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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.