Fantastic Literature

Today, we live, but by tomorrow today will be a story. The whole world, all human life, is one long story. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)

When discussing the oral tradition and the skill of storytelling, we make reference to three types of materials, as identified by authors like Peter Hunt. First there are the stories transmitted from generation to generation, like myths, legends, folk and fairy tales and all the accompanying proverbs, riddles and songs, next there are life stories, like the war stories mentioned by Walter Benjamin and discussed above: real-life accounts of the personal life, family and social events which constitute the foundation of social living even today. And last but not least there are the new stories imagined by story-tellers.

Authors relied on these and transformed them into new tales, more fantastic, such as the works of Lewis or Tolkien or our contemporary J.K.Rowling. Much of the aim of these popular writers is to offer psychological and spiritual consolation, just as much of the children literature does, from The velveteen rabbit of Beatrix Potter to Dr. Seuss that this paper will discuss in more details further on. This application of the fantastic in the children literature had lead to the birth of entirely modern myths and magical realism, a genre which has brought us more than one Nobel writer, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jose Saramago for instance, and has evolved into Postmodernism. The fantasy literature has preeminent precursors as old as the ancient world: Plato 's Republic and the Icaromennipus of Lucian, to the wonderful travels of Gulliver and the enchanted world of Narnia imagined by

What these beautiful stories that we were all brought up with have in common is their symbolism and psychological impact, the archetypes they use, the morals they teach and the ever-lasting power to appeal both to the elderly teller or reader and to children of all ages, even those adults that have remained children in their hearts, like the EFL teachers who love to bring children literature to their class. Although the Grimm brothers, pioneer philologists, were not the first to collect fairy tales, as there were other collections like the well-known one of Charles Perrault, they managed to use a method which proved useful to generations to come- they recorded the stories from oral sources, as they believed that tales moved from teller to teller, and reproduced them later on. This endeavor transformed the country folk into cultural treasurers. The Grimm brothers started off with the intention to prove the ancient cultural roots of Germany and managed to create a fundamental study field and a most valuable cultural legacy for hundreds of years.

The oral tradition of transmitting knowledge from generation to generation is considered the basis of all understanding and awareness of the world. Before writing became familiar to people,