Fantasy semantic field: problems of definition

Abstract

At the present stage of the development of literature the “pure” genre disappears, giving way to different entities that combine characteristic features of two or more genres. One of these relatively “new” literary phenomena is fantasy, ongoing discussions keep going around. The increased interest in it by literary critics may be explained by the constant dynamics of fantasy, which leads to the expansion of its thematic varieties, and hence to the expansion of the reader’s circle (it covers readers of different age groups and different social status).

Fantasy naturally formed into an independent branch within the limits of speculative fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, it has origins in the centuries-old tradition of the fantastic (mythical folklore tradition, Medieval, baroque, traditions of the Gothic novel, romanticism and modernism), where it borrowed various ways of reproduction of reality.

Despite the large quantity of studies devoted to various aspects and problems of the study of fantasy (S. Dreier, N. Fredrickson, E. Lugovaya, T.  Markova, V. Tolkachova, T. Khoruzhenko etc.), there is no clear definition of this concept. Most literary scholars call fantasy a genre, outlining the persistent components of its content (mythological basis, adventure intrigue, the division of the heroes into possessing superpowers, the presence of magical artefacts, opposition to the evil on a global scale).

We believe that fantasy is a meta-genre that has its own stable structure of modeling the world and brings together a diverse array of genres in literature and other arts as a common object of artistic representation. However, today to assert that fantasy is a meta-genre, lacks one important component ‑ the preservation of the structural semantic nucleus over several eras. Although we can assert that fantasy elements have already been clearly depicted in modernism.