Critical Discourses of

the Fantastic, 17121831

David Sandner

Critical Discourses of
the Fantastic, 17121831

for Amy, for everything

Critical Discourses of
the Fantastic, 17121831

David Sandner
California State University, Fullerton, USA

 David Sandner 2011

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Critical discourses of the fantastic, 17121831.
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Critical discourses of the fantastic, 17121831 / by David Sandner.
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XV

Contents
Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Romanticism as the Origin and End of the Fantastic

1 The Fairy Way of Writing

2 Interlocked Definitions: The Fantastic, the Sublime, the Uncanny

17

3 The Sublime and Fantastic: Joseph Addison, Longinus,

Edmund Burke

33

4 Romantic Wildness and Fantastic Modernity in Anti-Apparition

Writings, the Ballad Controversy, and Romance Criticism

47

5 The Fantastic and the Fabulous Past: Richard Hurd and James Beattie63
6 Gothick Pasts and Gothick Futures: Horace Walpole and
Mary Shelley

71

7 This Wild Strain of Imagination: Samuel Johnson and

John Hawkesworth on Wonder

81

8 Fairy Unexplained in Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho

91

9 Supernatural Modernity in Walter Scotts Redgauntlet and

James Hoggs The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner

107

10 The Floating Corpse of Fairyland: William Wordsworth and

Fables Dark Abyss

117

11 On Two Faults in a Work of Such Pure Imagination: Samuel

Taylor Coleridge and Anna Letitia Barbauld on The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner

129

12 Faery Lands Forlorn and the Failure of the Imagination:

John Keats Perilous Realm of Faery

147

Afterword: A Typology of the Fantastic: Dispossession, Fragmentation,

Domestication, and Possession

159

Appendix: A Chronology of Early Critical Sources on the Fantastic

173

Bibliography
Index

175
189

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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Tres Pyle and Ian Duncan for invaluable work mentoring the
earlier version of this project. I also wish to thank The Romantic Reading Group
at the University of Oregon, including, at times, Mita Mahato, Erin Connors, Mark
Meritt, Sarah Goss, George Cusack, and Bill Hamilton, for necessary support. For
productive discussions of the rhetorical and natural sublimes, I would like to thank
Chris Hitt; for productive arguments over the sublime and the uncanny, I wish to
thank Mike Arnzen. For work on this project far beyond the call of duty, I would
especially like to thank Amy Novak.
The International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts has nurtured ideas
here through responses to papers, panels, and, most importantly, I think, informal
discussions. I would especially like to thank Jacob Weisman (and all thing
tacyhon), Bernie Goodman, and Andy Miller.
I would also like to thank the editors of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts,
Bill Senior and Brian Attebery, who published a version of the opening chapter
on Addison. JFAs support of parallel work I have done on Fantastic Literature:
A Critical Reader has helped with this project as well. I would also like to thank
Extrapolations, which published a version of the chapter on Scott and Hogg.
Thank you all.

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Introduction

Romanticism as the Origin and End

of the Fantastic
In criticism of the fantastic, Romanticism often figures as an origin for the
genre, the moment when William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
call for a certain coloring of the imagination to be thrown over the practice
of literature. For example, Tobin Siebers in The Romantic Fantastic (1984) and
Karl Kroeber in Romantic Fantasy and Science Fiction (1988) offer compelling
accounts of Romanticism as the era when the fantastic as a form emerges into
cultural awareness. Certainly, the Romantic period provides a watershed moment
for imaginative literature. For instance, in a matter to be discussed at more length
later, the straightforward acceptance of supernatural terror in Mary Shelleys
introduction to Frankenstein (1831) late in the Romantic period marks an apt
contrast to the nervous justifications for the Gothic fantastic proffered by Percy
Bysshe Shelleys earlier preface to the novel (1818). Percy Shelley attempts to
defend, somewhat desperately, the usefulness of the supernatural in literature;
Mary Shelley assumes that the genres conventions are familiar and that the
readers desire to be frightened by supernatural terror is self-evident. Only thirteen
years have passed and the work has become famous. But also, the fantastic as a
form continued to gain ground and acceptance. The genre later to be called the
fantastic becomes, for better and for worse, more sharply defined by Romanticism
and its concerns, especially in relation to what Coleridge named the (capital I)
Imagination.
However, for the purposes of the present study, Romanticism also proves an
end to things ... an ending (one of many?) perhaps followed by a new beginning.
Too much might be made of Romanticism as origin and end. The conversation
on fantastic literature examined here beginning with the early eighteenth-century
critic Joseph Addison might seem to be heading inevitably, teleologically toward
its rise in Romanticism; or, alternately, the Wordsworthian Imagination might
be figured as one end of the fantastic as a serious form, the moment when all the
fitful eighteenth-century definitions of the fledgling genre become banished by the
triumph of the modern imagination (or Imagination) as a faculty to be properly and
forever linked to childhood (and, worse, vulgar popular literature!) and thus to a
permanent irrelevance in relation to the matter of real adult literature.
At the same time, Romanticism might be more usefully figured as a turning
point for the fantastic, a beginning and an ending, but one with too many
continuities between what comes before and after the early nineteenth century to
render the period anything so straightforward as a genesis or apocalypse for the
field. Romanticism has often been figured as an origin for the fantastic precisely

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 17121831

because it sets the terms for our present discussion, offering, in Wordsworths
works, in Coleridges, in Keatss, in Mary Shelleys, in Scotts and Hoggs, and in
the works of many others, important ways to explain and explore the imagination
and imaginative literature. Modern definitions of the fantastic, such as those
advanced in the criticism of more contemporary writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien
and Ursula Le Guin, very prominently, in their reliance on the imagination as a
power and imaginative literature as an active mediation of experience itself, have
obvious parallels to Romantic poetics.
However, as Addisons essay and the other works examined here suggest, the
relationship of the fantastic, although it undergoes crucial transformations during
the early nineteenth century, predates Romanticism proper. Critical Discourses of
the Fantastic describes the genre from Joseph Addisons essay on the fairy way
of writing to John Keatss poetry of fairy lands forlorn in order to reclaim the
fantastic, or at least its somewhat fragmented and too-often neglected history. Seen
from the eighteenth century, the fantastics peculiar claims on the present become,
it seems to me, clearer: presented in the criticism of Addison, Ann Radcliffe, or
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among others, as a natural appetite of the modern
reader, a commodity consumed in numerous popular forms in works by Horace
Walpole, Mary Shelley, or Walter Scott, among others, the fantastic can be shown
to perform the superstitious past as a radically lost (often Gothick) pre-history
that uncannily defines skeptical modernity. As the genre of the purely imaginary,
the fantastic functions as a discourse of the sublime, but a contested discourse
that threatens to disrupt any attempt to ground the sublime in the realistic or
sympathetic imagination affirmed by Edmund Burke or William Wordsworth.
Joseph Addison first theorizes the fantastic precisely as a discourse of the
sublime in literature, developing a basic tension between the fantastic as purely
imaginary and as the embodiment of an all-too-familiar tradition of exploded
supernatural beliefs from fairies to demons, that is, between the performance
of merely rhetorical difference and the performance of the uncanny return of
the superstitious past into rational modernity. From Richard Hurds attempt to
theorize a Gothic aesthetics separate from neo-classical tradition, to Edmund
Burkes neo-Lockean grounding of the sublime in sense perception and pain, to
Ann Radcliffes explained supernatural which produces a supernatural affect that
it then carefully explains away, critics attempt to cultivate the genres production
of wonder and fearthat is, its sublime affectwhile minimizing its threat to the
stability of the modern imagination. But perhaps all these critics achieve in the
end is a heightened realization of the all too real threat the fantastic poses to
modern identity.
The central claim of the present studythat the fantastic functions as a
discourse of the sublime in literature, arising out of vital arguments about
aesthetics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuriesremains radical not
only in its revision of the critical history of the fantastic (moving the formation
of the genre back almost a hundred years to Addisons early discussion of the
sublime) but in its implications for Romanticism itself. Rather then functioning as

Introduction

simply a genre important to an era interested in Gothic antiquity and the irrational,
Critical Discourses of the Fantastic claims fantastic literature as a characteristic
mode of Romantic expression and thought. Indeed, a related claim here is that
fantastic literature continues to explore the tensions inherent in Romanticism into
the present day through the continued popularity of the genres of the imagination.
Romanticism, an era that embraced certain forms of the fantasticnotably
Gothic conventions and the supernatural balladas characteristic genres, proves
a crucial moment for the fantastic as a field. Ironically, however, the history
of Romantic criticism records an ambivalent response to the fantastic and its
relationship with Romanticism. M.H. Abrams and Harold Bloom produced
influential studies of the imagination in Romanticism. Abrams The Mirror and
the Lamp (1953) in particular recognized the Poetic Marvelous as a Romantic
genre. However, both critics idealized the imagination as an absolute above
history that has led to the rejection of these approaches to the field. Blooms
The Visionary Company (1961), for example, claims the Romantics, especially
Wordsworth, respond to the failures of the French Revolution by producing a
visionary poetics of the imagination beyond the sorrow of history. New Historicist
readings of Romanticism derived from Jerome McGanns The Romantic Ideology
(1983) challenge the use of an idealized Romantic criticism and insist that poems
are social and historical products and that the critical study of such products must
be grounded in a socio-historic analytic (3). Historicist work in the 1980s on
Wordsworth, for example, including James K. Chandler, Wordsworths Second
Nature (1984), Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworths Great Period Poems (1986),
and Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989), attempts to discover
the hidden social and political underpinnings supporting Romantic poetry and
its idealistic poetics. Moving out of what has been called the theory wars in
the late 1990s and into the present day, Romanticism has been the site for an
outpouring of historically-minded handbooks, encyclopedias, critical companions,
and the like, honestly too numerous to list, which have nearly uniformly ignored
the fantastic. Demystifying the fantastic imagination could be an important step
toward understanding the genre not as wholly different from reality but as
an apprehension of the real in all its confusion, its frightfulness, its mystery, and
its wonder. Unfortunately, the current focus of Romantic criticism promises no
such understanding of the genre, turning strongly away from products of pure
imagination to the historical record and its perceived influence on literature.
In effect, recent Romantic criticism implicitly renews the charge of escapism
against the genre and turns instead to decoding the real history obscured by the
projections of the Romantic imagination, thus, unsurprisingly, ignoring or eliding
the fantastic. The unstated argument is: as the fantastic refuses the external or
mimetic, so it seemingly refuses, like any visionary Romantic form, its social
and political moment. The charge of escapism has too long bedeviled the genre,
deeming it unimportant and irrelevant, to be helpful in developing a useful
criticism of the form now. A too-easy dismissal of the fantastic as ideological
projection fails to realize that the genreeven when seemingly at the furthest

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 17121831

remove from its present moment in time and spaceparticipates, if only spectrally
or phantasmagorically, in the social and political realities of real writers and
real readers.
Where a historically minded critic might view the fantastic as obscuring a
material history behind its merely escapist and impossible flights of fancy, a
better approach might instead take seriously the desire for the purely imaginary
that motivates the fantastic as a form and has made it enormously popular as a
genre. By doing so, critics can perhaps approach more closely the problematic
poetics of Romanticism itself, a poetics defined by endlessly deferred claims
on, or attempts to achieve, the purely imaginary. For example, as suggested
by Paul de Man1 and later critics, languages desire to erase itself (or appear
transparent) in Romantic poetics, whether to discover nature or an ideal beyond
nature, ironically rediscovers the figuration of language itself. Romantic poems of
transcendence perform a deferred desiremost pointedly, for a Romantic poetics
of transcendence. The performance itself fascinates, even as it endlessly fails to
achieve coherence; by implication, the fantastics illusory status, its impossibility,
acknowledged by its very definition, could be regarded not as a failure to achieve
the coherence of reality but as a vital performance of the deferment of the
(perhaps illusory) coherence of reality.
Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act (1981) implicates imaginary literature, what Jameson calls magical
narratives, in politics and history, endorsing the reading of fantastic texts not as
history disguised or translated into something else but as a form of history itself.
For Jameson, genre study is vital because it is mediatory [...], which allows the
co-ordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin
diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life
(105). He defines the fantastic not as unreal but as using a protonarrative structure
as the vehicle for our experience of the real. Jameson recovers the fantastic not as
false consciousness, a simple reification and mystification of the historical moment
in imaginary literature, a moment to be demystified by the astute critic, but as a
locus of tensions and debate. The ideological approach to the fantastic taken by
Jameson finds support in The German Ideology of Marx and Engels, who write:
The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of
their [humanitys] material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound
to material premises (47). The fantastic exists in the material body as phantoms
formed in the human brain just as much as in the material form of language. The
fantastic reveals to us, perhaps more clearly than any other literary form, what
haunts us, in modern identity, in modern life, in the processes of the modern body
itself.
1

The development of these ideas in de Man can be seen in his Intentional Structure
of the Romantic Image (1960; 1970), Criticism and Crisis (1967; 1980), The Rhetoric
of Temporality (1969), and The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984); also helpful is Stefano
Rossos An Interview with Paul de Man (1983).

Introduction

Fantastic literature can be studied not as a disembodied, idealized form

despite its claims towards the purely imaginarybut as a material form subject
to and productive of ideological (and historical) discourse. As Rosemary Jackson
claims in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion: The fantastic traces the unsaid
and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered
over and made absent (4). Seen in this light, the fantastic not only offers but
might be said to threaten us with transcendence, worrying the supposed limits of
present culture and reality, of self and society; not only based in, but also reveling
in, the materiality of language, the strange, hard kernel of otherness that persists in
any ideological construction of reality, the fantastic offers shadows of the Real
and unreal, saying the unsaid, showing the unseen, speaking silence; the fantastic
comments on a reality it can ultimately neither affirm nor deny, or rather, can both
affirm and deny, impossibly tracing new limits while refining, even affirming, old
ones, appearing by turns both subversive and reactionary, with everything and
nothing up for grabs.

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Chapter 1

The Fairy Way of Writing

In his essays on The Pleasures of the Imagination (1712), Joseph Addison praises
the power of a peculiar kind of literature he calls the fairy way of writing. In
his description of it in The Fairy Way of Writing (The Spectator No. 419, found
in The Pleasures of the Imagination), Addison offers the eighteenth century a
working definition of fantastic literature:
There is a kind of writing wherein the poet quite loses sight of nature and
entertains his readers imagination with the characters and actions of such
persons as have many of them no existence but what he bestows on them. Such
are fairies, witches, magicians, demons, and departed spirits. This Mr. Dryden
calls the fairy way of writing. (170)

Addisons definition contains a basic tension. On the one hand, the fantastic is
presented as purely imaginary, as having no existence, thereby framing, and so
calling into question, existence, whatever is understood as real and known. On
the other hand, the fantastic is associated with a tradition of exploded supernatural
beliefs from fairies to demons. But if fantastic literature presents itself as other,
as not only wholly imaginary but productive of absolute difference, how can it
also be the repository of the all-too familiar elements of superstitious folklore?
Addison simply assumes the two sides of his definition do fit together: for, of
course, modem rationality no longer allows belief in fairies or any of the other
claptrap of superstition. Fairies and the rest must have no existence. Addison
elaborates on his definition by claiming that the would-be fantasist should take care
lest his fairies talk like people of his own species and not like other sets of beings
who converse with different objects and think in a different manner from that of
mankind (170). Though no human (non-fairy?) writer could write, much less
think, in a different manner from that of mankind, Addisons definition insists
that the appearance of a difference is necessary to the function of the fantastic.
However, though the poet has no pattern to follow and must work altogether
out of his own invention, Addison insists he must also have a particular cast of
fancy and imagination not only naturally fruitful but also superstitious. The
fantasist must be very well versed in legends and fables, antiquated romances, and
the traditions of nurses and old women (170). Again, the power of the fantastic
resides in the poets creation of something new and original out of nothing, but
also in its raising of the specter of a superstitious past supposedly laid to rest by
the refinement of modem understanding.
The purpose of the fantastic for Addison is to raise a pleasing kind of horror in
the mind of the reader and amuse his imagination with ... strangeness and novelty.
Connecting the psychological to the cultural, Shakespeares works become the

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 17121831

exemplar of the fantastic mode of writing which represents for Addison an

English national character that is naturally fanciful and liable to wild notions
and visions (172). The peculiar power of the fantastic is to bring up into our
memory the stories we have heard in our childhood and those secret terrors and
apprehensions to which the mind of man is naturally subject (171). The fantastic
is activated by a mixture of memory and story, built on the return of childhood
fears that had seemed left behind by the reasoning adult (and modem culture) and
on secret terrors that Addison indicates naturally underlie the mind.
Modem skeptical humanity should be immune to the secret terrors of the
fantastic, but is not. Addison takes up two lines of reasoning on why this is so.
First, Addison proposes, in a proof directed toward a positivist, scientific discourse,
that the presence of the impossible in fantastic literature only represents the actual
presence of the unknowable and invisible world of the spirit in the natural world.
Addison writes:
Men of cold fancies and philosophical dispositions object to this kind of poetry
that it has not probability enough to affect the imagination. But to this it may
be answered that we are sure in general there are many intellectual beings in
the world besides ourselves, and several species of spirits that are subject to
different laws and economies than those of mankind. (171)

Fantastic literature opens the mind to speculations concerning what science does
not yet and may never know, the workings of different laws and economies ...
than those of mankind, that function within or behind the everyday world. But,
second, Addison indicates that the fairy way of writing is not even attempting
to represent such truth at all but is, rather, simply providing a pleasure that has
no regard for truth or falsehood. Addison writes of impossible representations in
fantastic works:
At least, we have all heard so many pleasing relations in favor of them that we
do not care for seeing through the falsehood and willingly give ourselves up to
so agreeable an imposture. (171)

Addisons answers are again contradictory, revealing the odd, uncanny position of
the fantastic in modem culture. The fantastic at once defines modernity in contrast
to its very backwardness and supposed childishness, its seeming unimportance,
and yet the fantastic also haunts modernity with its presentation of unassimilable
and wholly different laws and economies, its secret terrors and pleasures that
also naturally underlie, and so define, the modern mind.
Addisons criticism marks the fantastic as the oddity of original genius, as
antiquated, as female, and as childish. Built on childhood fears, the fantastic
requires the genius of a Shakespeare as informed by the fabulous past recorded in
both ancient romances and the Mother Goose tales of nurses and old women;
the fantastic enacts a counter-tradition to the real manner ... of mankind that
isthe adult, the enlightened, the present, the male. In particular, the association
of fantastic literature with childhood would prove crucial to the later development

The Fairy Way of Writing

of the genre, eventually becoming a commonplace. By the late nineteenth century,

much fantastic literaturesuch as John Ruskins King of the Golden River (1851),
Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland (1865) or, to use a slightly late example,
Kenneth Grahames The Wind in the Willows (1908)is written exclusively
for children as their special province.1 In the eighteenth century, however, the
association of the fantastic with childhood remains secondary to the relationship
of the fantastic to the primitive and superstitious cultural past.2
Despite the continuity between the two characterizations or explanations
of the fantastic as superstitious and/or child-like, differences between them bear
comment. Whether the fantastic is positioned in childhood or in the superstitious
past may seem to make little practical difference to the genre. In both, the fantastic is
related to the immature and irrational; in both, the fantastic is realized as nostalgia.
The development of the child into the reasoned adult and of primitive culture
into modern civilized society have an obvious (if invidious) parallel structure.
However, the nineteenth-century emphasis on childhood as the province of the
fantastic opens up the unrealizable but still powerful possibility of the modern
adult satisfying a natural appetite for the fantastic through contact with actual
children, still innocent and imaginative, or through recollection of ones own
childhood (as Wordsworths poetics in particular will advocate). The eighteenthcentury emphasis on the superstitious past situates the fantastic in a radically lost
pre-history. The eighteenth-century fantastic thus not only embodies an appetite
for otherness, or for the surprising, or for a supposedly innocent childhood
1
The three works mentioned are written, in fact, for particular children. See William
Coyle, Ruskins King of the Golden River: A Victorian Fairy Tale (1985), 86; Martin
Gardners Notes to Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alices Adventures in Wonderland
& Through the Looking Glass (1960), 214; and David Gooderson, Introduction to
Kenneth Grahame, My Dearest Mouse: The Wind in the Willows Letters (1988), 811.
Primary nineteenth-century (and Edwardian) critical works claiming the fantastic as the
special province of children include Charles Dickens, Frauds on the Fairies (1853); John
Ruskin, Fairy Stories (1868); and G.K. Chesterton, Fairy Tales (1908). On children
and fantasy in the nineteenth century, see F.J. Harvey Darton, Childrens Books in England:
Five Centuries of Social Life (1958); Cornelia Meigs, A Critical History of Childrens
Literature (1969); Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy (1979); Humphrey Carpenter,
Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Childrens Literature (1985); Sheila A.
Egoff, Worlds Within: Childrens Fantasy from the Middle Ages to Today (1988); Nina
Auerbach and U.C. Knoepflmacher, eds., Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies
by Victorian Women Writers (1992); Maria Tatar, Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the
Culture of Childhood (1992); and David Sandner, The Fantastic Sublime: Romanticism and
Transcendence in Nineteenth-century Childrens Fantasy Literature (1996).
2
Numerous eighteenth-century scholars of Romance associate the fabulous with
a superstitious and irretrievable past. Primary eighteenth-century critical works on the
fantastic as the literature of the fabulous past include Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and
Romance (1762); Thomas Percy On Ancient Minstrels (1765); Hugh Blair, A Critical
Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1765); Thomas Warton, Of the Origin of Romantic
Fiction (1774); Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785); and Sir Walter Scott,
Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry (1830).

10

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 17121831

imagination, but also powerfully performs history as an uncanny return of a

discontinuous, irretrievable past that compels attention but remains tantalizingly
out of reach. Defining differences between the two characterizations of the genre
should not obscure the continuity of historical development from one to the other,
from the association of the fantastic with the cultural past to its association with
childhood by the late nineteenth century; but nevertheless, the differences must be
kept in mind, for they change the genres emphasis subtly but importantly.
Because critics of the fantastic generally locate the formation of the genre in
the Romantic era, the role of the fabulous and uncanny past in the function of
the fantastic, both in the eighteenth century and after, remains a neglected area
of study. As Stephen Prickett makes clear in On the Evolution of a Word in
his Victorian Fantasy (1979), fantasy does not become descriptive of a genre
until the late nineteenth century. The term fantastic becomes a common name
for the genre (or anyway of a mode negatively related to mimesis) only in the
twentieth century.3 The uncanny, a term that will be related to the sublime and
the fantastic here, enters genre criticism of the fantastic only after Freuds essay on
The Uncanny (1919) applied the term to E.T.A. Hoffmanns fantastic story The
Sandman (not coincidentally, a German Romantic tale, affirming Romanticism
as the limit for critical work on fantastic literature). How can the terms fantastic
and uncanny be applied to eighteenth-century literature? How can Addison be
presented as discussing fantastic literature if the fantastic does not yet exist as a
genre?
Modern fantastic literature, it can be noted, embodies precisely the tension
attending Addisons definition of the fairy way of writing between the claims of the
purely imaginary and superstition. On the one hand, fantastic literature presents itself
as an interior literature arising self-contained from the faculty of the imagination.
Fantastic literatures declared position as purely imaginary or unrealistic clearly
underwrites the persistent charges against it as escapist.4 Because the fantastic
apparently refuses or is unable to connect with reality, it is commonly viewed as
lacking serious intention or relevance. The charge of escapism find a Classical
3
See John Clutes entry on the fantastic in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997).
Further confusing the issue, the fantastic can be considered descriptive of all literature,
realistic or not, tracing its history back to Greek origins. As Rosemary Jackson writes in
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981):
The fantastic derives from the Latin, phantasicus, which is from the Greek [...]
meaning that which is made visible, visionary, unreal. In this general sense, all imaginary
activity is fantastic, all literary works are fantasies. (13)
4
As Rosemary Jackson writes in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981),
Fantasys
association with imagination and desire has made it an area difficult to articulate or to
define, and indeed the value of fantasy has seemed to reside in precisely this resistance
to definition, in its free-floating and escapist qualities. Literary fantasies have appeared
to be free from many of the conventions and restraints of more realistic texts: they have
refused to observe unities of time, space and character, doing away with chronology, three
dimensionality and with rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and
other, life and death. (12).

The Fairy Way of Writing

11

basis in the history of literary criticism from Platos privileging of mimesis.5 The
notion that the fantastic produces, through the imagination, absolute difference
also impels an important tradition of genre criticism that embraces as liberation
fantasys apparent transcendence of ordinary reality. The primary example of the
latter is Tolkiens Christian gloss of the fantastic in his essay On Fairy-Stories
(1947), which discovers in fantasys difference from reality a glimpse of the other
world of the spirit.6 At the same time, however, the fantastic necessarily entails a
The Platonic notion of mimesis, foundational to literary criticism, is an important
reason for the marginal position of fantastic literature in general. In The Republic, Socrates
explains that the mimetic poet, who only makes a copy of what the craftsman makes (which
is itself but a copy of the ideal), should be excluded from the Republic; by implication,
the fantasist is yet another step removed, even further from the ideal. In The Phadreus,
Socrates, when asked to give rational explanations for fantastic mythical tales, refuses to
even try, claiming that seeking to know oneself is simply a better use of ones time. For a
discussion of the relationship of mimesis to fantasy from Plato to the present, see Kathryn
Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (1984), esp. Part
I, pp. 354.
The Classical Age also produced an important though limited defense of the fantastic
that has determined fantasys place in literature generally. Aristotles criticism of the
marvelous marks an interesting and important contrast to Plato. As Douglas Biow writes,
Aristotle, generally considered the first literary theorist of the marvelous, stood squarely
on the side of realism in his Poetics (Mirabile Dictu: Representations of the Marvelous in
Medieval and Rennaissance Epic [1996], 3). However, although Aristotle does not embrace
the fantastic, his Poetics lays out some of the main arguments against Platos dismissal
of the marvelous. Aristotles criticism allows for the impossible on formal grounds, for
though it is an error to include the impossible, the error may be justified, if the end of
the art be thereby attained. Aristotles argument that the marvelous is a traditional part of
the epic and tragedy, and that it serves the needs of art if not life, have been important to
justifications of the fantastic into the twentieth century.
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The connection between the fantastic and the other world of the spirit can be
traced back to Addisons The Fairy Way of Writing (1712), which suggests, in a passage
already quoted, a connection between the fantastic and the invisible world. John Dennis
links the divine, the sublime and a host of mythological and fantastic creatures in The
Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704). Samuel Taylor Coleridge attempts to reconcile the
imagination and the invisible or divine in his work on Faerie to be found in scattered
references throughout his criticism, particularly The Statesmans Manual (1816) and Table
Talk (18301832), and in the gloss to his own important Gothic fantasy, The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner (1817).
Primary critical works on the fantastic and the world of the spirit from within the genre
proper, besides Tolkiens essay, include George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination
(1890); and C.S. Lewis, On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (1966).
Rudolph Ottos notion of the numinous in The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the NonRational factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (1917; 1923) has
affected criticism of the fantastic, though particularly the Gothic. S.L. Varnado, Haunted
Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction (1987), applies Ottos idea of the numinous to
Gothic literature. See also, Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being A History of the
Gothic Novel in England (1957; 1964).
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