Why has fantasy never had a literary masterpiece?
>>24783338because it deliberately cuts itself off from the general culture. that's the price of entry, so to speak. you're entering the grotto of illusions, and whatever interesting or beautiful things happen, they happen within the grotto.
>>24783338It has.
>>24783338What about The Lord of the Rings?
>>24783506Mid.
>>24783354Hmm. I think I like this. I will respond in four hours when I have sufficiently mulled it over.
>>24783506The Silmarillion is the great work. I would say it has literary merit and is a work of literature.
>>24783338Because genre literature has always been ignored. The few works that steered it are just that, exceptions.
>>24783338IliadOdysseyMetamorphosesAeneidParadise Lost (if you say the above are not fantasy, you literally CANNOT deny that PL is fantasy, you FAGGOT)Le Morte d'ArthurAlice in Wonderland
>>24783566>>24783506>>24783527When I talk about masterpieces, I mean actual masterpieces, not hollywood blockbuster popularity.
>>24783570>answer this question for me, no right answers though!
>>24783570Care to name some masterpieces from other genres?
>>24783566>Alice in WonderlandOnly this is fantasy. >>24783338Gormenghast
>>24783566Fantasy is a literary movement that started in the late 1800s.
>>24783338Fantasy authors usually aren't writing about topics that the elite tastemakers consider literature-worthy eg. the virgin Struggle Against Evil vs the chad Adultery in the Midwest. And fantasy fans themselves have irreparably damaged the standards of prose in fantasy, so there is some very understandable prejudice. I mean, even now there are people who praise Sword of Shannara.But all that is immaterial. What matters is that fantasy does not require approval from Big Lit Daddy. It is doing its own thing, with its own fans, and with its own famous masterpieces within that world. That is already as legitimate as anything can get.
>>24784715Came here to post this.Mervyn Peake's prose is a consistent delight iirc.
>>24783527>I would say it has literary merit and is a work of literature.So is The Lord of the Rings, retard. Even The Hobbit as a children’s tale has a lot of artistic merit.
>>24783566Iliad and Odyssey are not fantasy, Metamorphoses arguably could be considered one, Aeneid was written to be the foundational history of Rome so not really fantasy either even if most Romans wouldn’t have believed this events to have been literal truth. Paradise Lost is fantasy though the author believed the events to have happened. Le Morte d’Arthur arguably could be fantasy like Metamorphoses.But doesn’t matter because none of them are fantasy as in fantasy as a literary genre. It’s like those retards that say “Orlando Furioso is actually sci fi because he traveled to the moon” ignoring the whole context.
>>24783338Just read the first page of this, prose is maximalist kino
>>24785819It's a good series, but for some reason everyone says to stop reading right when the main character stops being a whiny little shit. It would have been great all the way through if Sanderson had a better understanding of the subtext.
>>24783506The fictional languages of the story are well thought out, but that's the only thing really going for it. Compared to the titans of the Western Canon, the book is a non-entity.
>>24783338The Bible
