1 - Fantasy from Dryden to Dunsany
from PART I - HISTORIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2012
Summary
On 1 July 1712, in his magazine The Spectator – which, widely available in coffeehouses, was probably the closest thing eighteenth-century England had to what we would now think of as a popular blog – Joseph Addison introduced a topic of discussion that might sound familiar to modern readers of fantasy:
There is a kind of writing wherein the poet quite loses sight of Nature, and entertains his reader's imagination with the characters and actions of such persons as have many of them no existence but what he bestows on them; such are fairies, witches, magicians, demons, and departed spirits. This Mr. Dryden calls the fairy way of writing, which is, indeed, more difficult than any other that depends on the poet's fancy, because he has no pattern to follow in it, and must work altogether out of his own invention.
Addison, of course, wasn't thinking of anything like the fantasy novel in the modern sense – his main purview was poetry and drama – but his observations were pertinent enough that a contemporary scholar, David Sandner, has argued that Addison could be regarded as ‘the first critic of the fantastic’. Addison does not quite use the terms ‘fantastic’ or ‘fantasy’, however, speaking instead of ‘the reader's imagination’ and ‘the poet's fancy’ – both terms which would increasingly, over the next century or so, move to the foreground in discussions of the fantastic imagination.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature , pp. 5 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
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