Conclusion

Abstract

English fantasy as we have now seen it is a far larger and older genre than is usually thought. It is not simply Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the other well-known names, but Edmund Spenser, Douglas Jerrold and Peter Ackroyd, and a host of other under-acknowledged figures. Nor is it only a ‘secondary world’ type of fantasy, as it is frequently taken to be but exists in several different forms, in the development of most of which the English have been pioneers. Other countries have tended to specialize in one area, as have the Americans in ‘high’ or secondary world fantasy, or the French in subversive fantasy: but the English, with their propensity for individuating whatever they touch, have excelled in them all. It is this that makes England the home and centre of the fantastic genre. Yet the strange thing is that it is so by having the most peculiar fantasy in the world.