The fantastic () is a subgenre of literary works characterized by the ambiguous presentation of seemingly supernatural forces.
Bulgarian-French structuralist literary critic Tzvetan Todorov originated the concept, characterizing the fantastic as the hesitation of characters and readers when presented with questions about reality.
Definitions
The fantastic is present in works where the reader experiences hesitation about whether a work presents what Todorov calls "the uncanny", wherein superficially supernatural phenomena turn out to have a rational explanation (such as in the Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe) or "the marvelous", where the supernatural is confirmed by the story. Todorov breaks down the fantastic into a manner of systems, filled with conditions and properties that make it easier to understand.
The fantastic requires the fulfillment 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. The fantastic also explores three conditions; reader’s hesitation, hesitation may be felt by another character, and the reader must have a certain mindset when reading the text. There is also a system to the fantastic that he explores that uses three properties. The utterance which discusses the use of figurative discourse, how everything figurative is taken in a literal sense. The supernatural begins to exist within the fantastic due to exaggeration, figurative expression being taken literal, and how the supernatural originates from the rhetorical figure. Leading into the second property, the act of uttering. In this property, it is most connected to the narrator of the story and the idea (discourse-wise) is that the narrator/character must pass this "test of truth". The narrator is someone who cannot "lie"; they explain the supernatural (marvelous), but doubt in what they say creates the fantastic. The final property is the syntactic aspect. Penzoldt’s theory (see below) is what focuses on this property the most.
The fantastic can also represent dreams and wakefulness where the character or reader hesitates as to what is reality or what is a dream. Again the fantastic is found in this hesitation—once it is decided the Fantastic ends.
Rosemary Jackson builds onto and challenges Todorov's definition of the fantastic in her 1981 nonfiction book Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Jackson rejects the notion of the fantastic genre as a simple vessel for wish fulfillment that transcends human reality in worlds presented as superior to our own, instead positing that the genre is inseparable from real life, particularly the social and cultural contexts within which each work of the fantastic is produced. She writes that the "unreal" elements of fantastic literature are created only in direct contrast to the boundaries set by its time period’s "cultural order", acting to illuminate the unseen limitations of said boundaries by undoing and recompiling the very structures which define society into something "strange" and "apparently new". In subverting these societal norms, Jackson claims, the fantastic represents the unspoken desire for greater societal change. Jackson criticizes Todorov's theory as being too limited in scope, examining only the literary function of the fantastic, and expands his structuralist theory to fit a more cultural study of the genre—which, incidentally, she proposes is not a genre at all, but a mode that draws upon literary elements of both realistic and supernatural fiction to create the air of uncertainty in its narratives as described by Todorov. Jackson also introduces the idea of reading the fantastic through a psychoanalytical lens, referring primarily to Freud’s theory of the unconscious, which she believes is integral to understanding the fantastic’s connection to the human psyche.