Possible Worlds of the Fantastic

For realist authors like Charles Dickens, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, and Guy de Maupassant the aim of realism was not to transcribe reality into literature. The imagination, they believed, discovers and interprets a reality which is neither closed nor purely empirical. It was this shared aspect of their poetics, coupled with their common interest in the unexplained, that led them to cultivate and t...