Fantasy can be associated with imagination and desire. Literary fantasies are "free" from many of the conventions and restraints of more realistic texts: they have refused to observe unities of time, space and character, doing away with rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, life and death.

It is a literature of desire, which seeks what is experienced as absence and loss, what is outside cultural order. It opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems. The fantastic traces the unsaid and unseen of culture.

The starting point for a study of fantasy can be the late eighteenth century, the point at which industrialization transformed western society, since literary forms have social and political implications. At the same time, since social "norms" and structures are reproduced and sustained within us, we cannot avoid considering the "unconscious" material present in these works.

Literary fantasies express unconscious drives and express a tension between the "laws of human society" and the resistance of the unconscious mind to those laws.

This fantastic mode is an interrogation of the "nature" of the "real", expressing an existential dis-ease. It is different from the fantastic realm of fantasy which is more properly defined as fairy or romance literature.

The "fantastic" derives from the Latin, phantasticus: that which is visionary, unreal. In this general sense all imaginary activity is fantastic, all literary works are fantasies.

However, a fantasy is a story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility. Such violation of dominant assumption threatens to subvert (overturn, upset, undermine) rules and conventions taken to be normative. This is not in itself a social subversive activity. It does, however, disturb "rules" of artistic representation and literature's reproduction of the "real".

Its roots can be considered Petronius's Satyricon, Apuleius' s Metamorphoses, Lucian's Strange Story. The menippea moved in space between this world, an underworld and an upper world. It conflated past, present and future, and allowed dialogues with the dead. States of hallucinations, dream, insanity, eccentric behaviour, extraordinary situations, were the norm. Mikhail Bakhtin finds similar features in the works of Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Gogol, etc., even if they have lost the delight in misrule found in a menippean tradition.

This world turns into something "other" than the familiar, comfortable one. Fantasy plays upon difficulties of interpreting events/things as objects or as images, thus disorienting the reader's categorization of the "real". It does not escape reality, but re-combines or inverts it. It reveals reason and reality to be arbitrary. The structure of fantastic narrative is founded upon contradictions. (the basic trope of fantasy is oxymoron, a figure of speech which holds together contradictions). The fantastic is always an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality, a break in the acknowledged order.

The IMPOSSIBLE is the realm of polisemy, of relativizing processes, of ambivalences. It suggests events beyond interpretation and is an experience of the limits of reason.

Fantastic tales proliferate during the nineteenth century as an opposite version of realistic narrative: it is the uneasy conscience of the positivist ninetieth century. It' is all that is unsayable through realistic forms: the "bourgeois" category of the real is under attack.

The fantastic is linked to existential anxiety and unease, that is why it must be close to the real: there is always hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. There is no definite version of    truth.

The FANTASTIC is a mode placed between the MARVELLOUS (fairy tales, romance, supernaturalism, magic, which create a world "above") and the MIMETIC (narratives which claim to imitate an external reality and shape experiences into meaningful patterns and sequences, such as classic narrative fiction, nineteenth century novels, etc. They claim that the represented fictional world and the real world outside are equivalent).

The fantastic confounds elements of both the marvellous and the mimetic. They assert that what they are telling is real - relying upon the conventions of realistic fiction to do so - and then proceed to break that assumption of realism by introducing what - within those terms - is manifestly unreal. They pull the reader from the apparent familiarity and security of the known and everyday world into something more strange. The status of what is "real" is constantly in question. There is instability of narrative. It subverts the unitary monological vision of the "realistic" novel and its bourgeois ideology.

The narrator is often in a position of uncertainty; the extraordinary happenings surprise him; perception becomes increasingly confused, signs are vulnerable to multiple and contradictory interpretations, so that "meaning" recede indefinitely. There are "nameless things", the apprehension of something "unnameable" (the "It", the "He", the "thing", the "something"). Fantastic pushes towards an area of non-signification, trying to articulate "the unnameable".

Bleak, empty, indeterminate landscapes; spaces which are often white or grey or black, opposing the colourful fullness of the marvellous.

The mirror is often employed as a motif or device to introduce a double or Doppelgänger effect. It is a metaphor for the production of other selves; it provides versions of self transformed into another. Ego is a cultural contruction.

Enclosures are central to modern fantasy, from the dark, threatening edifices and castles of Gothic fiction to new enclosures of metropolitan nightmare in Dickens, Kafka, etc.

Chronological time is exploded; the past, present and future lose their historical sequence. Reality is not a coherent, single-viewed entity anymore; there is a dissolution of separating categories, boundaries are blurred such as the distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral or male and female.

Multiplicity is no longer a metaphor: self transforms into selves.

In the marvellous, evil is located in a supernatural creature, representing otherness; difference is located in devils, demons, etc. Little by little the demonic ceases to be located outside and is internalized: it is an aspect of personal and interpersonal life, a manifestation of unconscious desire (for example, in Frankenstein the "I" and the "Not-I" intertwine with each other. It is a Faustian tale on a fully human level). The "other" becomes a part of the self and the easy polarization of good and evil (operating in tales of supernaturalism and magic) ceases to be effective. Danger is seen to originate from the subject, through excessive knowledge, or rationality, or the mis-application of the human will).

The Frankenstein type of myth can be represented as the self generating its own power for destruction and metamorphosis. Self becomes other through a self-generated metamorphosis, through the subject's alienation from himself and consequent splitting or multiplying of identities

The Uncanny (das Unheimlich)

This term indicates a disturbing, vacuous area. It uncovers what is hidden and by doing so effects a disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar.

Fantastic literature reveals an obscure, occluded region which lies behind the homely (heimlich) and native (heimish). It reveals something which is familiar and old and become alienated through the process of repression. A devil or a monster is an unconscious projection of those "qualities, feelings, wishes, objects, which the subject refuses to recognize or rejects in himself and which are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing" (Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis) .

What is experienced as uncanny is an objectification of the subject's anxieties.

A fantasy of physical fragmentation corresponds to a breakdown of rational unity.

With the publication of Horace Walpole's dream novel The Castle of Otranto the demonic found a literary form in the midst of Augustan ideals of classical harmony, public decorum and reasonable restraint. Unreason, silenced throughout the Enlightenment period, erupts in the fantastic art of Sade, Goya and horror fiction. There were hundreds of Gothic novels from 1764 until well into the 1800's. It has been seen as a reaction to historical events, particularly to the spread of industrialism and urbanization. Early Gothic romances are closer to the marvellous than to pure fantasy. As it undergoes transformations (thanks to Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, M.G. Lewis, etc.) it develops into a literary form capable of more radical interrogation of social contradictions. It was used to dramatize uncertainty and conflicts of the individual subject in relation to a difficult social situation.