Description: Challenging the idea that fantastic literature emerged in the Romantic period, Sandner shows that fantastic tales were popular throughout the eighteenth century. Reading fiction and criticism by Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and Walter Scott, among others, Sandner argues that the fantastic functions as a discourse of the sublime imagination and thereby redefines the antecedents of the fantastic.
Review Quotes: Prize: Shortlisted for the 2013 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies sponsored by the Mythopoeic Society 'Critical Discourses of the Fantastic puts forward a convincing and relevant argument about the significant role that fantastic fiction plays in the processes by which we continually (re)construct ourselves and our world.' BARS Bulletin '... it is a fascinating insight into the world of Wordsworth and Keats to see how much their worldview was a product of the fantastic. ... an invaluable analysis of the relationship between certain forms of the fantastic, specifically those works involving the supernatural, and eighteenth-century ideas about the sublime that were instrumental in the rise of the Romantic movement.' Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts ''[Sandner's book] offers the reader stimulating arguments about the significance of the fantastic within eighteenth-century arguments about the sublime, connecting these to the rise of the Gothic novel and the development of Romantic poetry ... Critical Discourses of the Fantastic provides a challenging overview of critical debates on fantasy's contested position from the eighteenth century to today.' Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies