ISSN 2415-3168 (Online), ISSN 2226-3055 (Print) ВІСНИК МАРІУПОЛЬСЬКОГО ДЕРЖАВНОГО УНІВЕРСИТЕТУ СЕРІЯ: ФІЛОЛОГІЯ, 2019, ВИП. 20 58 УДК 82-312.9 N. Ivanova O. Ryzhchenko FANTASY AS A DEVELOPING PHENOMENON OF MODERN ART The article deals with the problem of interpreting the phenomenon of fantasy in modern science. Fantasy has spawned many discussions related to the definition of its sources and genre nature, the relationship with the myth-folklore tradition, the problems of classification, the specifics of extra-literary functions and many others. We consider fantasy to be one of the branches of speculative fiction, which naturally formed into an independent industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Initially having appeared as a genre, fantasy subsequently has outgrown this category. Today we can say with confidence that fantasy is a meta-genre, which has its own structure of modeling the world and unites various literary genres (novel, novelette, lyric poetry and others) and types of art (sculpture, cinema, animation, graphic arts, painting, and others) with a common subject of artistic representation. Key words: fantasy, meta-genre, mythology and folklore tradition, problems, speculative fiction, themes. DOI 10.34079/2226-3055-2019-12-20-58-64 Introduction. Fantasy is quite a new phenomenon of literature with a rapid development. It covers completely different subjects and develops a wide range of works. Standing out from speculative fiction into an independent genre, it is obvious that fantasy gradually expanded ideologically and thematically. And today we can point out that fantasy has overgrown the concept of the literary genre by having won various forms of art such as sculpture, painting, animation, cinema and others. Olena Chernyavska determines that such a dynamics of the phenomenon of fantasy, integrated into different spheres, requires constant research: «At the end of the XX th century – at the beginning of the XXI st century fantasy takes up more and more stable positions, which can be explained both by sociocultural tendencies and specific literary peculiarities of this genre. National variants enrich and diversify the literature of fantasy, because the author's fantasy is not limited by a clear framework of the genre, or, as we can conclude, literary genres» [14, p. 330]. The purpose of our work is to give the analysis of the material of recent years devoted to the determining of the place and semantics of fantasy in modern science. We offer our own point of view of the problem of existing of fantasy in different spheres. Literature Review. Being a relatively new phenomenon in literature, fantasy has united researchers of completely different fields of knowledge around itself. Anna Grytting points out that today fantasy has proliferated from purely childish writing to the literature satisfying the reader's interests of any age group [17, p. 4–5]. Philologists argue about the genre nature and genesis of this phenomenon (Stephanie Dreier, Ekaterina Lugovaya, Tat'yana Markova, Valeriya Tolkacheva, Paula M. Zaja, Svitlana Lyevochkina, Oksana Marchuk). Psychologists talk about the causes of this type of work, associating it with a constant informational and mental voltage and the need to release emotions, fantasy in another world, fictional and successful. Philosophers seek