THE WORM OUROBOROS AND THE QUEST FOR A LOST FANTASY MANIFESTO

Abstract

This article aims to specify the key ideas that differentiate what is now understood as Fantasy from the broader category of Non-Mimetic Fiction based on a historical analysis of primary sources. The documents chosen will be limited to those written by the authors most uncontroversially associated with the development of Non-Mimetic Fiction, written as articulations of their own work regarding what these authors perceived to be the main cultural, artistic and political developments of their day. Once selected, these documents will be contrasted to map what ideas overlap. They will also be related chronologically to make any patterns of historical development clearer, and to make more evident which of these documents could have been written from a position of awareness of other documents like it. The utility of such an approach is to provide the contemporary scholar with a relation of primary sources retroactively organized to explicit what was perceived by these sources as immediately meaningful from their own perspective, which is meant to facilitate more detailed future research, and to provide a historiographical approach that may serve as an alternative to genre-based literary criticism.