Fantasy-as-Mode VS Fantasy-as-Formula

Scholarly engagements with the Fantasy genre tend to come largely from literary perspectives and to focus on genre as a body of texts, usually written. Definitions, as a result, are generally concerned with how to delineate its boundaries – which texts are in and which are out? Brian Attebery’s delineation of “fantasy-as-mode” and “fantasy-as-formula” from the Fantasy genre continues to be one of the most influential and useful approaches to that project. The “fantastic mode” encompasses “all literary manifestations of the imagination’s” ability to soar above the merely possible, that is, nonmimetic writing.8 Formulaic fantasy is “essentially a commercial product,” the success of which “depends on consistency and predictability.”9 It is not necessarily bad, but is rooted in “the opposite extreme” of the “potential anarchy of the fantastic.”10 Attebery proposes the still widely used “fuzzy set” model of genre. A “fuzzy set” has “a clear center but boundaries that shade off imperceptibly, so that a book on the fringes may be considered as belonging or not.”11 One of the key questions suggested by to this model, albeit one which often goes undiscussed is: whose opinion counts? The “fuzzy set” is necessarily open to interpretation at its edges, but its centre must also come from somewhere.