HUMN 4486W - Literature Of The Fantastic

3 credits (Hrs: 3 Lec.)

Literature of the Fantastic is an interdisciplinary, comparative literature study of a broadly defined literary genre encompassing Romantic fairy tales (the German Marchen), Gothic horror fiction, the Frech “conte fantastiqu.” The class begins with a theoretical discussion of the fantastic and presents various critical definitions of the fantastic. The emergence of the fantastic in response to late 18th and early 19th century industrialization, rationalism, and urbanization situates the genre in its place in literary history. Over the course of the semester, attention will be paid to changes in the meaning of the term “fantastic,” as the popular understanding of what was “natural” and “real evolved druing the 19th and 20th century.

Satisfies upper division Writing core.