A Short History of Fantasy

Mendlesohn, Farah, and Edward James. A Short History of Fantasy. London: Middlesex University Press, 2009. 285 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-90675068-0. $25.00.

A Short History of Fantasy was written according to its authors "to track the conversation of fantasy writers as they develop and extend the genre. The book will make little reference to the critics, but should provide readers with a very long reading list" (6). It also intends to fill the absence of a short history. As a history, its chapters proceed in chronological order, beginning with "From Myth to Magic" (and Gilgamesh), followed by "1900-1950," and then by decades with interspersed chapters on Tolkien and Lewis and on Pullman, Rowling, and Pratchett. The end matter consists of a chronology of important works and people; a chronology of important movies, TV series, and other media; a glossary; a list of further reading; an index of titles; and an index of authors and topics. It does include mentions of comics, television, and films in addition to literature.

The danger of a chronological history is that sometimes it separates rather than unifies. Some of the later chapters, in particular, leap from topic to topic. There is some difficulty with that here. Lost-race (e.g., Talbot Mundy's Jimgrim series) and Utopian fantasy (e.g., James Hilton's Lost Horizon) and alternate history fantasy are not well covered. Also, those works derived from existing mythologies do not receive much attention. Studies like C. W. Sullivan Ill's Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy are not mentioned in the important works section, and while the authors in fact point out their own avoidance of the secondary literature, ignoring the work of scholars leads to occasional and unfortunate omissions. For example, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and the Proceedings of the International Conference on the Fantastic are missing, which is particularly odd since Mendlesohn is the immediate past president of the sponsoring organization, the Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

The authors indicate that they do not want to get involved "with the critical arguments which continue to sideline fantasy" but they do outline four approaches to understanding and explaining it (2; emphasis added). The first is the presence of the impossible and the "unexplainable." This premise was championed by...