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Fantasy Subgenres

Subgenres of speculative fiction whose defining premise is magic, myth or an invented world rather than a scientific one, spanning high and low fantasy, sword and sorcery, urban and contemporary fantasy, historical and mythic fantasy, comic and romantic fantasy, and the Chinese and Japanese fantasy traditions built on their own mythologies such as xianxia, xuanhuan, isekai, LitRPG and the shenmo or gods-and-demons tradition. Includes fantasy hybrids that blend magic with another mode, such as science fantasy, romantasy, weird western and grimdark, where the entity's own description frames the work primarily as a fantasy variant rather than a horror or science-fiction one. Excludes science-fiction subgenres grouped under Science Fiction Subgenres, horror-first subgenres grouped under Horror Fiction Subgenres, and fairy-tale-specific forms grouped separately under Fairy Tale and Fable.

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Comparison
Era of Emergence
1858 1
Fantasy Subgenres
Filter Results39 entries
Sources
1. Fantasy (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)Fantasy, Modern fantasy section
Quote, Fantasy, Modern fantasy section
Although pre-dated by John Ruskin's story The King of the Golden River (1841), the history of modern fantasy literature is usually said to begin with George MacDonald, the Scottish author of such novels as Phantastes (1858) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872)
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