Urban fantasy: Theorising an emergent literary subgenre (original) (raw)
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Theorizing the emergent subgenre of urban fantasy
Fantasy literature in the 1980s underwent a revisionist change, which resulted in the emergence of a number of subgenres that challenged the dominant Tolkien model of fantasy writing. One such subgenre, which continues in popularity today, is urban fantasy (UF). UF is distinguished by real-world urban settings unsettled by the presence of the supernatural and the non-rational. The classification of UF has predominantly been commercial or industry-based, with little critical or theoretical evaluation undertaken to define or establish its parameters. Within a limited frame of reference this paper aims to offer a classificatory framework that identifies the distinctive elements of UF to further the genetic understanding of unique fantasy subgenres.
Urban Fantasy: A Literature of the Unseen
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2016
This article analyzes the nature of urban fantasy by aggregating the claims, suggestions, and observations made by several different accounts of what urban fantasy is. These accounts comprise six scholarly sources and four sources written by people who are producers and purveyors of urban fantasy. An eleventh "account" is made up of the impressions conveyed by a vast number of book covers identified through Google Image Search. These eleven accounts are analyzed with regard to their views on worlds and settings, cities and urbanity, central characters, and the sources of fantastic elements. Finally, the article presents how three major threads in the accounts reveal that urban fantasy has a central, thematic concern with the Unseen. This Unseen is largely related to a social Other that portrays unpleasant aspects of urban life, such as criminality, homelessness, addiction, prostitution, and physical and sexual abuse.
This paper offers a wide overview of the various inspirations, sources and roots that have inspired the development of the new subgenre of urban fantasy. Reaching as far back as ancient mythologies coming forward to the great shift in fantasy literature that was Tolkien, the paper aims to suggest the deep roots of urban fantasy literature. With only a cursory connection to seminal and current texts, such as Emma Bull, Charles de Lint and Laurell K. Hamilton, the paper is a document interested in developing a framework for situating the growing subgenre.
Urban Fantasy: Conjuring Collapse or a Sense of Place?
Caliban: French Journal of English Studies , 2020
Urban Fantasy coalesced as a genre in the early 1980s born in reaction to the tumultuous musical subcultures that permeated urban society in America and England at the time. This paper reflects the way the early Urban Fantasy texts sought through their magical narratives to help Western youth to navigate the shadows of the urban jungle and traverse a period of both societal and personal difficulties.
Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic
Lever Press, 2024
Open Access ----- Urban fantasy, the genre of fantastic literature in which magic and monsters meet modern society, is fairly young but has old roots. Stefan Ekman’s book, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, examines the genre in depth, including its inherent social commentary, its historical development, and its interplay between modernity and the fantastic. The author draws on a wide range of urban fantasy texts from five decades, combining detailed analysis of dozens of novels and other media with broad discussions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre across three sections. The first section presents an overview of what the genre looks like today-both in terms of its common traits and its variety of settings-and how it has developed over time, including the history of urban fantasy scholarship. The second section examines urban fantasy’s core concern with the unseen, for example through a focus on unseen individuals overlooked by society or hiding within it, and on ignored urban spaces or labyrinthine undergrounds. The third section addresses how urban fantasy explores the relationship between the supernatural and modernity. Ekman offers readings of fiction by Ben Aaronovitch, Lauren Beukes, P. Djelí Clark, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Max Gladstone, Kim Harrison, N.K. Jemisin, and Megan Lindholm, among others. Urban Fantasy will appeal to teachers and students of the fantastic as well as to urban fantasy enthusiasts and literary scholars. Ekman illuminates the genre’s evolution and defining traits, inviting readers to rethink urban fantasy as a creative tool for using magic to explore modernity.
An Etymological View of Urban Fantasy
Theorising the basis of any sub-genre requires an understanding of the etymology of the terms. Urban Fantasy is a sub-genre built upon a mixed heritage of low fantasy and urban realism. This paper is an overview examination of the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions of the key terms that form an understanding of the title of Urban Fantasy.
This conference paper explores medievalism in urban fantasy television through three series: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Lost Girl; and Grimm. It suggests that Urban Fantasy is a genre deeply rooted in anxieties about place, history, and - in the cases of these three series - modern white identity in North America. The paper argues thatThe medievalism of Urban Fantasy exists as a foil to modernity, one which ‘proves’ the triumph of the present over the past.
Dirk Vanderbeke - The Sub-creation of Sub-London-Neil Gaiman’s and China Miéville’s Urban Fantasy
Fantasy is reputedly an escapist literature for juvenile or immature audiences, set in an ill-defined era between prehistory and fake medievalism, endlessly repeating generic stories about mythical heroes, beasts, elves, dwarves and wizards. This has never been quite true, and fantasy has always addressed serious issues, albeit in metaphorical and symbolic garb. Over the last decades the innovative subgenre of urban fantasy has discarded the stereotypical markers of time and space, heroes and villains, and replaced the traditional versions of the perilous realm by the very real and recognizable cityscapes of the modern metropolis. Drawing on earlier literary explorations of the city as the location of the fantastic and inexplicable, the texts discussed in this paper merge elements of various genres, e.g. fantasy, magic realism and steampunk to create counter-world visions of London that appear simultaneously weird and familiar, appalling and fascinating, unbelievable and eminently political.
'Fictions of the City' reviewed by Richard Hornsey
Over the last couple of decades, the critical investigation of the constitutive links between literature and urban modernity has been a steadily expanding field. Through ongoing interdisciplinary dialogues with cultural geography and urban cultural studies, literary scholars have become not only more aware of how various types of writing have made sense of the disjointed flow of metropolitan experience, but of their larger contributions to the formation of urban imaginaries and ongoing cultural debates about the meanings of city life. Matthew Taunton's Fictions of the City and David Welsh's Underground Writing are two welcome additions to this body of work. Both books set out to provide a historical survey of how literature (and in Taunton's case, film) has engaged with a particular aspect of the built urban environment -the mass housing of London and Paris, and the London Underground, respectively -while situating the texts they examine within wider conversations around speculative development and municipal civic policy. These two volumes have markedly different provenances; Fictions of the City is based on Taunton's recent PhD thesis, while Underground Writing has its roots in Welsh's considerable experience as both an employee of London Transport and a community oral historian. They thus arrive at contrasting moments in the two authors' careers and this has given each book its own set of qualities, which marks them apart in both style and tone.
Urban Literature: A User’s Guide
Journal of Urban History, 2017
This article addresses urbanists in various fields—history, the social sciences, planning, and more—who are interested in incorporating literary works into their teaching and research and may be looking for critical approaches that connect such work to their own expertise. It begins from the premise that the traits that make a city a city present writers with opportunities to tell stories, experiment with form, make meaning, and otherwise exercise the literary imagination. When we use “urban literature” as a category of analysis, when we try to identify relationships between cities and the writing produced in and about them, we are asserting that this writing takes shape around confronting the city as a formal, social, and conceptual challenge. This article explores examples of texts ranging from Sister Carrie to I Am Legend and beyond that engage signature urban processes such as urbanization, development, and the dense overlap of orders.