Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831

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.

Introduction Romanticism as the Origin and End of the Fantastic, David Sandner; Chapter 1 The Fairy Way of Writing, David Sandner; Chapter 2 Interlocked Definitions, David Sandner; Chapter 3 The Sublime and Fantastic, David Sandner; Chapter 4 Romantic Wildness and Fantastic Modernity in Anti-Apparition Writings, the Ballad Controversy, and Romance Criticism, David Sandner; Chapter 5 The Fantastic and the Fabulous Past, David Sandner; Chapter 6 Gothick Pasts and Gothick Futures, David Sandner; Chapter 7 “This Wild Strain of Imagination”, David Sandner; Chapter 8 Fairy Unexplained in Ann, David Sandner; Chapter 9 Supernatural Modernity in Walter Scott's Redgauntlet and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, David Sandner; Chapter 10 The Floating Corpse of Fairyland, David Sandner; Chapter 11 On “Two Faults” in “a Work of Such Pure Imagination”, David Sandner; Chapter 12 “Faery Lands Forlorn” and the Failure of the Imagination, David Sandner; Afterword A Typology of the Fantastic, David Sandner; Chapter 102 Appendix A Chronology of Early Critical Sources on the Fantastic, David Sandner;

David Sandner is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. He is author of The Fantastic Sublime and editor of Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader.