How long does it take to read The Fantastic?
The Fantastic by Tzvetan Todorov takes about 3 hours 21 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 21 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1970. 183 pages, about 50,325 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 36 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 21 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 6 minutes |
The page count is the median across 18 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov seeks to examine both generic theory and a particular genre, moving back and forth between a poetics of the fantastic itself and a metapoetics or theory of theorizing, even as he suggest that one must, as a critic, move back and forth between theory and history, between idea and fact. His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory. As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aurélia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.
Subjects: Fantastic fiction, History and criticism, Roman africain, Roman merveilleux, Roman noir (Genre litteraire), Litterature fantastique
