Hard to say if that's speculative fiction or romance. World's oldest profession engenders the world's oldest genre. And the oldest fantasy tales very often involve romance.It's the first genre of fiction.
Hard to say if that's speculative fiction or romance. World's oldest profession engenders the world's oldest genre. And the oldest fantasy tales very often involve romance.
I think Frankenstein is actually a science fiction novel. It's about technology and the impact of that technology on society. Yes, it's fantastical technology, but it's still technology. So, SciFi."Modern" fantasy [maybe] started with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in 1818. But that has probably started a huge new debate
HOW far does fanasty go back?
I've been thinking about this, and I think the oldest genre would be horror. Things which go Boo! in the night. Stories about the terror lurking just beyond the light of the fire or outside the cave at night.Hard to say if that's speculative fiction or romance. World's oldest profession engenders the world's oldest genre. And the oldest fantasy tales very often involve romance.
Just going to pick on you for a second. The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murisaki and which I still need to read all of, dates back to the 11th? century.If we look at the earliest literary forms, they're mostly adventure stories. Plenty of fantastical elements (think Odyssey), but for the most part they're not what I would classify as fantasy.
I wouldn't call it fantasy as a genre until we have novels. Parzival or the Niebelungenlied are as much history as fantasy, or maybe call them morality plays. Njal's Saga and related works are in much the same vein--great heroes on epic quests, all larger than life but still closer to Alan Quartermain than to John Carter.
But it really does depend on definitions, for what we're doing here is trying to find a line of demarcation between stories with fantastical elements (which do go right back into pre-history), and a literary genre (which I wouldn't put any earlier than the 17thc because there were no novels earlier than that). With room for fudging all round.