ABSTRACT
What is the Fantastic? This is the main question this book tries to answer. Specifically, is it possible to define it using contemporary Literary Geography Studies? Is it conceivable to circumscribe such a magmatic, fluid, fleeing argument once and for all? As the Fantastic is what transgresses the normality of the so-called real, and goes beyond the known and everyday events of our lives, can it really be a norm, bounded, and defined? And, in particular, can the real itself be a site of the Fantastic, if we take into account uncanny and eccentric perspectives/narrations centred on the darker, more frightful and shifty spaces and places of our everyday existences? In fact, crossing the borders between the real and the unreal is in some ways easier than we expect. It outlines an uncertain, dangerous path from our living world to an occult, an unknown universe. Such a liminal and fleeing movement from our reassuring places to the spaces of the unusual and the unfamiliar/das Unheimlich, with the subjects almost unaware of having passed the threshold between the two, produces a limit-situation that can transform itself into a hallucinating phantasmagoria, similar to the visions of an outsider. That unsure path, full of forks, drops, and coves, is where the Fantastic most haunts and attracts us.
