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new audience. Each generation has its cooks, its Hans Christian
Andersen or Charles Perrault, spinning magical tales for those who
will listen-even amid the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth
century or the technological revolution of our own. In the last
century, George MacDonald, William Morris, Christina Rossetti,

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, Kai
Nielsen, 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 Barth's
Chimera, John Gardner's Grendel, Joyce Carol Oates' Bellefleur, Sylvia
Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfln, Mark Halprin's A Winter's
Tale, and the works of South American writers such as Gabriel
Garcia MArquez and Miguel Angel Asturias.
It is not surprising that modern readers or writers should occa-
sionally 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. Susaon 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
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Jane Yolen

that material, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's use of themes and ima,
from the Icelandic Eddas and the German Niebelungenlied in The
of the Rings or Evangeline Walton's reworking of the stories from
Welsh Mabinogion in The Island of the Mighty. Some authors
the language and symbols of old tales to create new ones, suc
the stories collected in Jane Yolen's Tales of Wonder, or Pat