The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

Introduction

Todorov’s “Introduction to Fantastic Literature” (1970) applied structuralist poetics to a genre. He defines the fantastic as the hesitation experienced by a reader – and often by a character – who knows only natural laws and is confronted with an event that seems supernatural. If the event is explained naturally, the text belongs to the uncanny; if new laws of nature must be accepted, to the marvellous; the fantastic lasts only as long as the hesitation. Todorov draws his examples from Jan Potocki’s “Manuscript Found in Saragossa”, Hoffmann, Poe, Nerval, Henry James and others, argues that psychoanalysis took over the themes of the fantastic in the twentieth century and reads Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” as a new, generalised fantastic. The book became a standard reference, though critics questioned its narrow corpus and its formalism.

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