Departing from established structuralist or psychological approaches to the fantastic, Jos Monlecn offers an ideological reading of this literary product of mass culture. In an exploration of the origins and development of the fantastic, Monlecn traces the relation of reason to unreason in light of three distinct events that influenced capitalist thinking: the French Revolution, the uprisings of 1848, and the Bolshevik Revolution. The fantastic, Monlecn argues, reflected social tensions and produced a cultural space in which to appropriate fears brought on by the revolutions--to tame the...