The course examines the fantastic as a literary mode that historically challenges the authority of realist representation. Centring on British texts from the seventeenth century to the present—including Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Neil Gaiman’s Snow, Glass, Apples, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—the course investigates how the fantastic generates productive uncertainty at the boundary between the natural and the supernatural, the ordinary and the marvellous. We consider key narrative structures (such as quest and portal narratives) and persistent motifs (including magical objects, liminal spaces, metamorphosis, and hybridity), as well as the fantastic’s relation to Oxford writers, the Gothic, speculative fiction, the fairytale, and children’s literature. The module also explores the mode’s negotiation of changing gender roles, its ongoing dialogue with science and technology, and its reimagining of human–animal relations and the environment, where nonhuman creatures and landscapes act as agents rather than backdrops. Close reading and comparative discussion will situate these texts in their historical moments while tracing the fantastic’s continuing cultural work. The course also aims to develop students’ skills in close textual analysis, with texts read for how their formal features (structure, word choice, tone, imagery, gaps and omissions, etc.) elicit particular emotional and intellectual responses.
