4 - Enlightenment and its Shadows

Summary

This chapter considers how Fantasy has been shaped by and shaped modern understandings that privilege facts, realism and scientific knowledge. It argues that while Fantasy has often been belittled by discourses that seek to define what is true, right and possible, fantasies have engaged in good faith with such discourses while serving as valuable means for negotiating their limitations. The chapter begins by discussing Enlightenment and its oversights, before pivoting to discuss how Fantasy was side-lined by discourses of genius that exalted authors and demeaned audiences, setting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Francis Jeffrey against more sympathetic appraisals by Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb and George MacDonald. The back half of the chapter explores how Fantasy engages critically with dominant rationalist and realist understandings that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering works including Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the animated series Arcane, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep.