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
>>24783338MabinogionThe King of Elfland's Daughter The Worm OuroborosLe Morte d'ArthurThe Once and Future King and The Book of MerlinFafhrd and the Gray MouserThe Last UnicornThe Neverending Story
>Don Quixote wasn't fantasy>Shakespeare never wrote any fantasy>Homer isn't fantasy
>>24785819>Eye of the World prologue chapter>AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE I KILLED MY WIFE AND CHILDREN I'M GOING INSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANE>immediately teleports away>kills himself, and in the process he makes an island that looks like a vagina (Tar Valon) right next to a mountain that looks like a penis (Dragonmount)What did Robert Jordan mean by this...?
>>24787540why is the map a vagina
>>24787544Because Robert Jordan's work is fundamentally about the differences between men and women. Women rule the world (Aes Sedai are powerful mages, but they only allow women into their order, because men always go insane if they try to use magic) and everything goes to shit while women are in charge. Aes Sedai live on that vagina island.
>>24787553>Aes Sedai live on that vagina island.so uh... are they on zillow
>>24783338Avalon le fae
>>24783566This >>24783338Stop reading modern YA
>>24787553You forgot the part where the men only go insane because women are pathologically averse to doing their fucking job and directly caused the corruption of male magic, and as a result the destruction of the entire world and the eventual escape of the devil.
Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Tempest
>>24786117and which might those be?i sincerely cant think of any work written as beautifully as The Lord of the RingsIlliad and Odyssey don't really have good prose, Illiad is all rythm and battle but the description of the shield and armor is very beautiful as well as the comparisons of battle to the life of the greek shepards, but doesn't really reach tolkien. the odyssey is all story and its merits aren t in its descriptions.faust perhapse? the image painted by faust while talking with wagner at sunset is verry beautiful, except for faust i can t think of many other german works of literature which may compete with tolkien s in this category, since the germans were more fond of drama and poetry and not so much of prosethe french, i haven't read their dramas but dumas, balzac and verne are pulp. hugo is a bad philospher who tries to communicate his erroneous ideas trough beautiful storiesthe english are known for the soap operas of the brontes, austen and dickens but also for the poems of byron, shelley and miltoni genuinely haven't read of heard of a work as beautiful as The Lord of the Rings, i heard here that miller has beautiful purple prose and that faulkner and mccarthy aren't far off, but are their stories as beautiful as that of tolkien and fit so well with the word choices? reading tolkien is like going out on a beatiful day of june and taking a deep breath filled with the rays of the sun, the clean mountain air, the lushnes of the forests, the perfume of the meadows and the warmth of the wheat fieldsi guess moby dick since you guys love it so much, but i haven't read it yet
>>24784715Based
>>24783566even biblefags must admit that Paradise Lost is fantasy as it contains tons of made up shit that absolutely doesn't exist in trve christian dogma>>24783566>if you say the above are not fantasy, you literally CANNOT deny that PL is fantasy, you FAGGOTit's fanfiction THOUGH. separate genre
