ABSTRACT
Numerous eighteenth-century literary critics, from Addison to Burke and beyond, regard the fantastic as a superstitious literature, the repository of the fabulous past. Discerning readers of the fantastic become marked, then, as necessarily modern, present, and skeptical in relation to a genre viewed as a patchwork of discarded beliefs and outmoded forms. The problem of fantastic literature-its romantic wildness and yet fantastic modernity-suggests that it functions as a productive contrast to eighteenth-century claims for the modern, the enlightened, and the rational. But more than that, the fantastic must be accounted for as a modern literature itself, constitutive, if only covertly, of eighteenth-century culture, and characteristic of the eighteenth century's "appetites", its desires and beliefs. Critical histories of the fantastic as a genre generally date its formation to Romanticism, a movement which embraces the imagination, excess, and the irrational, at least in part as a protest against the age of "progress" and "reason".
