Introduction: The Fantastic in Cultural History: Essays from a growing Interdisciplinary Research Field

In this volume of HumaNetten we invite you to the realm of the fantastic, to a world filled by marvels and wonders; like flying steamships, time travelling devices, and mythological heroes and foes.We also take a trip to the dark side to meet the Bogey man from bygone ages, ghosts that go bump in the night, and monsters which haunt our imagination.When we hear the word fantastic in present time, most of us think about fantastic or speculative fiction.The genre is stupendously popular, and it engages people of all ages around the world.In academic terms, the concept fantastic fiction is generally described as non-mimetic, aesthetic genres like fantasy, science fiction and horror.But this concept is built on a fairly limited understanding of the fantastic, both in space and time, and it has only been in use for 200 years.A long, long time before that, fantastic features were used in the oral tradition of myths, legends, and folk belief."Many of the genre's most prominent works consist of re-telling and re-conceptualizing classical myths, legends, and folklore" (Höglund and Trenter 2021: 15) These narratives become a part of our collective imaginations and cultural heritage.Scholars such as Kathryn Hume argue that it was the breakthrough of modernity, in the wake of Enlightenment, that created a dualism between the natural and supernatural (Hume 1984).Therefore, the understanding of myth changed.The author and the reader of fantastic fiction also became more selfconscious.The difference is not the ability to apply skeptical reason to magical motifs and supernatural beliefs; rather, "it is the new awareness of myth as something belonging to others, to the past, to unfallen primitives" (Attebery 2014: 26).The dualism between natural and supernatural, the real and unreal, is reflected in both the earlier academic research of fantastic fiction as well as in the debate in contemporary media.The discussion of the concept fantastic fiction often centres on its boundaries and fantastic fiction is defined as "something else" than other fictional genres.Fantastic fiction deals only with the imaginative world and therefore differs completely from other genres that deal with the "real world".As a result of this, there exist a common misunderstanding that people use fantastic fiction as pure escapism, as a strategy to escape reality.In more recent research, though, the watertight compartments between the fantastic and the real is called into question (Höglund and Trenter 2021).