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For realist authors like Charles Dickens, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, and Guy de Maupassant the aim of realism was not to transcribe reality into literature. The imagination, they believed, discovers and interprets a reality which is neither closed nor purely empirical. It was this shared aspect of their poetics, coupled with their common interest in the unexplained, that led them to cultivate and to transform the fantastic. In Possible Worlds of the Fantastic Nancy Traill argues that the transformation of the fantastic was the realists’ answer to the intellectual changes of the time, when the ‘fair way of writing’ was no longer credible. She defines and describes the cultural conditions of this transformation – positivism in philosophy and science, and realism in literature and the arts.

The main theoretical contribution of the book is a new conception of fantastic literature. Traill rejects the prevailing idea that the fantastic is a literary genre, and proposes a cross-generic approach, a theory of the fantastic based on the possible-worlds semantics. The fictional world of the fantastic is composed of two domains – the natural and supernatural. Fantastic literature is divided into five modes according to the relation between the natural and the supernatural. In the disjunctive mode the natural and supernatural coexist and interact as fully authentic domains; the ambiguous mode blurs the distinction; the fantasy mode is entirely located in the supernatural realm; the supernatural naturalized describes seemingly supernatural events, but ultimately explains them by natural causes; and in the paranormal mode, the supernatural is incorporated into an expanded natural domain. Traill demonstrates the emergence of the paranormal mode through a detailed comparative analysis of fantastic tales by Dickens, Turgenev, and de Maupassant. In creating this new mode, these realists saved the fantastic from extinction and gave it a shape with twentieth-century writers were able to develop further.