The following book is less a corrective to existing theories of the Fantastic in literature than a complement to them. It has struck me for some time that Todorov’s formalist definition of the ‘Fantastic’, which draws from a kind of isotopic examination of a whole raft of Fantastic or Gothic novels (to use the accepted English term), represents a developed understanding of the generic features of this type of literature which does not apply at all in the original applications of the term Fantastic/fantastique. After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, and the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, there arose...

While Charles Nodier (1780–1844) may not be as well-known as either Hugo or Lamartine, his role in shaping, naming and directing both Romanticism and the rise of the Fantastic in France is too important to ignore. As regular contributor toJournal des débatsandRevue de Paris, and as librarian at L’Arsenal in the Restoration period, where he held a small salon that included Hugo and Delacroix, he did much to define and defend the new literary trends which became popular in France after the fall of the Voltairean-minded Napoleon. He popularized the works of Byron in his stage-play...

As Ada Myriam Scanu has shown, the publication in France of a translation (and in many cases adaptation) of Scott’s inflammatory ‘On the supernatural element of fictitious composition, and particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore Hoffmann’ (1827),¹ was an important factor in both the promotion of Hoffmann’s work and the definition of the ‘Fantastic’ genre thereafter. Not only did Nodier himself forge an antithetical reaction to the Scotsman’s words, but a whole host of critics and readers queued up to defend the German’s art and devour translations of his writing, to the point where even Théophile Gautier expressed amazement...

Théophile Gautier is best known for his poetry, through which he practised his belief that art has no moral dimension, no finer purpose than to make manifest the beautiful, and through which he also used his earlier skill as a painter to create a language that is more visual than it is exclamatory. So successful was he in this that he inspired the Parnassian School of poetry, in which poets attempted to convey both emotions and ideas through imagery rather than through abstract descriptions or lengthy effusions of feeling. His skills have tended to be seen by subsequent poets –...

Three works by the FrenchfeuilletonnierPaul Féval which have benefited from resurgent interest in recent years are ones which made little impression upon the French public during his own lifetime.¹ Indeed hisLa Vampireof 1856 andLe Chevalier Ténèbreof 1860, which blend the Historical, Sensational and Gothic novel subgenres, were not even serialized then, unlike his inordinately successfulLes Mystères de Londres(1843) andLe Bossu(The Hunchback) (1858). Admittedly his later vampire novel of 1875,La Ville Vampire– an affectionate send-up of both the English and an admired writer, Ann Radcliffe, which has the young...

While Féval suggests the continuing demise of society through modern capitalism and Bonapartism inLa Vampire, his critique of the waning of the age of Faith and subsequent rise of both materialism and positivism becomes more pronounced and more open in his next vampire novel,Le Chevalier Ténèbre, leading him to abandon the homeopathic theme in favour of a more overt espousal of Legitimist views. So extreme is his critique, that we might even call this work an ‘anti-Gothic’ novel if David Punter’s and Fred Botting’s understanding of the Gothic as an indulgent diversion from Enlightenment principles is accepted,¹ for...

Linda Dryden has understood ‘Olalla’, a piece published just beforeThe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hydeand written almost contemporaneously to it, as further proof of Stevenson’s interest in Galton’s theories on hereditary degeneracy, and as even tentatively anticipating Lombroso’s more recent theories of atavism:¹ the belief that racial stock can decline.² There is certainly some evidence for the prevalence of such theories of degeneracy in the text, as Stevenson’s young narrator describes Olalla’s brother Felipe as being ‘inclined to hairyness’ and ‘a child in intellect’.³ Furthermore, the mother is described as showing similar marks of a...

I hope that I have proved the following main arguments in this book. First, that the works we call Fantastic or Gothic in the English-speaking world do not necessarily conform to the Enlightenment-based binary proposed by Todorov, in which the reader is understood as hesitating between a marvellous and uncanny resolution for events which break the laws of nature. This binary is one which is more or less accepted by most critics of the Gothic, who see in the genre’s terror and horror a challenge to Enlightenment principles of nature or an emotional release from them through the resurgence of...