Science Fiction And Fantasy The Distinction Of Genres In Frankenstein, The War Of The Worlds And Dracula

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Trier, language: English, abstract: What makes a text a science fiction text? What makes it a fantasy text? In this study, I would like to discuss why it is impossible to clearly draw a line between these two genres. In order to do so, I am going to focus on the "justification" of the unreal, respectively, the supernatural elements of a story. I shall be discussing why a text can be considered a science fiction text or a fantasy text - and why, in some cases, there is no clear answer to the question of which genre a text is belongs to. While one might answer the two questions put at the beginning of this study rather quickly by stating a rule of thumb - scientific elements make a text a science fiction text, magical ones make it a fantasy text - it is obvious that this would lead to a very broad definition. It is thus necessary to go into detail, which I am going to do. In order to investigate what, apart from the technical and the magical elements, are the characteristics of the respective genres mentioned at the beginning, I am going to give the definitions of these terms which can be found in standard reference texts. In order to go into detail, I shall add more information from academic literature about the fantastic genre, which both science fiction and fantasy are part of. I would then like to go a step further by testing the definitions with the help of three texts - H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds as an example for the science fiction genre and Bram Stoker's Dracula as an example for a fantasy text. In addition, I shall be discussing Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. In this text, there are elements of both science fiction and of fantasy. After this, I would like to conclude my study. Any selection of texts will necessarily be arbitrary, as it is impossible to include everything into a study like this. I chose three tex