Fantastique

Fantastique is a French term for a literary and cinematic genre and mode defined by the intrusion of supernatural elements into an otherwise realistic story, accompanied by sustained uncertainty about whether those elements are truly supernatural. The concept comes from the French critical tradition and is distinguished from the broader English-language term fantasy: the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov argued that the fantastique is defined by the hesitation it produces between the natural and the supernatural, the possible and the impossible, in contrast to the marvellous, where a magical world's premises are accepted and events then unfold in an almost normal, familiar way. The genre emerged in the eighteenth century and reached a golden age in nineteenth-century Europe, especially in France and Germany.