Fantastic literature
Parent categories: fantastic - fantastique - literature
Nowhere as in fantastic literature are special effects so cheaply produced. [Jun 2006]
Todorov holds that fantastic literature involves an unresolved hesitation between a supernatural (or otherwise paranormal or impossible) solution and a psychological (or realistic) one. His term hesitation reminds me of the terms ambiguity and ambivalence used in the definition of the grotesque. [Jun 2006]
Tropes and themes: doppelgänger - dream - fantasy - grotesque - marvelous - supernatural - uncanny
Subgenres: chivalric romances - horror fiction - magic realism - science fiction literature
The rise of fantastic fiction in France parallels the rise of the gothic novel in England. One of the marvellous and terrifying events which takes place in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764; the first Gothic novel) is the figure of Alfonso stepping down from his portrait, a portentous sign that Manfred's days at the castle are numbered. [Jun 2006]
Authors: Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam - Petrus Borel - Mikhail Bulgakov - Jacques Cazotte - E.T.A. Hoffmann - Nikolai Gogol - Franz Kafka - Stephen King - Guy de Maupassant - Gérard de Nerval - Jan Potocki - Oscar Wilde
Secondary literature: The Fantastic (1970) - Tzvetan Todorov - Demons of the Night (1995) - Joan Kessler - Fantasy (1981) - Rosemary Jackson - A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) - Christine Brooke-Rose
The Devil in Love (1772) - Jaques Cazotte [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The first text cited in the genre of fantastic fiction is customarily Jacques Cazotte’s short novel The Devil in Love (Le Diable amoureux, 1772)
Definition (literature)
The Fantastic is a literary genre of writing or art which intrudes fantasy elements into a story (or picture) that is basically representational or real-feeling. It is this foundation (and intrusion) upon a sense of the real world that differentiates the Fantastic genre from Fantasy or the Surreal.The most typical type of Fantastic story, one used many times, brings the Devil to a contemporary setting. The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov is a celebrated example of this.
As a literary technique, many writers have used the Fantastic to comment on social realities in an entertaining and indirect manner. It is also a strategy to defeat censorship.
There isn't a clear distinction between the Fantastic and Magical Realism, but the latter seems generally to include a higher proportion of non-real elements.
The Fantastic is sometimes known as the Grotesque, possibly because in the 19th century its practitioners wrote stories set in poverty, examined social problems, or featured strange personalities. Examples of writers of Fantastic literature include E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nikolai Gogol, Oscar Wilde, Mikhail Bulgakov, Abram Tertz, and Bernard Malamud.
An example of a painter of the Fantastic is Marc Chagall, where one finds for example everyday elements of shtetl life defying a sense of gravity.
In Elizabethan slang, a Fantastic was a rake; an "effeminate fool" or "improvident young gallant". The character Lucio in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is described in the Dramatis Personae as a Fantastic. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic [Oct 2004]
Authors of works classed as fantastique
* Honoré de Balzac * Robert Bloch * Petrus Borel * Dino Buzzati * Jacques Cazotte * August Derleth * David Farland * Claude Farrère * Théophile Gautier * Robert Erwin Howard * Stephen King * Dean Koontz * Fritz Leiber * Howard Phillips Lovecraft * Arthur Machen * Richard Matheson * Guy de Maupassant * Prosper Mérimée * Haruki Murakami * Michael Moorcock * Gérard de Nerval * Charles Nodier * Thomas Owen * Edgar Allan Poe * Jan Potocki * Jean Ray * Maurice Renard * Anne Rice * Claude Seignolle * Bram Stoker * Theodore Sturgeon * John Ronald Reuel Tolkien * Jules Verne * Mathias Villiers de l'Isle-Adam * Roger Zelazny--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastique [Jan 2006]
The first text cited in this category
The first text cited in this category is customarily Jacques Cazotte’s short novel The Devil in Love (Le Diable amoureux, 1772). Other prime examples are Friedrich Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer (Der Geisterseher, 1884) and Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades (Pikovaia dama, 1834). Further prominent practitioners of the Fantastic of the Romantic period include E.T.A. Hoffmann, Charles Brockden Brown, Théophile Gautier, Prosper Mérimée, Vladimir Odoevsky and, of course, Edgar Allan Poe. Later in the nineteenth century examples can be found in, for instance, the work of Guy de Maupassant and Robert Louis Stevenson. Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) also lends itself to a fantastic reading, but the classic paradigm from this period is undoubtedly Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), around which psychological, as opposed to supernatural, explanations have long been debated: are the ghosts “real”, or are they hallucinated? --Neil Cornwell, University of BristolFirst published 18 July 2002 via http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1215 [Jan 2006]
The theoretical approach to this fictional form
The theoretical approach to this fictional form tends to derive in general terms from the French tradition of the fantastique and its historians, but subsequently and more specifically from the argument of Tsvetan Todorov (in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique, 1970; translated as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 1973) that fantastic fiction involves an unresolved hesitation between a supernatural (or otherwise paranormal or impossible) solution and a psychological (or realistic) one. If the question is not, or cannot be, resolved, then the work remains within the category of the Fantastic. Todorov’s stance toward fantastic narrative has been somewhat refined and developed by such commentators as Christine Brooke-Rose (in her A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic, 1981); Rosemary Jackson (Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, 1981); and the present author (see Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism, 1990). --Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol
First published 18 July 2002 via http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1215 [Jan 2006]
Sexuality and fantastic literature
Various psychoanalytical schools readily interpret the genre of fantastic literature as the expression of incontestable sexual desires. In fact, it is relatively easy to connect each theme of the fantastic with a paraphilia. Thus, witchcraft equals nymphomania, vampirism sadomasochism, etc. However, like all symbols, the symbols of the fantastic are open to many interpretations depending on the context. Thus, the symbol of the double (doppelgänger) may indicate the alienation of an individual who lost contact with the outside world rather than a schizofrenic.
Moreover, sexuality is represented explicitly rather than symbolically in numerous fantastic stories. A very violent sexual desire is ofthen the reason the hero shifts from the realm of the realistic into the universe of the fantastic. (for exemple La Chevelure by Maupassant). --http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastique#La_sexualit.C3.A9 [Jun 2006]
Literary Fantastic from Gothic to Postmodernism (1990) - Neil Cornwell
Literary Fantastic from Gothic to Postmodernism (1990) - Neil Cornwell [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
See also: 1990 - fantastique - Gothic novel - literature - fantastic literature - postmodern novel
Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983) - Frank Northen Magill
Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983) - Frank Northen Magill
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Search terms used: Christine Brooke-Rose, Scholes, Todorov
Before proceeding too much further, however, it should be noted that horror and fantasy do have qualities in common. They both require that readers engage, according to W.R. Irwin in The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (1976), in a conspiracy that agrees to suspend the rules of everyday (8-9). Readers must invest strong psychological belief in the literary worlds that are presented. Gary K. Wolfe, in his essay "The Encounter with Fantasy" (in Schlobin ed.), correctly points out that this is more than the "willing suspension of disbelief" that Samuel Coleridge first observed and so many scholars have slavishly followed since (including J.R.R. Tolkien in "On Fairy-Stories"). --FANTASY VERSUS HORROR In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature via http://wpl.lib.in.us/roger/F-VS-H.html
See also: fantastic literature
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