Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831

David Sandner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138261426
• eBook ISBN: 9781317157410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 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
• 3 The Sublime and Fantastic: Joseph Addison, Longinus, Edmund Burke
• 4 Romantic Wildness and Fantastic Modernity in Anti-Apparition Writings, the Ballad Controversy, and Romance Criticism
• 5 The Fantastic and the Fabulous Past: Richard Hurd and James Beattie
• 6 Gothick Pasts and Gothick Futures: Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley
• 7 “This Wild Strain of Imagination”: Samuel Johnson and John Hawkesworth on Wonder
• 8 Fairy Unexplained in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
• 9 Supernatural Modernity in Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
• 10 The Floating Corpse of Fairyland: William Wordsworth and “Fable’s Dark Abyss”
• 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
• 12 “Faery Lands Forlorn” and the Failure of the Imagination: John Keats’ Perilous Realm of Faery
• Afterword: A Typology of the Fantastic: Dispossession, Fragmentation, Domestication, and Possession
• Appendix: A Chronology of Early Critical Sources on the Fantastic
• Bibliography
• Index