The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is a reference work on fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant. Other contributors include Mike Ashley, Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, David Langford, Sam J. Lundwall, Michael Scott Rohan, Brian Stableford and Lisa Tuttle.
The Encyclopedia was published in 1997 in a format matching the 1993 edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It is slightly smaller, containing 1,049 alphabetical pages, over 4,000 entries and approximately one million words, the bulk of which were written by Clute, Grant and Ashley. A later CD-ROM edition contains numerous revisions.
The Encyclopedia uses a similar system of categorization to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, but does not include an index of theme entries. One of the major differences is that there are no entries related to publishing.
There has also been some criticism of the Encyclopedia's use of new terms and theme entries under headings that are invented for the purpose, rather than adaptations of commonly-used phrases. Examples include:
- Instauration Fantasy: a story concerning the restoration of past glories.
- Thinning: the gradual loss or decay of magic or vitality.
- Wainscots: secret societies hiding from the mainstream of society, as in Mary Norton's The Borrowers.
- Water Margins: shifting or ill-defined boundaries, used as both a physical description and a metaphor; derived from the Japanese television adaptation of The Water Margin.
- Polder: defined as an "enclaves of toughened reality demarcated by boundaries" that are entered by crossing a threshold.
- Crosshatch: described as when then the demarcation line is blurred and "two or more worlds may simultaneously inhabit the same territory" such as in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- Taproot texts: are examples of fantasy literature that predates the late 18th century that defines the emergence of the fantasy genre such as Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Some examples of new terms are;
- Into the Woods a phrase that denotes the process of transformation or passage into a new world signaled by entering woods or forests (the term is apparently based on the title of the Stephen Sondheim show); and
- wrongness which is the growing awareness that something is 'wrong' in the world such as when the Hobbits first glimpse the Nazgûl in The Lord of the Rings.
Despite the introduction of the above critical literary vocabulary, these terms in many academic circles have become widespread in their usage.