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Genre

Fairytale Fantasy

Speculative and Fantastic Fiction

Fairytale Fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy distinguished by its heavy use of motifs, and often whole plots, drawn from fairy tales and folklore, set apart from a plain literary fairy tale by its use of novelistic conventions of prose, characterization and setting. Its roots reach back to Apuleius's Golden Ass in the Roman period, and it was shaped further by the Renaissance tales of Giambattista Basile, the salon fairy tales of seventeenth century French writers such as Charles Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy, and the Brothers Grimm's reworking of collected folk material into literary form. Modern fairytale fantasy ranges from original stories built on fairy tale motifs, such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit, to adult retellings, revisionist versions that invert a tale's original morals or supply a rationale for its magic, and stories whose characters knowingly occupy a fairy tale role. Writers associated with the genre include Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Facts
Notable Example
The Hobbit 1
Defining Trait
Heavy use of motifs and plots from fairy tales or folklore 1
Sources
1. Fairytale fantasy - Wikipedia
  • Introduction
    heavy use of motifs, and often plots, from fairy tales or folklore
  • Genre overview, paragraph 1
    such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit
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