Fantasy: A Short History

One of the most popular genres of modern times, fantasy literature has as rich a cultural and literary heritage as the magical worlds that so enrapture its readers. In this book, a concise history of the genre, Adam Roberts traces the central forms and influences on fantasy through the centuries to arrive at our understanding of the fantastic today.

Pinning the evolution of fantasy on three key moments – the 19th-century resurgence of interest in Arthurian legend, the rise of Christian allegory, and a post-Ossian, post-Grimm emergence of a Norse, Germanic and Old English mythic identity – Roberts explores how the logic of ‘the fantastical’ feeds through into the sets and trappings of modern fantasy. Tracking the creation of heroic and high fantasy subgenres through antiquarian tradition, through C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and into the post-Tolkien boom in genre fantasy writing, the book brings the manifestation of the fantastic beyond literature into art, music, film and TV, video games and other cultural productions such as fandoms. From Tennyson and Wagner, through Robert Graves, David Jones, Samuel Delany, Dungeons and Dragons, Terry Pratchett and Robin Hobb, to the Game of Thrones, Skyrim, The Witcher and The Lord of the Rings media franchises, the book digs into the global dissemination and diversity of 21st-century fantasy. Accessible and dynamic, wide-ranging but comprehensive, this is a crash-course in context for the most imaginative form of storytelling.