The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
by Tzvetan Todorov (trans. Richard Howard) · Cornell University Press
Todorov defines the fantastic as the reader's sustained hesitation between natural and supernatural explanation, bordered by the uncanny and the marvellous. A worked demonstration of how one genre gets theorised and tested against Gothic and nineteenth-century tales. Pairs with Frow and Frye as method rather than survey: it shows the whole move from abstract genre definition to close reading and back.
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