ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is more narrowly concerned with fantasy and its functions, with the relationship between literary fantasy and the author who produces it, and with the human needs of the audience which it fulfills. It then sketches the four significant, conscious responses to reality which are logically possible within an artistic framework: illusion, vision, revision, and disillusion. The book also deals with the effects that literary form have on fantasy and those that fantasy has on form, these clarify some of the reasons that would motivate authors to use fantasy. Psychoanalytic theory, Freudian, Jungian, and Gestalt, suggests how some kinds of fantasy work on reader's minds. For fantasy, proves to be peculiarly important to the experience of meaning, even though western culture has traditionally been hostile and dismissive toward fantasy in most of its manifestations.
