abstract:In literary criticism, the term fabulation was popularized by Robert Scholes, in his work The Fabulators, to describe the large and growing class of mostly 20th century novels that are in a style similar to magical realism, and do not fit into the traditional categories of realism or (novelistic) romance. They violate, in a variety of ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly successful—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, fantastic, mythical, and nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.
This leads to the means for distinguishing fantasy from the far broader category of the fantastic, which includes a vast range of other forms such as horror, fabulation, surrealism and science fiction, the subject of an earlier excellent encyclopedia edited by Mr Clute and Peter Nicholls.