FINESSING FANTASY

I don't always elaborate on changes to my subject tags, but in this case, I want to record my line of thought for future use.

I noticed that two of my tags-- "fantasy" and "fantasy stories"-- seemed a little redundant, and in fact I had over the years sometimes applied them inconsistently. So, in line with the recent determinations I made in the MIND OUT OF TIME series, I changed anything that referred to particular stories of magical fantasy to "magical fantasy stories," while creating new categories for stories that didn't meet the magical fantasy criteria. For instance, Lewis Carroll's tales are now "nonsense fantasy stories," while THE SATANIC VERSES is "supernatural comedy." The rubric "supernatural" is one I plan to use for any with fantasy-content that's not either science fiction, nonsense, or some metaphenomenal hybrid and is set in more or less contemporary times. 

As a further example, the LEPRECHAUN horror-series would be mostly "supernatural drama" since it involves an archaic leprechaun killing off people in modern times-- though I guess LEPRECHAUN 4 IN SPACE is a hybrid between SF and supernatural drama.

The tag "fantasy (literary term)" deserves more explication. There is not a standard use of the term "fantasy" in academic literary criticism, but one particular critic does use it as I do: Kathleen Hume in her 1984 book FANTASY AND MIMESIS. She uses "fantasy" as a blanket term for everything in literature that deviates from commonplace, mimetic descriptions of the world, even deviations that might be classed as minor bits of nonsense. (For instance, she includes an incident where two characters in Voltaire's CANDIDE, seen to die explicit deaths "on stage," come back to life for no good reason.) My own category for the totality of all fantastic imaginings is "the metaphenomenal," while "the isophenomenal" describes everything that adheres to the principle of mimesis. But henceforth I'll also use "fantasy" to indicate the mental process by which authors create deviations from realism. This process, regardless of the rationalization used, thus engenders a principle opposite to that of mimesis, as in Hume: a principle which authors use to describe anything that goes beyond the bounds of realism.