Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-4ws75 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-06T19:02:35.920Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Fantastic in Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

Charles Nodier (1780–1844) holds the dismal distinction of being the most important French Romantic you have never heard of. A child prodigy, Nodier was reading Montaigne and Plutarch, and writing fluently in French and Latin, by the age of ten. By twenty-five he had vandalized a guillotine, founded the ironically Freemasonesque antiJacobin society called the Philadelphes, published one of the irst French works of scholarship on Shakespeare, and served a month in prison for criticizing Napoleon in the poem “La Napoléone.” It was only then that he got serious, and in 1806 Les tristes was published, a collection of short stories, poems, dialogues, and essays that marked him as a disciple of the Romanticism of Goethe and Schiller and hinted at his future affinity for the visionary, fantastic mode of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Information

Type
Criticism in Translation
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable