Genre Overview
This genre may include modern fairy tales, which use fairy tale motifs in original plots, such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit, as well as erotic, violent, or otherwise more adult-oriented retellings of classic fairy tales (many of which, in many variants, were originally intended an audience of adults, or a mixed audience of all ages), such as the comic book series Fables. It can also include fairy tales with the plot fleshed out with characterization, setting, and fuller plots, to form a child's or young adult novel.
Many fairytale fantasies are revisionist, often reversing the moral values of the characters involved. This may be done for the intrinsic aesthetic interest, or for a thematic exploration. Writers may also make the magic of the fairy tale self-consistent in a fantasy re-telling, based on technological extrapolation in a science fiction, or explain it away in a contemporary or historical work of fiction.
Other forms of fantasy, especially comic fantasy, may include fairy tale motifs as partial elements, as when Terry Pratchett's Discworld contains a witch who lives in a gingerbread house, or when Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest is rife with princesses and princes trying to fit in their appointed fairy tale roles.
The settings of fairytale fantasies, like the fairy tales they derive from, may owe less to world-building than to the logic of folk tales. Princes can go wandering in the woods and return with a bride without consideration for all the political effects of royal marriages. A common, comic, motif is a world where all the fairy tales take place, and the characters are aware of their role in the story, occasionally even breaking the fourth wall.
Other writers may develop the world as fully as in other subgenres, generating a work that is also, based on setting, a high fantasy, historical fantasy, or contemporary fantasy.
Authors who have worked with the genre include such various figures as Oscar Wilde, Kathryn Davis, A. S. Byatt, Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, Kate Bernheimer, James Thurber, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Rikki Ducornet, Robert Bly, Katie Farris and Annette Marie Hyder.
Read more about this topic: Fairytale Fantasy
Famous quotes containing the word genre:
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)