ABSTRACT
Critical Discourses of the Fantastic identifies what might be called a genealogy of the fantastic, locating the genre's origins specifically in the eighteenth-century discourse of the sublime. The typology offered explores what is at stake in the arguments and differences discussed between writers and critics in Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, serving as a guide to the method at work in the present study, not as a proscriptive model. The fantastic's self-conscious foregrounding of imagination as only the imagination, that is, as pure imagination or imagination unbound disrupts the usefulness of sublime as an essentially connective and unifying faculty. The fantastic puts the potentially subversive power of the sublime at play in the field of literature. The purely imaginative fantastic image, overdetermined by definition, seems to offer the direct realization of desire but also, paradoxically, nothing substantial at all, an absent presence. The fantastic mediates desire in an aesthetic form which itself becomes an object of desire, deferring realization indefinitely.
