World-building in Urban Fantasy

This thesis studies the world-building elements of Urban Fantasy, a genre of popular fiction that emerged in the early 1980’s. I examine the genre as a model-variant of the fantastic that uses elements of traditional Fantasy, Science-Fiction, and the Gothic to construct a believable storyworld inhabited by both humans and non-humans, in which a “breach” has occurred before the opening of a narrative and forced the previously mimetic world model to “adapt” to a supernatural intrusion. Repercussions resulting from the breach are also examined though the works of popular Urban Fantasy authors, such as Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, and Kim Harrison, in order to establish a formula for current Urban Fantasy narratives that has progressed from the early fiction of the genre.