Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates the genre of the fantastic as it was practised in France and Russia during the nineteenth century. It illustrates how the fantastic operates and how it produces its effects. The book argues that the hesitation typical of the fantastic exists in texts which would ordinarily be dismissed by Todorov's criteria, notably those depicting madness or an ironic narrative attitude. It examines how a mimetic fictional world is constructed through the appropriation of techniques associated with realist fiction. The book focuses on the creation of a fictional world which is not just verisimilar but stable and in which the narrative voice is authoritative and reliable. It also examines how the reader's experience of hesitation is influenced by narrative personae which play with the conventions of the fantastic.