The result is, as Kay says, “history with a twist” (qtd.
Borrowing from Primary-World historical events, Kay creates an analogous Secondary World that resembles, but is not actually, the Primary World. To use Tolkien’s terminology, the Primary World is the “real,” exterior world, while the Secondary World is the author’s “sub-creation,” a made-up universe that the reader enters (46-49). Kay’s novels straddle two genres by depicting Secondary Worlds based on Primary-World historical settings. In the end, Kay’s historical fantasy challenges historicism by implying that history is always subjective and partial, composed of crafted narratives. The new hybrid sets the composition of a self-consciously told narrative against the maintenance of a historically probable narrative that disguises its artificiality. However, in Kay’s later novels, The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995) and Under Heaven (2010), he equally reconciles the structural demands of the fantasy novel to the historical novel, achieving a fuller generic hybrid. Kay’s Tigana is most accurately described as a fantasy novel combined with a modulation of the historical novel’s repertoire, since the narrative structure of fantasy dominates. One of the primary ways the genres hybridize is through his application of fantasy’s structural characteristics, such as thinning and eucatastrophe, to a historically probable narrative. However, Guy Gavriel Kay synthesizes these diverse literary forms in a way that highlights the value of fantasy literature. Kay afterwards engaged with the Tolkienesque epic fantasy tradition in Fionavar Tapestry before turning, in Tigana (1992), towards a genre termed “historical fantasy.”1 The historical novel, which depends upon mimesis and realism for its effectiveness, is opposed to the anti-mimetic impulse of fantasy. Possessing a certain pedigree among fantasists-he knew Christopher Tolkien through Christopher’s second wife’s family-he became an editor of The Silmarillion in 1974 (Ordway 140).
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, fantasy literature has simultaneously seen the rise of formulaic fantasy and the appearance of authors who escape the constraints of genre and renew its powerful effects on readers. This is the 2012 honours thesis by Matthew Rettino written when while attending McGill University.
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