THE BATTLE FOR FANTASTIC: THEORETICAL-CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

Alongside - and in opposition to – the bourgeoise realist novel, the fantastic is configured as a defining literary expression of the 19th century. In the following century, many critics and researchers took on the task of defining this way of telling stories so peculiar, but yet so general. However, it was in the seventies, starting with the bulgarian Tzvetan Todorov, that this discussion gained airs of a set-piece battle between two different definitions for the fantastic. This paper aims to outline a general overview of this long-standing dispute for the definition of the literary fantastic, focusing on the theoretical and conceptual debates between critics and researchers of the 20th century, more precisely during the period that we can call, in a contingent nomenclature, post-todorovian. To do so, we divided the discussion into two opposing strands: on one hand, Tzvetan Todorov (2012 [1970]), bastion of the genological fantastic; on the other, his critics and dissidents, defenders of the modal fantastic, of which: Irene Bessière (1974), Lenira Covizzi (1979), Filipe Furtado (1980; 2009), Rosemary Jackson (1986 [1980]) and Remo Ceserani (2006 [ 1996]).