The fantastic as a genre starts in France with the works Le diable amoureux of Jacques Cazotte (1772) and Le manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse of Jean Potocki (1805), but they remain closely linked to the narrative patterns of the eighteenth century and do not succeed in asserting themselves in the literary scene dominated by the guiding principle of verisimilitude. In Germany, the outburst of fantasy found in the marvelous of Achim von Arnim brings a new stimulus to romanticism in this country and enables the evolution of the genre up until it reaches the rich fictional resources worked by E. T. A. Hoffman in his fantastic tales. It is then from the translation of the work of the German short story writer, that is, from 1829, that the way to the literature of the fantastic is established in that country, stimulating some romantic French writers. In the brief instance between the thirties and the forties, the literature of the fantastic presents itself, once more, as an answer to the political crisis and the sheer boredom in which the French literature found itself, achieving projection and the status of hegemonic literature. However, as another romantic myth, it runs out of vitality and ends up as a parody of itself in the fictional work of Gautier, a writer of outstanding short stories of the fantastic, which, by means of irony, promotes the criticism of the literature of his days.
fantastic literature; Romanticism; ruptures in the canon; crisis of representation