"Charles De Lint - Jack, The Giant-Killer" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

and Oscar Wilde, among others, turned their hands to
fairy stories; at the turn of the century lavish fairy tale
collections were produced, a showcase for the art of
Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielson, the
Robinson Brothers—published as children’s books, yet
often found gracing adult salons.
In the early part of the Twentieth Century Lord
Dunsany, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, T.H. White,
J.R.R. Tolkien— to name but a few—created classic tales
of fantasy; while more recently we’ve seen the growing
popularity of books published under the category title
“Adult Fantasy”—as well as works published in the
literary mainstream that could easily go under that heading:
John Earth’s Chimera, John Gardner’s Grendel, Joyce
Carol Gates’ Bellefleur, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s
Kingdoms of Elfin, Mark Halprin’s A Winter’s Tale, and
the works of South American writers such as Gabriel
García Márquez and Miguel Angel Asturias.
It is not surprising that modern readers or writers
should occasionally turn to fairy tales. The fantasy story
or novel differs from novels of social realism in that it is
free to portray the world in bright, primary colors, a
dream-world half remembered from the stories of
childhood when all the world was bright and strange, a
fiction unembarrassed to tackle the large themes of Good
and Evil, Honor and Betrayal, Love and Hate. Susan
Cooper, who won the Newbery Medal for her fantasy
novel The Grey King, makes this comment about the
desire to write fantasy: “In the ‘Poetics’ Aristotle said, ‘A
likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing
possibility.’ I think those of us who write fantasy are
dedicated to making impossible things seem likely, making
dreams seem real. We are somewhere between the
Impressionist and abstract painters. Our writing is haunted
by those parts of our experience which we do not
understand, or even consciously remember. And if you,
child or adult, are drawn to our work, your response
comes from that same shadowy land.”
All Adult Fantasy stories draw in a greater or lesser
degree from traditional tales and legends. Some writers
consciously acknowledge that material, such as J.R.R.
Tolkien’s use of themes and imagery from the Icelandic
Eddas and the German Niebelungenlied in The Lord of the
Rings or Evangeline Walton’s reworking of the stories
from the Welsh Mabinogion in The Island of the Mighty.
Some authors use the language and symbols of old tales
to create new ones, such as the stories collected in Jane
Yolen’s Tales of Wonder, or Patricia McKillip’s The
Forgotten Beasts of Eld. And others, like Robin
McKinley in Beauty or Angela Carter in The Bloody