A Canon of Fantastic Literature Studies: On Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

Abstract

Abstract: Fantastic literature is an important part of the world literature, and also one of the long-term concerns of the Western literary criticism, resulting in a large amount of works and studies. In his The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov defines from the perspective of the structuralist poetics the fantastic novels as a literary genre and tries to reveal the mechanism inherent in the genre. Although this book has been the subject of considerable controversy since its publication, it is still, because of its original and insightful views, a must-read canon for the study of the Western fantastic literature, and it also gives an example of the structuralist criticism.

Key words: fantastic literature, Todorov, structuralism, literary genre

Tan Fang. A Canon of Fantastic Literature Studies: On Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre[J]. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2014, 34(6): 201-207.

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