Contemporary Fantasy

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Contemporary fantasy or contemporary fantasy (rarely also fantastic / fantastic ) is a sub-genre of fantasy literature.

Contemporary Fantasy describes texts from the field of fantasy literature in which the real world is broken up by fantastic elements. This mostly happens as a merging of the everyday life of the present with old and modern myths , for example through the integration of supernatural forces and mythical creatures that come from the repertoire of fantasy. The appearance of gods and their messengers is also not uncommon; Examples are Douglas Adams ' The Long Dark Five O'clock Tea of ​​the Soul and Neil Gaiman's American Gods .

Demarcation

The contemporary fantasy differs from the historical fantasy (historical fantasy) not only by the relation to the present. The contemporary fantasy covers at most the time from the end of the 19th century to today. The focus of most of the novels, however, lies in a modern setting, which often comes from the urban area with its fast pace and conflicts. In contrast to this, historical fantasy is set in a long time past, when myths still had a real meaning and gods and magicians still had real power. In works of contemporary fantasy it is portrayed as a power that is disappearing and hardly noticed by most people. Helmut W. Pesch writes: This type of fantasy takes place in our reality, in which (sic!) Magic breaks in - but in a way that it is seen as compatible with it.

Occasionally, however, the real and the fantastic world do not merge, but only touch, for example when the hero enters a fantasy world through magical gates or rituals, as in the Chronicle of Thomas Covenant the Doubt by Stephen R. Donaldson or in Michael Ende's Neverending Story . These stories and novels, in which a fantastic world exists completely independently alongside the everyday world, are not attributed to actual contemporary fantasy by some literary scholars and critics . The modern world is only the starting point of a framework plot in which the hero of a story enters a fantasy world with independent locations, characters and rules that do not influence the everyday world.

Urban fantasy

A common form of contemporary fantasy is urban fantasy , in which the "real" action takes place in urban space. Often both terms are used synonymously, not least because of the difficult definition.

Well-known representatives

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut W. Pesch: Spielformen der Fantasy. Magische Fantasy ("Contemporary Fantasy") Archive link ( Memento of the original from July 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.helmutwpesch.de

literature

  • Richard Bleiler (Ed.): Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror. Volume I and II. Holiday House, 2nd edition, November 2002, ISBN 0684312506
  • Martin Horstkotte: The postmodern fantastic in contemporary British fiction . Horizons - Studies on Texts and Ideas of European Modernism, Volume 34. WVT, Trier, 2004 ISBN 3-88476-679-1
  • Lance Olsen: Ellipse of uncertainty: an introduction to postmodern fantasy . Greenwood Press, Westport, 1987 ISBN 0-313-25511-3
  • Petra Schrackmann: Knowledge as a threshold. "Urban Fantasy" for children and young people in media transfer , in: Foreign Worlds. Paths and Spaces of Fantasticism in the 21st Century , edited by Lars Schmeink and Hans-Harald Müller, DeGruyter Verlag, Berlin and Boston 2012, pp. 271–286. ISBN 978-3-11-027655-8