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Show Summary Details fantastic literature. Both look back to the Phaeacian tales in the Odyssey, which became a byword for the unbelievable cf. Their primary purpose was social and moral comment, but they often seem to have been authenticated by an adventure story, which provided entertainment but also drew attention to the question of how literally they were to be believed.
Although these works were criticized as falsehoods, some recognized that undisguised fiction represented an area of licence for the imagination e. Strabo 2. You do not currently have access to this article Login Please login to access the full content.
Subscribe Access to the full content requires a subscription. Many of our ebooks are available for purchase from these online vendors:. Many of our ebooks are available through library electronic resources including these platforms:. What exactly is the fantastic? In the twentieth-century world, our notions of what is impossible are assaulted every day.
To define the nature of fantasy and the fantastic, Eric S. Rabkin considers its role in fairy tales, science fiction, detective stories, and religious allegory, as well as in traditional literature. A truly fantastic work is subtle in the working of the feeling, and would leave the reader with a sense of confusion about the work, and whether or not the phenomenon was real or imagined. Tzvetan 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 is reminiscent of the terms ambiguity and ambivalence used in the definition of the grotesque. Todorov compares the fantastic with two other ideas: The Uncanny , wherein the phenomenon turns out to have a rational explanation such as in the gothic works of Ann Radcliffe ; or the marvelous , where there truly is a supernatural explanation for the phenomenon. Other examples of writers of fantastic literature include:. In Elizabethan slang, a 'fantastic' was a fop; an "improvident young gallant" who was obsessed with showy dress.
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