The Fantastic is one of the many inventions of the nineteenth century. It has been described as the creative reaction to a bourgeois, prosaic world, dominated by capitalism and rationalism, and deserted by poetry, faith and the imagination. Writers of fantastic literature were fascinated by the parallel realities of mental disorder, madness, dreams and drug-induce d perceptions.  The void left by the materialistic explanations of reality became the space where a fantastic perception of reality could develop and thrive, hesitating between the real and the supernatural, in the intermediate space of the unexplained and unexplainable. We will read stories by Balzac, Cortázar, Dumas, Gautier, Gog ol, Hoffmann, Kafka, Maupassant, Mérimée, Edgar A. Poe, and Villiers de l’Ile-Adam.

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