Escapist fiction  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Escapist fiction is fiction which provides a psychological escape from thoughts of everyday life by immersing the reader in exotic situations or activities.

The term is not used favorably, though the condemnation contained in it may be slight. Those who defend works described as escapist from the charge either assert that they are not escapist -- such as, a science fiction novel's satiric aspects address real life -- or defend the notion of "escape" as such, not "escapism" -- as in J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" and C.S. Lewis's quotation, in his "On Science fiction" of Tolkien's question of who would be most hostile to the idea of escape, and his answer: jailers.

Genres which include elements of escapist fiction include:

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Escapist fiction" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools