It was instead considered part of the Romantic tradition that included gothic stories, nonsense verse, and fairy tales. As a critic Chesterton identified and defended fantastic forms, and he did so by emphasizing fantasy's positive aim and effect. One positive aim of fairy-tale fantasy is its role as an educational tool; a second is its ability to provoke or reawaken wonder in its reader, which Chesterton believed would prod the individual, and thus society, out of its paralysis.
Chesterton's ability to produce literature that provokes or recovers wonder in characters and readers is given special notice by J. R. R. Tolkien. In his essay "On Fairy-Stories" from Tree and Leaf (1965) Tolkien names a type of low fantasy after Chesterton. He describes "Chestertonian Fantasy" as symbolized by the strange word mooreeffoc, used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. Chesterton became acquainted with mooreeffoc-coffee room spelled backward--in his studies of Dickens. In his Charles Dickens (1906) Chesterton recounts how this common word appeared strange to Dickens as he read it through the glass door from the other side. What Tolkien calls a Chestertonian fantasy, Chesterton calls Dickens's eerie realism: the real becomes the fantastic.
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