The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

<P>In <I>The Fantastic</I>, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between idea and fact. His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory. As an essay in fictional poetics, <I>The Fantastic</I> is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's <I>The Sargasso Manuscript</I>, Nerval's <I>Aur©lia</I>, Balzac's <I>The Magic Skin</I>, the <I>Arabian Nights</I>, Cazotte's <I>Le Diable Amoureux</I>, Kafka's <I>The Metamorphosis</I>, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.</P>