ABSTRACT
This chapter presents modern fantasy published over the three decades after 1945. Relatively little has been written on post-war fantasy, except for studies of individual authors. The modern fantasy novel might hardly seem to need a defence, were it not for the curiously ambivalent position it occupies in the contemporary literary scene. The essential ingredient of all fantasy is ‘the marvellous’, which will be regarded as anything outside the normal space-time continuum of the world. Tolkien’s belief in the transcendent power of fantasy is closer to Shelley’s views on the poetic imagination, set forth in A Defence of Poetry. The marvellous element which lies at the heart of all fantasy is composed of what can never exist in the world of empirical experience. It might be argued that modern fantasy writers are simply the heirs of a long-standing literary tradition, even perhaps that they could scarcely have existed but for the foundations laid earlier in the development of European literature.
