The Fantastic in Literature: Charles Nodier

McManus profiles Charles Nodier, highlighting his article The Fantastic in Literature published in Revue de Paris in 1830. Nodier holds the dismal distinction of being the most important French romantic that people 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 anti-Jacobin society called the Philadelphes, published one of the first French works of scholarship on Shakespeare, and served a month in prison for criticizing Napoleon in the poem "La Napoleone." 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.