The Fantastic

The Fantastic
Author: Tzvetan Todorov
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1975
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780801491467

In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between idea and fact. His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory. As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aurélia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831
Author: David Sandner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317157427

Challenging literary histories that locate the emergence of fantastic literature in the Romantic period, David Sandner shows that tales of wonder and imagination were extremely popular throughout the eighteenth century. Sandner engages contemporary critical definitions and defenses of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fantastic literature, demonstrating that a century of debate and experimentation preceded the Romantic's interest in the creative imagination. In 'The Fairy Way of Writing,' Joseph Addison first defines the literary use of the supernatural in a 'modern' and 'rational' age. Other writers like Richard Hurd, James Beattie, Samuel Johnson, James Percy, and Walter Scott influence the shape of the fantastic by defining and describing the modern fantastic in relation to a fabulous and primitive past. As the genre of the 'purely imaginary,' Sandner argues, the fantastic functions as a discourse of the sublime imagination, albeit a contested discourse that threatens to disrupt any attempt to ground the sublime in the realistic or sympathetic imagination. His readings of works by authors such as Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, and James Hogg not only redefine the antecedents of the fantastic but also offer a convincing account of how and why the fantastic came to be marginalized in the wake of the Enlightenment.

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature
Author: Susan Napier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2005-07-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134803362

An exploration of the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. A wide range of fantasists form the basis for a ground breaking analysis of the fantastic.

The Fantastic Other

The Fantastic Other
Author: Brett Cooke
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2022-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004455019

The Fantastic Other is a carefully assembled collection of essays on the increasingly significant question of alterity in modern fantasy, the ways in which the understanding and construction of the Other shapes both our art and our imagination. The collection takes a unique perspective, seeing alterity not merely as a social issue but as a biological one. Our fifteen essays cover the problems posed by the Other, which, after all, go well beyond the bounds of any single critical perspective. With this in mind, we have selected studies to show how insights from deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and Freudian, Jungian and evolutionary psychology help us understand an issue so central to the act of reading.

The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film

The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film
Author: Judith B. Kerman
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2014-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476618739

When reality becomes fantastic, what literary effects will render it credible or comprehensible? To respond meaningfully to the surreality of the Holocaust, writers must produce works of moral and emotional complexity. One way they have achieved this is through elements of fantasy. Covering a range of theoretical perspectives, this collection of essays explores the use of fantastic story-telling in Holocaust literature and film. Writers such as Jane Yolen and Art Spiegelman are discussed, as well as the sci-fi television series V (1983), Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil (1982), Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and Martin Scorsese's dark thriller Shutter Island (2010).

The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale

The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale
Author: Dorothea E. von Mücke
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2003
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780804738606

This book examines the early development of the fantastic tale through the works of of the German romantics Ludwig Tieck, Achim von Arnim, and E. T. A. Hoffmann; the subsequent French rediscovery of the genre in works by Théophile Gautier and Prosper Mérimée; and Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to the literary form.

Exploring the Fantastic

Exploring the Fantastic
Author: Ina Batzke
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2018-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3839440270

The fantastic represents a wide and heterogeneous field in literary, cultural, and media studies. Encompassing some of the field's foremost voices such as Fred Botting and Larissa Lai, as well as exciting new perspectives by junior scholars, this volume offers a mosaic of the fantastic now. The contributions pinpoint and discuss current developments in theory and practice by offering enlightening snapshots of the contemporary Anglophone landscape of research in the fantastic. The authors' arguments and analyses thus give new impetus to the field's theoretical and methodological approaches, its textual materials, its main interests, and its crucial findings.

The Fantastic in Religious Narrative from Exodus to Elisha

The Fantastic in Religious Narrative from Exodus to Elisha
Author: Laura Feldt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 131754384X

The Fantastic in Religious Narrative from Exodus to Elisha argues that perspectives drawn from literary-critical theories of the fantastic and fantasy are apt to explore Hebrew Bible religious narratives. The book focuses on the narratives' marvels, monsters, and magic, rather than whether or not the stories depict historical events. The Exodus narrative (Ex 1-18) and a selection of additional Hebrew Bible narratives (Num 11-14, Judg 6-8, 1 Kings 17-19, 2 Kings 4-7) are analysed from a fantasy-theoretical perspective. The 'fantasy perspective' helps to make sense of elements of these narratives that - although prominently featured in the stories - have previously often been explained by being explained away. These case studies can illuminate Hebrew Bible religion and offer wider perspectives on religious narrative generally. In light of the fantasy-theoretical approach, these Hebrew Bible stories - with the Exodus narrative at the centre - read not as foundational stories, affirming triumphantly and unambiguously the bond between the deity, his people, and their territory, but rather as texts that harbour and even actively encourage ambiguity and uncertainty, not necessarily prompting belief, orientation, and a sense of meaningfulness, but also open-ended reflection and doubt. The case studies suggest that other religious narratives, both in and beyond the Judaic tradition, may also be amenable to interpretation in these terms, thus questioning a dominant trend in myth studies. The results of the analyses lead to a discussion of the role of ambiguity, uncertainty, and transformation in religious narrative in broader perspective, and to a questioning of the emphasis in the study of religion on the capacity of religious narrative for founding and maintaining institutions, orienting identity, and defending order over disorder. The book suggests the wider importance of incorporating destabilisation, disorientation, and ambiguity more strongly into theories of what religious narrative is and does.

The Fantastic of the Fin de Siècle

The Fantastic of the Fin de Siècle
Author: Zdeněk Beran
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2016-09-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443816469

This volume explores various facets of the relationship between the fantastic and the fin de siècle. The essays included here examine how the fin de siècle reflects the fantastic and its relation to the genesis of aesthetic ideas, to the concepts of terror and horror, the sublime, and evil, to Gothic and sensation fiction, to the Aesthetic Movement and Decadence. They also raise the question regarding the ways in which fantastic literature reflects the dynamic and all-too-often controversial development of the concept of the fantastic. At the same time, the majority of the contributions also investigate a broader context of specific social, political and economic conditions that frame the fantastic of the fin de siècle. They examine how fantastic genres use narrative manipulations, and how they incorporate various ideas of scientific development and progress by highlighting the role of religion, cultural anxiety and social crisis, as well as exploring the ways such genres use the fantastic for various purposes of cultural and social subversion. Fin de siècle fantastic literature is also investigated across a variety of cultures, as reflected in Scottish, Canadian, Australian, American and British writing, with particular emphasis on their predominant cultural or generic aspects, the genesis of the fin de siècle fantastic in some of these cultures and literatures, and their relations to a wider historical and cultural framework. The essays as a whole represent the work of scholars working in a diverse range of fields, and therefore adopt a wide range of approaches to the fantastic. As such, this volume provides a fresh and stimulating platform for further rethinking of the concept of the fantastic and its relation to fin de siècle literature, and its theoretical, philosophical, generic, and other implications within a broader literary, social and cultural context.

Contemporary Italian Women Writers and Traces of the Fantastic

Contemporary Italian Women Writers and Traces of the Fantastic
Author: Danielle Hipkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351195336

"Contemporary fantastic fiction, particularly that written by women, often challenges traditional literary practice. At the same time the predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offers a problematic range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 're-write'. Fantastic tropes, of space in particular, enable three important contemporary Italian female writers (Paola Capriolo, b. 1962; Francesca Duranti, b. 1935 and Rossana Ombres, b. 1931) to encounter and counter anxieties about writing from the female subject. All three writers begin by exploring the hermetic, fantastic space of enclosure with a critical, or troubled, eye, but eventually opt for wider national, and often international spaces, in which only a 'fantastic trace' remains. This shift mirrors their own increasingly confident distance from male-authored literary models and demonstrates the creative input that these writers bring to the literary canon, by redefining its generic boundaries."