A name in brackets indicates the creator or popularizer of the term
Creator copyright universe: a fantasy world created by an author to set his or her stories in, as opposed to setting stories in a shared world or a licensed world.
Dark fantasy: a fantasy story which borrows elements from horror, and which typically does not end in eucatastrophe.
Eucatastrophe: the uplifting and joyful moment when the story resolves into its happy ending (J.R.R. Tolkien).
Fairytale: a story involving the fantastic, usually involving familiar traditional formulas and often ending in eucatastrophe (after which people live happily ever after).
Gothic: a form of fantasy combining horror, melodrama and romance, and frequently invoking medieval trappings (including castles, dungeons, monks).
Heroic fantasy: fantasy set in a world which often resembles the ancient or medieval past, drawing on their epic traditions of heroes; barely distinguishable from high fantasy or sword-and-sorcery.
High fantasy: fantasy that deals with the activities of heroes, drawing on the literary tradition of epic; immersive fantasy, and not set in our world (as low fantasy is).
Immersive fantasy: a story set entirely within an imagined world, without any overt reference to the world of the reader (Farah Mendlesohn).
Indigenous fantasy: a story “that is, like an indigenous species, adapted to and reflective of its native environment” (Brian Attebery); also called “low fantasy”, and may overlap with “urban fantasy”.
Interstitial fantasy: stories which draw on other genres than fantasy, and which cannot easily be categorized in genre terms (Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman).
Intrusion fantasy: a story in which the fantastic intrudes into the mundane world; commonly found in dark fantasy and in horror (Farah Mendlesohn).
Liminal fantasy: a story set usually in our world in which the fantastic element is glimpsed or suspected by the reader but never fully realized or explained (Farah Mendlesohn).
Low fantasy: a story in which the fantastic appears in the ordinary world (as indigenous fantasy), as opposed to the epic other worlds of high fantasy.
Magic realism: a story in which the fantastic appears within an otherwise “normal” world, and is generally accepted as normal. In practice, a term used of literary fiction rather than of genre fantasy (cf. indigenous fantasy).
Matter of Britain: stories dealing with the mythical world of King Arthur and his knights, whether written in the Middle Ages or subsequently; usually called “Arthurian fantasy”.
Medievalist fantasy: a story set in a world based in some loose way on the world of the European Middle Ages, often drawing its inspiration from medieval romance and the Matter of Britain, and frequently in the form of a quest fantasy.
New Weird: a marketing category (or perhaps a movement) around the turn of the millennium, which explored new and often disturbing ways of looking at fantasy motifs and at the borderlands between science fiction and fantasy (China Miéville).
Paranormal romance: a subgenre halfway between dark fantasy and romance, usually featuring romantic relationships between humans and fantasy beings such as vampires or werewolves.
Portal fantasy: a story in which the fantasy world is reached through a gateway (such as one might find in a wardrobe). Frequently these stories involve exploring the new world and solving its problems or fulfilling some quest, so these have also been designated portal-quest stories (Farah Mendlesohn).
Posthumous fantasy: a story concerning, and frequently told from the point of view of, a dead person; sometimes set in the land of the dead.
Quest fantasy: a story (frequently in multiple volumes) involving one or more people travelling through a landscape, learning about the world, and fulfilling some quest or destiny; cf. “portal-quest”.
Rationalized fantasy: a story in which the magic or other fantastic element is explained in scientific or pseudo-scientific ways.
Science fiction: a story distinguishable from fantasy (except at the margins) by being entirely set within a universe that can be explained rationally in scientific terms.
Slick fantasy: a story in which, often, a wise-cracking modern urbanite gets involved with one of the standard scenarios of fantasy: the granting of three wishes, a pact with the devil, and so on.
Slipstream: a literary story that slips across the boundaries between the mundane and the fantastic (Bruce Sterling); mainstream fiction with fantastic elements. Cf. interstitial fantasy and magic realism.
Steampunk: fantasy (or science fiction) set in a real or fantasized nineteenth century.
Sword-and-sorcery: fantasy set in a pre-industrial world, involving warriors in conflict with magical or supernatural forces; largely indistinguishable from heroic fantasy or high fantasy, although perhaps better seen as a subset of them (Fritz Leiber).
Taproot text: significant texts from before the emergence of the genre of fantasy, which have fed into the genre (e.g. The Odyssey, The Faerie Queen) (John Clute).
Theatre fantasy: stories which take place in a fantasy world devised to serve as a stage for a series of such stories (Farah Mendlesohn).
Urban fantasy: stories which involve the intersection of the fantastic and the “real world”, and in which the city itself is frequently a focus of attention.
Weird fantasy: stories involving supernatural and horror, and often the occult; the staple of the US magazine Weird Tales.
YA (young adult fiction): fiction written for, published for, or marketed to adolescents, roughly between the ages of 12 and 18.