Fantastic  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Antichita Romanae (1748) by Piranesi

Anonymous Flemish print, end of the 16th century, from The Waking Dream book.

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Wikipedia Wiktionary Tumblr Wikisource YouTube Shop Featured: A Scheme for abolishing all Words is one of the wittiest and smartest comments on semantics. (Illustration: extreme close-up from the movie "The Big Swallow" (1901), produced and directed by James Williamson (1855-1933)

Fantastic or Fantastik can refer to:

• Fantastic literature genre of writing
• Fantastique French genre of writing

Chronological bibliography of the fantastic in literature and art

• Das Unheimliche (1919) / The Uncanny - Sigmund Freud
• La carne, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (Italy, 1930) / Romantic Agony - Mario Praz
• Le Moyen Age fantastique (Paris, 1955) Jurgis Baltrusaitis
• The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957) - Wolfgang Kayser
• Arts fantastiques (Paris, 1960) - Claude Roy
• L’Art et la littérature fantastiques (1960) - Louis Vax
• L'Art fantastique (1961) - Marcel Brion
• Au coeur du fantastique (Paris, 1965) - Roger Caillois
• Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s (1969) - Philippe Jullian
• Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970) / The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre - Tzvetan Todorov
• 200 Jahre Phantastische Malerei (Berlin, 1973) - Wieland Schmied
• Zauber Der Medusa: Europaische Manierismen (1987) by Werner Hofmann
• The Occult in Art (1990) - Owen S. Rachleff
• Les peintres du fantastique (1996) - André Barret

Notes: nature and scope of the fantastic as genre

On a semantic level, the term fantastic is ambiguous because it can mean greatness as well as a certain sensibility in the arts, where it is used to denote works which defy natural laws and traditional ideas of reality. In the visual arts this sensibility has been always important but it came especially to the fore in Mannerism, Romanticism, Symbolism, the Decadent movement and Surrealism.

The irony is of course that since some time, the word fantastique has been introduced in the English language. The benefit of the term fantastique is that it does not have the connotation of greatness which is linked with the word fantastic. Another irony is that the Germans have started using the term fantastik. In short, the fantastic as genre is the most complex area of research in genre theory, because of its universal presence and multi-language confusion.

Our ultimate aim is to reconcile the concepts of the uncanny, Das Unheimliche and the fantastic.