emphasis on creativity, but there are prominent examples in earlier literature.
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Notes
Cf. Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures (Transworld, 1991), p. 9: ‘The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist.’
Marie de France, ‘Del cok e del gupil’, Fables, ed. and tr. Harriet Spiegel ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987 ), pp. 68–70.
D. D. R. Owen, tr., The Romance of Reynard the Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Branch II, 11. 1–468 (pp. 53–9 ).
Walpole, ‘The King and his Three Daughters’, Hieroglyphic Tales ( San Francisco: Mercury House, 1993 ), p. 25.
Ibid., pp. 115, 141. On 1830s extravaganzas, see Michael R. Booth, English Plays of the Nineteenth Century, V: Pantomimes, Extravaganzas and Burlesques ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 ).
See also Roger B. Henkle, Comedy and Culture 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 196–9 (referring to the work of W. S. Gilbert).
Richard Garnett, The Twilight of the Gods ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947 ), p. 47.
Edith Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet (George Newnes, 1904), p. 137.
John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights ( Alexandra, VA: Time-Life, 1980 ), p. 266.
Roald Dahl, The BFG ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 ), pp. 49–50.
Eric Thacker and Anthony Earnshaw, Wintersol (Cape, 1971), p. 8.
Thacker and Earnshaw, Musrum (Cape, 1968), pp. 8, 135, 22, 37, 46.
Pratchett, The Colour of Magic (Transworld, 1994), pp. 263, 177, 127.
Back cover of Robert Irwin, The Limits of Vision, 3rd edn. ( Sawtry, Cambs.: Dedalus, 1993 ).
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Viking Penguin, 1988), p. 112.
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© 1999 Colin Manlove
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Manlove, C. (1999). Comic Fantasy. In: The Fantasy Literature of England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27499-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27499-4_6
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