ABSTRACT
This chapter traces some of the key recurring tropes and themes in fantasy from the Ancient Greeks to the twenty-first century, beginning with a discussion of various adaptations of ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ and The One Thousand and One Nights and exploring differing representations of the folkloric figure of the Fairy Queen. Although Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are key texts in this chapter, substantial weight falls on non-literary fantasy, too. Light opera is discussed through Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus and the Underworld, as is Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker Suite. Early and later cinema is represented strongly in this chapter through a discussion of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Baghdad, Disney’s animated and live action adaptations of Aladdin, Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon and The Conquest of the Pole, Ken Hughes’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The chapter closes with a discussion of the television drama Game of Thrones and a final section on children’s hand-held technology through Pokémon and Tamagotchi.
