ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century fantastic literature and the sublime are linked through the key role the imagination plays in each; both discourses act through the agency of the imagination, and both paradoxically claim to thereby reach beyond the imagination's limits to apprehend not only what cannot be "actually' experienced but, indeed, what cannot even be imagined. The fantastic is notoriously difficult to define. As categories, both the fantastic and the sublime are radically unstable, pointing not only towards the unknown but also towards the unknowable, the imagination "unbound". Both the fantastic and the sublime mark excess. Addison also presents eighteenth-century fantastic literature as the modern debased form of an expelled history of the fabulous past. The position of the fantastic in the discourse of the sublime is complicated by the contention-both in eighteenth- and in twentieth-century criticism-between what has been called the rhetorical and natural sublimes.
