fantastique

Fantastique is a French term for a literary and cinematic genre and mode that is characterized by the intrusion of supernatural elements into the realistic framework of a story, accompanied by uncertainty about their existence. The concept comes from the French literary and critical tradition, and is distinguished from the word "fantastic", which is associated with the broader term of fantasy in the English literary tradition. According to the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov (Introduction à la littérature fantastique), the fantastique is distinguished from the marvellous by the hesitation it produces between the supernatural and the natural, the possible and the impossible, and sometimes between the logical and the illogical. The marvellous, on the other hand, appeals to the supernatural in which, once the presuppositions of a magical world have been accepted, things happen in an almost normal and familiar way. The genre emerged in the 18th century and knew a golden age in 19th century Europe, particularly in France and Germany.

==Definition== Three major critical sources in French literary theory give the same fundamental definition of the concept: Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant of Pierre-Georges Castex, De la féerie à la science-fiction of Roger Caillois and Introduction à la littérature fantastique of Tzvetan Todorov. In these three essays, the fantastique is defined as the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative. It evokes phenomena which are not only left unexplained but which are inexplicable from the reader's point of view. In this respect, Tzvetan Todorv explains that the fantastique is somewhere between the French concept of "marvellous" (merveilleux), where the supernatural is accepted and entirely reasonable in the imaginary world of a non-realist narrative, and the uncanny (étrange in French), where apparently supernatural phenomena are explained according to realist precepts and accepted as normal. In an English speaking theoretical perspective, it can therefore been considered as a subgenre of fantasy.