Sara Martín Alegre P08/04540/02135

2.2. Fantasy, realism and experimentalism
The period 1945-1960 also saw the entrance of 
fantasy
into the English novel
on a large scale. The novels of these years preceded the new wave of fantasy
writers in the 1960s, including 
J.�G.�Ballard
and 
Michael�Moorcock
, who
questioned the boundaries between fantasy and the mainstream or realistic
novel.
Orwell
's political dystopian fantasies, 
Animal Farm
(1945) and 
Nineteen
Eighty-Four
(1949), 
Mervyn� Peake
's Gothic 
Gormenghast
trilogy (
Titus
Groan
, 1946; 
Gormenghast
, 1950; and 
Titus Alone
, 1959), 
John� Wyndham
's
science-fiction novel 
The Day of the Triffids
(1951) and 
J.�R.�R.�Tolkien
's trilogy
The Lord of the Rings
(
The Fellowship of the Ring
, 1954; 
The Two Towers
, 1954;
and 
The Return of the King
, 1955) exemplify this trend.
Orwell's use of fantasy suggests that far from being escapist, fantasy can be
a way of expressing the anxieties caused by history in an alternative way.
Peake himself drew the inspiration for his bizarre gallery of characters in
Gormenghast
from the horror of the Belsen concentration camp, which he had
visited.
The idea of the long chronicle criss-crosses fantasy and realism in the novel,
for the trilogy and other even longer sequences, now typical only of fantasy,
were the format chosen by, among others, 
Anthony� Powell
(
The Music of
J. R. R. Tolkien, 1972.

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© FUOC
• P08/04540/02135
17
Post-War English Literature 1945-1990
Time
, 1951-75, 12 volumes),