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Sandner, David. Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. viii + 191 pp. Cloth. ISBN 978-1-4094-2862-6. $99.95.
What do we mean when we talk about fantasy? It's a word we use too loosely for it to have any hard and fast definition. Fantasy includes the tales we tell our children and the sexual dreams we conjure up, other people's religions, and some of the treasures of world literature. The word can equally well be applied to the same thing as praise or as condemnation. Every work of fiction can be described as fantasy or fantasy can be confined to a very narrow range of fictions. We apply the term so cavalierly to such different fictions that we invent other cognate terms-the fantastic, fantastika, heroic fantasy, literary fantasy-in an effort to be more precise, though without ever quite managing to specify why work A might belong to one category but not work B. Taxonomies never seem to include everything we would normally consider as fantasy; schemas that seek to explain how the genre works do not work unfailingly for eve 17 fantasy we might name.
So when, at the end of this short but fascinating book, David Sandner claims to have identified "what might be called a genealogy of the fantastic, locating the genre's origins specifically in the eighteenth-century discourse of the sublime" (159), we know to be wary. Put simply, fantasy did not begin in the eighteenth century; so what does Sandner mean by "the genre's origins"? He doesn't spell it out in so few words, but the tenor of his thesis is that, during the eighteenth century, a body of critical work began to appear that identified and discussed the fantastic as a specific literary form. Of course, they didn't call it fantasy or the fantastic; these were identifiers that came much later in the literary history. Joseph Addison spoke of "The Fairy Way of Writing," Samuel Taylor Coleridge talked of'"Faery Tales and Genii," others talked fairly indiscriminately of "wonder," "the marvellous," tales of "ghosts and monsters," "the supernatural," "the Gothic," and so forth. But all of this, Sandner avers, is the same thing: a recognizable critical body of work on a recognizable topic, and thus the genre of fantasy was...
