The image of Alexander flourished across the disiecta membra of the empire he created and far beyond it. Consideration is given here to the appropriation of the king’s image in the broader sense – and principally through the medium of texts – in relation to the founders of the greater two of the Successor dynasties, those of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The legend of Seleucus was richly bathed in Alexander-imagery, and this imagery was focused, in different ways, on the person of Seleucus himself. Some of the tales focus syntagmatically on his personal interaction with the king, whilst he yet lived, and indeed in one case even after even he had died. Others serve to establish paradigmatic or typological parallel between the actions of Alexander and those of Seleucus, and some seek to do both. The case of Ptolemy is different: whilst there is again some focus on Ptolemy’s personal interaction with Alexander, much of the legend-generation focuses rather on Alexander’s relationship with Ptolemy’s city of Alexandria, the glory of which was the king’s tomb. So long as Ptolemy remained ensconced in the city, he could afford to bask in a more indirectly reflected variety of the king’s charisma.

This chapter explores the ways in which modern works of Fantasy remake longstanding cultural forms. It modifies John Clute’s notion of taproot texts by focusing on larger-scale modes of meaning-making rather than individual influential works, examining the ways in which Fantasy is deeply informed by myths and legends, epic and romance, folk and fairy tales, and religions. Any one of these could be the subject for a book in itself, so the chapter employs a selective approach, giving a sense of each mode’s larger patterns, exploring how these have been taken up in Fantasy and examining a small selection of case studies. The myths and legends section focuses on how recent Fantasy texts remake the story of Hades and Persephone, considering Anaïs Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, Supergiant’s game Hades and Rachel Smythe’s webtoon Lore Olympus. Other key works discussed include Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories, Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and Kelly Link’s ‘Travels with the Snow Queen’.

The Conclusion and Epilogue gesture toward the listed dynamics of counting and materialization in later texts through the brief examples of the Parian Marble and Lindian Chronicle. These monumental inscribed text-objects can be understood as literal transformations of cultural value into list form, extreme inventories untethered from their contents.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.