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โครงการรวบรวมและจัดทําเอกสารวารสารอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์


          202      Humanities Journal Vol.21, No.1 (January-June 2014)

                 Fantasy Literature
                 Fantasy literature formally emerged in the late eighteenth century in
          the form of novels and short stories. Fundamentally, those fantasy works
          involve  elements  of  wizards,  enchanted  swords,  knights,  fairy  tales,  and
          supernatural events (Mathew, 2002; Todorov, 1970 cited in Scholes, 1975).

          In addition, Drabble (2000) mentioned that because of the discontentment
          with everyday life in readers’ societies, fantasy fiction has become in great
          demand and one of the most productive and commercially successful genres
          during the second half of the twentieth century.

                 Characteristics of Fantasy Literature
                 Todorov (1970, cited in Scholes, 1975) defines fantastic sense as

          the  sentiment  of  imagination  that  can  create  an  ambiguous  perception
          shared  by  readers  and  one  of  the  characters.  He  also  noted  that  the
          characteristics  of  fantasy  works  lay  between  marvelous  and  uncanny
          elements of literary works. This concept is summarized in Figure 1 below:

               Marvelous            Marvelous             Uncanny
            elements in literature   and Uncanny fantasy   elements in literature

                       Figure 1 The characteristics of fantasy works:
                     the intersection of Marvelous and Uncanny elements

                  Marvelous fantasy is a kind of fantasy in which all supernatural

          events  cannot  be  explained  by  any  laws  of  reality. Those  supernatural
          phenomena are closely related to imagination and they can be categorized
          as the elements of pure fantasy.
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