ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes what fantasy is. It summarizes the most influential critical and theoretical approaches to fantasy over the last fifty years, including some of the main distinctions in approach taken by J.R.R. Tolkien, Tzvetan Todorov, Kathryn Hume, Rosemary Jackson, Lucie Armitt and Farah Mendlesohn. Fantasy’s influence on the theoretical ideas of Julia Kristeva, Donna J. Haraway and Slavoj Žiźek is also discussed .The versatility and importance of fantasy to literature, film, television, cinema, music, painting and illustration is introduced here. Portal fantasy is defined and analysed in relation to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring and Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The role desire and loss play in the creation of some fantasy narratives is discussed in relation to Zach Helm’s film Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and George MacDonald’s Phantastes. The chapter concludes with a detailed consideration of animation, using the Toy Story Disney Pixar franchise as illustration.
