Fantasy Literature

Welcome to Fantasy Literature! 🐉✨

So… you’re about to take a class on fantasy.

Yes, that means dragons, magic, strange worlds, and possibly questionable life choices made by characters with swords. But it also means something more: we’re going to look at how fantasy helps us understand the real world—sometimes better than realism does.

In this course, we’ll explore different types of fantasy—high fantasy, sword and sorcery, urban fantasy, and even a little fantasy horror. Some stories will take us far away from anything recognizable. Others will drop just a hint of the strange into worlds that feel a lot like our own.

Most of what we read will come from after Weird Tales started publishing in 1923 (basically when modern fantasy really starts to take shape), but we’ll also peek at the older roots of the genre—the myths, folklore, and weird ideas that still echo in fantasy today.

You’ll meet authors who build entire worlds from scratch—like J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Robert E. Howard—and others who sneak magic into places that look suspiciously like our own world, like J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, and Octavia E. Butler.

We won’t just read novels—we’ll also spend time with short stories (which are kind of the original playground of fantasy writers), including work by Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ray Bradbury.

Your Fantasy Journal 📖

Throughout the course, you’ll see Fantasy Journal prompts pop up alongside the readings.

This is your space.

You can question the text, argue with it, connect it to your own experiences, or just figure out what the heck is going on. There’s no single “correct” way to respond here—because reading isn’t about getting the “right answer.”

It’s more like a conversation. Or a negotiation. Or, honestly, sometimes a mild argument.

Reading is an individual dance between the author and the reader—and in this class, you get to decide your steps.

The first thing you should do once you have access to D2L/Brightspace is take the time to explore the class a bit and see how things are set up. 

One last thing…

You don’t have to be a “fantasy person” to belong here.

You just have to be willing to be curious.