Toward a Prehistory of the Fantastic: The Imagination of Alterity in the Long Eighteenth Century

Dreams of Reason: The Imagination of Alterity in the Long Eighteenth Century historicizes the assumptions underlying theories of fantastic or non-realist genre fiction. In the course of a comparative analysis of the lunar voyage, oriental tale, and Gothic novel, representative fictional texts in English and French from the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth centuries are read along with critical works by their contemporaries. The aim is to show how modern notions of fantastic literature arose not from a rhetorical opposition to realism or verisimilitude, but to historical encounters with alterity, from new cosmological ideas to increased exposure to non-European cultures around the world. This dissertation locates fantastic fiction at the center of the development of a European identity in the early modern period.