Diversity and Multiplicity of Fantasy Genre in Modern Literary Criticism

Abstract

Fantasy as a genre has a long and complex history of formation. The history of fantasy is as old as humanity itself. Its legitimate predecessors are a fairy tale, a novel and a fable. Fantasy aims to build up not only the realm of dreams, but also seeks to establish itself as a significant and indispensable system. The literary fantasy genre usually starts with obvious or concealed subtext about the existence of several realities and moves in the direction of awakening heroes’ previously unknown parts of themselves. The fantastical genre, having greater freedom in creating an image of the world, has the opportunity to defend and prove “in practice” the importance of eternal humanistic values. Many scientists disagree not only in defining fantasy as a type of literature, but also on its components. In order to determine similarities and differences between the existing theories of fantasy division, the main types of fantasy worked on by Kovtun, Shidfar, F. Mendlesohn and others are described using descriptive, comparative and other literary methods. All the scientists studied have been doing their research for the past hundred years, which gives a wide field for analysis. During the review of existing theories, it was revealed that the main elements of fantasy move from one classification to another, changing only the names.