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This Web Site
Sponsored by Cornell
University’s Institute for Digital Collections
(CIDC) this image-bank provides a visual resource
for the study of the Fantastic or of the
supernatural in fiction and in art. While the site
emerges from a comparative literature course on the
topic at Skidmore College, it is also intended to
open the door to consideration of some of the
constant structures and patterns of fantastic
literature, and the problems they raise. In this
sense, the materials presented here may find a use
among students in a variety of disciplines.
In order to take maximum advantage of the materials
in the Cornell collections, it seemed best not to
adhere to a strict definition of either the
Fantastic or its predecessor, the Marvelous, as
these have emerged in literary criticism and
theory. It will be useful, nevertheless, to note
some general markers which have informed the
choices implicit in these pages. In the context of
western literature of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, The Fantastic involves dread, fear and
anxiety in the face of phenomena that escape
rational explanation, or that reveal the notion of
reality to be no more than a construct. A fantastic
experience can therefore be likened to the breaking
or shattering of a frame. While the literary
fantastic is limited to the last 200 years, the
Fantastic in art can be construed more broadly.
This elasticity allowed us to choose images from
works spanning a period from medieval manuscripts
and printed incunabulae, to the early twentieth
century.
Images were selected for their
intrinsic relationship to the topic, because they
illuminated an important dynamic, or quite simply
because they were unusually striking. Though,
inevitably, some familiar pieces will be found in
these pages, we have attempted to favor rare or
unusual works that, to our knowledge, have not been
reproduced before. Hence the concomitant emphasis
on book illustration, and on a wealth of images
that have remained more or less invisible in
canonical art histories. Always, the goal has been
to bring to light a body of material scholars were
unlikely to have had the opportunity to study.
Because of its rich and varied
modes of representation the Fantastic also lends
itself quite easily to interdisciplinary
approaches. Psychology and sociology, art and
literary history, anthropology and folklore among
other disciplines, can provide avenues of
investigation useful in the study of such basic
critical or analytical concepts for the Fantastic
as repression, the uncanny, indeterminacy, or the
postmodern. The image bank may thus also be useful
for broadening discussions in areas of study quite
removed from the Fantastic per se, and it is indeed
our hope that it will do so.
Cornell’s library holdings
in several areas provide a deep well from which to
draw for a project such as this one. The
incomparable Witchcraft collection, the History of
Science collection, a recent grouping of Russian
Fables and Fairy Tales now on deposit in Kroch
library and the serendipitous discoveries that seem
so readily to occur once the search gets under way,
have resulted in a data-base of nearly 300 images,
distributed among several general rubriques or
thematic clusters, with search and
cross-referencing capabilities
The clusters are each accompanied by a text that
provides an abbreviated introduction. A few
bibliographical references point to avenues of
study, as well as to literary texts having a
particular aptness to the topic or theme. Such
indications are intentionally brief, so that the
user might in fact experience the images unfiltered
by a priori readings of the designers.
Illustrations are identified as to source (the work
in which they appear, with attendant
bibliographical data), and, when known, by author
and technique. Cross referencing occurs when images
or themes of similar or contrasting nature are
available in the data-base.
Acknowledgments
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