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For other uses, see Fantastic (disambiguation).Fantastic is a literary term that describes a quality of other literary genres, and in some cases is used as a genre in and of itself, although in this case it is often conflated with the Supernatural. The term was originated in the structuralist theory of critic Tzvetan Todorov in his work The Fantastic. He describes the fantastic as being a liminal state of the supernatural. A truly fantastic work is subtle and leaves the reader with a sense of confusion about the work about whether or not the phenomenon was real. Todorov compares this with two other ideas: The Uncanny, wherein the phenomenon turns out to have a rational explanation such as in the Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe; or the Marvellous, where there truly is a supernatural explanation for the phenomenon:
The fantastic requires the fulfilment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work -- in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations. [1]
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