Inaugural Lecture of Professor Adam Roberts

Enchantments of fantasy: a short history of the mode

Fantasy is hugely popular today. In his inaugural lecture, Professor Adam Roberts will offer a short history of the mode, its roots in the 19th-century: the resurgence of interest in Arthurian literature, children’s fantastika, the popularity of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Wagner and William Morris) into the 20th-century, when the first world war galvanised the form.

He continues through to the boom in Fantasy of the last decades of the 20th-century, a function of the enormous commercial success of Tolkien in the 1960s and beyond, and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy List (from 1969) reprinting in paperback many earlier Fantasy works, then with many imitative new Fantasy works published through the 1970s and 1980s (together with D&D and Dragonlance) into the 90s and continuing through the present century.

Adam reads Fantasy in terms of a strategic and interestingly complex project of re-enchanting Weberian disenchantment. The foundational texts of the Fantasy boom, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, the Narnia novels, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Worm Ouroboros, were all written by men who had served in the First World War (Eddison was a civil servant during the war, but Tolkien, Lewis and Dunsany were all in the trenches), and the fantasies that they wrote were nostalgic re-enchantments of the world, written against the horrors of industrialised modern war.

Admission is free, but booking is essential.