ABSTRACT
In criticism of the fantastic, Romanticism often figures as an "origin" for the genre, the moment when William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge call for "a certain coloring of the imagination" to be thrown over the practice of literature. Romanticism as the era when the fantastic as a form emerges into cultural awareness. Certainly, the Romantic period provides a watershed moment for imaginative literature. The conversation on fantastic literature examined here beginning with the early eighteenth-century critic Joseph Addison might seem to be heading inevitably, teleologically toward its "rise" in Romanticism. Romanticism might be more usefully figured as a turning point for the fantastic, a beginning and an ending, but one with too much continuity between what comes before and after the early nineteenth century to render the period anything so straightforward as a genesis or apocalypse for the field.
