TAPROOT TEXTS, DEFINED

If ever there was a taproot text – in John Clute’s terms, a fantasy that branches out into a thousand other fantasies – this is it (referring to the Curdie and Irene diptych by George MacDonald).
Unknown lecturer, Glasgow University (2010s).

Encyclopedia of Fantasy (John Clute, 1997)
Taproot Texts

Only in the last decades of the 18th century, when (at least in the West) a Horizon of Expectations emerged among writers and readers, did a delimitable genre now called Speculative Fiction (Fantasy, Science Fiction, etc.) appear. Before that there were writings which included the Fantastic – and such works can be described as taproot texts. To exemplify: The presence of the sylph Ariel and of Prospero's staff in William Shakespeare's The Tempest (performed circa 1611; 1623) do not make that play a fantasy or spec-fic, according to this criterion; The Tempest, however defined generically, may contain elements of the fantastic, but these elements did not govern its audience's sense of its generic nature: it was, first and foremost, a theatrical play. On the other hand, Goethe's Faust (1808) clearly reveals its author's consciousness that he is transforming a traditional story containing supernatural elements into a work mediated through – and in a telling sense defined by – those elements. For our purposes, The Tempest is best conceived as a Taproot Text and Faust as a proper fantasy.

The notion of the Taproot Text seems necessary – or at least desirable – for at least two reasons. The first is that a Water Margin of not easily definable intentions marks what we may now read as an irreversible impulse towards fantasy and proto-science-fiction. over the last decades of the 18th century, and it seems advisable to have a blanket term available to use in order to distinguish relevant texts composed or written before those we can legitimately call fantasy or science fiction. The second is that, because almost any form of tale written before the rise of the mimetic novel could be retroactively conceived as ur- or proto-fantasy (or ur-/proto-sci-fi, etc.), it seems highly convenient to apply to works from this Ocean of Story a term – i.e., "taproot" – which emphasizes the heightened significance of the text mentioned. When we refer to a text as a TT, in other words, we describe one that contains a certain mix of ingredients and stands out for various reasons – not excepting quality.

The list of Taproot Texts, therefore, may be long, but it is by no means endless; and a clear degree of qualitative judgement will be apparent in any individual cataloguing. Beyond those already mentioned, some other texts seem to fit the taxonomical needs for which the term was devised.

Relevant texts from classical literature include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (composed by the 8th century BC); Hesiod's Theogony (composed 8th century BC), Aesop's Fables (composed before 560BC) (> Aesopian Fantasy); certain works of the Greek playwrights, like Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (produced before 456BC) and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (produced before 406BC); Ovid's Metamorphoses (circa AD1), Lucius Apuleius's The Golden Jackass (before AD155) and most of the surviving works of Lucian of Samosata.

Relevant early modern texts (from the turn of the Renaissance onwards) include Dante's The Divine Comedy (before 1321), Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (before 1353), the various Chivalric Romances and epics that mass together around the Matters of Britain (Arthurian cycle) and France (Carolingian cycle), including works like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (written circa 1370) (> Gawain) and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (1485) ed Thomas Caxton, some episodes of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (before 1400), Luigi Pulci's The Greater Morgante (1470; exp 1483), Orlando Innamorato (1487) by Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-1494), Lodovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516), François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1564), the Nights (1550-1553) of Gianfrancesco Straparola, Luis de Camoes's The Lusiads (1572), Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1581), Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus (written circa 1588), A Midsummer Night's Dream (performed circa 1595; 1600) and other Shakespeare plays, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605-1615), the Pentamerone (1634-1636) of Giambattista Basile, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) (>>> Pilgrim's Progress), Charles Perrault's Tales of Times Past or of Mother Goose (coll 1697), the various versions of The 1001 Nights (> Arabian Fantasy), Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). The list could be considerably extended, but there is a distinction to be made: huge quantities of work can be treated as being of backdrop interest only; these titles cannot. 

FUZZY GENRES IN LITERATURE

There is this hierarchy of genres in literature. From most to least prestige and renown, it goes:
Prose - Poetry - Drama - Essay - Graphic Literature (graphic novels, graphic poetry...)
When most people use the word "literature" on a prototypical level, excluding the other literary genres (at the subordinate level of vertical polysemy), they are always referring to prose, the dominant genre since the Victorian era. The other genres have been underrated ever since.
But the boundaries are not clear-cut. A story can be told in any of these five ways, actually. A nice style exercise would be to retell a short, familiar story (Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, the Princess and the Pea...) in all five genres, Five Obstructions style.
Then there are the works that are liminal. Is Beowulf, or the Homeric epics, prose or poetry? Originally it was narrative poetry, bridging this gap, but most translations are literal, prosified. Closer to prose.
Are Lemony narrators' digressions prose or essay? There's another case of genre liminality. Don Quixote's speech of academic vs. military life, for instance... is Cervantes, through his hidalgo, giving us a snippet of essay in the middle of the prose or is it just a soliloquy in the prose world?
When we've got Hamlet, or Iago, giving us a soliloquy on human nature (whether on page, stage, or screen)... is it drama or essay (or poetry, if it's in pentameter)?
Is The Invention of Hugo Cabret a prose or a graphic novel?
Genres in literature will intersect and have fuzzy boundaries, in these cases. It's these points where boundaries blur that make literature have part of its allure for me.

LITERATURE - US LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

I should have done this commentary on this mural from the US Library of Congress as part of last year's fourth centennial events, but, alas, I was kept too busy with other things to do.

Anyway, better late than never, they say...

Literature depicts a varied group of male and female figures sitting or standing. Apollo, the God of Letters, sits in the foreground of a Greek temple surrounded by a company of maidens (the Muses) reading an ancient scroll. On the right, are the muses of Comedy and Tragedy, the former reclining against a printing press. In the foreground a woman instructs two children in the rudiments of learning. On the left a dreamy poet reclines and reads the Homeric epics beside a bust of Homer while his muse hovers above him. Next to him a standing figure of Fame holds out a crown of laurel above the head of a seated poet who is deep in thought. Below are the names of countries notable for their contributions to literature: Greece (furthest on the left, below the Homeric reader and the muse of epic, symbolizing Homeric/classical-era literature), Italy (in the middle, below Apollo and most of the muses, excluding those of epic and the performing arts, symbolizing Renaissance/late medieval literature), and England (furthest on the right, below the muses of the performing arts and the printing press, symbolizing Shakespearean/early modern literature).

The painting is by William de Leftwich Dodge.
Wall plaques, clockwise from the northwest corner, bear the names: LITERATURE, Greece, Italy, England. Their arrangement from left to right mirrors the subjects of the allegories above; a mise-en-scène not left at all to chance.

GUNS, BOOKS, LIQUOR, AND REVOLUTION

In the late Middle Ages, the most powerful rulers in the Western world decided to expand their power onto the closest independent areas: the larger the realm, the harder to invade. The completion of this view of conquest was facilitated partially by the baby boom that followed the Black Death, partially by some powder brought from the East. A powder that, combined with lead and fire, could pierce even the stoutest bulwarks and breastplates.
At the same time, books started to be published at lightning speed in workshops, no longer handwritten over the course of years in secluded and sacred scriptoria, no longer the privilege of the Church, but also at the disposition of nobles and commoners.
And some alchemists looking for the so-called water of life discovered they had, in its pursuit, discovered an inflammable liquid, that turned out to be a far stronger drink than those already known: this liquid could be used as a weapon and as a painkiller.
The known world was on the brink of revolution. Guns, books, and liquor were to change the lives of the hot shots and their subjects alike. Forever.