THE STRANGE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FANTASTIC

Abstract

This will be a short genealogy, full of unsupported generalizations plus a prediction or two. First, a definition: What we think of as fantastic literature—incorpo rating elements by turns supernatural, antirepresentational, and gro tesque—is a form that rose to prominence during the Romantic era as a way of overturning the Enlightenment critique of the supernatural. This peculiarly hermetic strain of storytelling, exemplified by a writer such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, flowered in America in the person of Edgar Allan Poe, who in turn exerted a dramatic and enduring influence on the literature of continental Europe that far exceeded his impact on the serious literature of his own country. Over the course of the nineteenth century a second, popular variant of fantastic literature, the Gothic novel, together with its stepchild the Victorian ghost story became perhaps the first truly mass culture literary form. In the twentieth century, however, fantastic literature had absolutely divergent fates in Europe and America. Whereas the Old World saw a resurgence of the fantastic in "high" literature—European antirepresenta tional literature, especially in France and Germany, served as a vehicle of continental avant-garde art movements such as Dadaism, expression ism, surrealism, and futurism—in North America it became confined almost entirely to the mass culture forms. The sophisticated literary experimentation that continued through the rest of the twentieth century