Abstract:
This lecture will investigate the historical development and conceptual instability of the fantastic in literary studies, particularly within Anglophone tradition. Circumventing the definitional disputes that have long polarized criticism, the lecture will foreground a historical approach. It will show that a distinct, self-aware literary genre known as the fantastic, or rather le fantastique, did in fact emerge in France in the 1830s, catalyzed by the reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works. Through historiographic reconstruction, the lecture will reveal how the fantastic was shaped by a coherent oversimplification of Hoffmann’s poetics, as well as by market forces, and national intellectual traditions. French critics and writers such as J.-J. Ampère, P. Duvergier de Hauranne, T. Gautier, and Ch.-Au. de Sainte-Beuve codified this genre around a distinctive tension between the real and the extraordinary—following a binary structure that would later inform many twentieth-century academic theories. While acknowledging later transformations and hybridizations, I will assert that understanding the historical specificity of the fantastic is vital for clarifying its place within non-realistic literature, and for resisting the conceptual flattening of its identity in critical discourse. In particular, I will critique the problematic absence—or superficial treatment—of the fantastic in contemporary scholarship on the gothic and the weird, arguing that a transgeneric approach would prove more fruitful when investigating nineteenth-century non-realistic and/or supernatural literature.

Biography:

Ezio Puglia  is currently Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Zhengzhou University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of Bologna in 2012, with a dissertation on the image of things in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantastic fiction, encompassing German, French, American, and Italian literature. In 2016, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Luxembourg (AFR – Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Grant), and in 2018, he served as Associate Scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, where he conducted research on the earliest specimens of the written fairy tale, focusing on the Renaissance and Baroque narratives of G. F. Straparola and G. B. Basile.