High and Low Fantasy

[steepholm]

I put this query out on Facebook but may as well repeat it here, since the answer hasn't come zinging back in unambiguous terms as yet...

Who coined the terms "high fantasy" and "low fantasy" - both the concepts and the actual phrases? I feel this is something I ought to know just like that, since they have historically had quite wide currency, even though (for several reasons) I dislike and avoid them myself.

Comments

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

My guess, after a short check via the google N-gram thing, is that the use of the two terms as opposed to each other started around 1978, in Dark Imaginings (http://books.google.com.vn/books?id=0zNaAAAAYAAJ&q=%22low+fantasy%22&dq=%22low+fantasy%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XttTU9KCIcb1kQXJq4GQAQ&redir_esc=y), a work of literary criticism by Robert H. Boyer, Kenneth J. Zahorski (which I haven't read).
The term "high fantasy" seems to have been around since the mid-nineteenth century, though.

Editing to add: The term "low fantasy" was around earlier in the 1970s, but it looks like it was then being used by psychologists to describe children who didn't fantasise much, as e.g. "Seven- to nine-year-old boys were initially administered part of the Michigan Picture Test and then categorized as High and Low Fantasy on the basis of their scores..."

[larryhammer]

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy credits low fantasy to Boyer and Zahorski, but in the introduction to The Fantastic Imagination from 1977.

---L.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Interesting - thanks! I would assume (though I've not looked into it yet) that "high fantasy" in a 19-century context would mean something very different from its use in opposition to "low fantasy" - more a matter of elevated expression or even the rank of the characters involved. Mind you, those connotations linger even its later usage, along with a motley rag-bag of other ones (one reason why the term has very little utility).