Critic John Clute describes fantasy

This is the passage I quoted (in part) during our previous class, from the invaluable The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997):

A fantasy text is a self-coherent narrative. When set in this world, it tells a story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it; when set in an otherworld, that otherworld will be impossible, though stories set there may be possible in its terms. ... A fantasy text may be described as the story of an earned passage from bondage -- via a central recognition of what has been revealed and of what is about to happen, and which may involve a profound metamorphosis of protagonist or world (or both) -- into the eucatastrophe, where marriages may occur, just governance fertilize the barren land, and there is a healing.

Eucatastrophe was J.R.R. Tolkien's term (coined in "On Fairy-Stories," 1947) for a story's final "piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story."