Fantastic literature
Fantastic literature places supernatural or impossible events within a recognizable world, making their reality and meaning central to the narrative.
The fantastic: A literary mode in which an apparently impossible event unsettles assumptions about reality. The broader mode names the uncertainty that structures fantastic literature.
Magical realism: A narrative mode that presents extraordinary or magical events as ordinary parts of a realistic world. Unlike the fantastic's uncertainty, magical realism commonly treats the marvelous as accepted reality.
Gothic fiction: A literary genre using settings such as haunted houses, ruins, and remote landscapes to produce terror and mystery. Gothic conventions supplied settings and supernatural disturbances later used by fantastic literature.
The Metamorphosis: Franz Kafka's 1915 novella about Gregor Samsa, who awakens transformed into a monstrous insect. Its unexplained transformation enters an otherwise recognizable family and working life.
Sigmund Freud: An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and developed influential theories of dreams and the unconscious. His essay on the uncanny shaped psychological readings of fantastic literature.
Mimesis: The representation of recognizable people, actions, and worlds in artistic works. Mimetic detail makes supernatural disruptions feel embedded in ordinary life.
Fantasy: Fiction centered on imagined worlds, supernatural powers, or events beyond ordinary natural laws. Fantasy often establishes a separate world or accepted magic rather than destabilizing a recognizable one.
E. T. A. Hoffmann: A German Romantic writer whose stories combine everyday settings with uncanny and supernatural events. His tales became influential models for fantastic narratives rooted in ordinary life.
The Horla: Guy de Maupassant's 1887 story about a narrator who suspects an invisible being is controlling him. The story sustains uncertainty between supernatural invasion and psychological collapse.
The uncanny in literature: A literary effect in which familiar objects, people, or situations become strangely disturbing. Fantastic literature uses this effect to make ordinary reality feel unreliable.