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A MANIFESTO FOR WEREWOLVES
of benevolent and transcendent organizing principles, its positive
representation of hierarchical social organizations, and its simplistic
polarization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ appeared suspect. Despite the antimodernism
of the new critical perspectives, fantasy was also seen
as conservative on account of its own anti-modernism — its frequent
rejection of science and technology, its suggestion that ‘progress’
really equals ‘degeneration’ and its romanticization of a pastoral past. 19
Indeed, the imagery of pastoral, pre-industrial, pre-modern societies
that prevails in fantasy suggests its indebtedness to romanticism; a
connection that also worked against it at a time when many critics
had come to associate romanticism with the politics of the far right
(again, in spite of the fact that postmodernist theoretical perspectives
owe a considerable debt to the romantic tradition 20 ).
As a consequence of critics’ discomfort, a tendency to discuss ‘the
fantastic’ rather than ‘fantasy’ (often despite a stated intention to
examine ‘fantasy’) has characterized critical discussion since the 1970s.
In such contexts, ‘the fantastic’ is defined as an element of the supernatural
or unreal which can be introduced into any text, and also as a
‘mode’ which transcends genre; both perspectives that enable a consideration
of canonical or ‘literary’ fiction, thus absolving the critic from
engaging with popular fantasy. 21 As Helen Merrick observes, fantasy
in such usages ‘then becomes just another mode used by mainstream
authors, here figured as “anti-realist” and thus “postmodern”’. 22 One of
the primary sources of this approach is Rosemary Jackson’s influential
study entitled Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), which used
the terms ‘fantasy’ and ‘the fantastic’ interchangeably throughout, but
did not consider works of popular fantasy by authors such as C.S. Lewis,
J.R.R. Tolkien or Ursula Le Guin. Rather, Jackson was concerned with
‘the way in which elements of fantasy enter into, disrupt and disturb’
certain texts. 23 This focus tended to force a Gothic reading on to the
texts she examined, a bias that was reinforced by her stated preference
for texts that ‘replace familiarity, comfort, das Heimlich, with
estrangement, unease, the uncanny’. 24 Her focus on ‘subversion’ also
skewed the focus away from popular fantasy, towards a postmodern
literature that questions the ways in which reality and subjectivity have
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