fantastic

Dictionary: fan·tas·tic (făn-tăs'tĭk) pronunciation

also fan·tas·ti·cal

(-tĭ-kəl)
adj.

Quaint or strange in form, conception, or appearance.
1. Unrestrainedly fanciful; extravagant: fantastic hopes.
2. Bizarre, as in form or appearance; strange: fantastic attire; fantastic behavior.
3. Based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal: fantastic ideas about her own superiority.
Wonderful or superb; remarkable: a fantastic trip to Europe.

An eccentric person.

[Middle English fantastik, imagined, from Old French fantastique, from Late Latin phantasticus, imaginary, from Greek phantastikos, able to create mental images, from phantazesthai, to appear. See fantasy.]

fantasticality fan·tas'ti·cal'i·ty (-tĭ-kăl'ĭ-tē) n.
fantastically fan·tas'ti·cal·ly adv.

SYNONYMS fantastic, bizarre, grotesque, fanciful, exotic. These adjectives apply to what is very strange or strikingly unusual. Fantastic describes what seems to have slight relation to the real world because of its strangeness or extravagance: fantastic imaginary beasts such as the unicorn. Bizarre stresses oddness that is heightened by striking contrasts and incongruities and that shocks or fascinates: a bizarre art nouveau façade. Grotesque refers principally to deformity and distortion that approach the point of caricature or even absurdity: statues of grotesque creatures. Fanciful applies to what is strongly influenced by imagination, caprice, or whimsy: a fanciful pattern. Something exotic is unusual and intriguing: painted landscapes in exotic colors.

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Thesaurus: fantastic

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adjective

Appealing to fancy: fanciful, fancy, fantastical, imaginative, whimsical. See plain/fancy.
Existing only in the imagination: chimeric, chimerical, conceptual, fanciful, fantastical, imaginary, notional, unreal, visionary. See real/imaginary.
Following no predictable pattern: capricious, changeable, erratic, fantastical, fickle, freakish, inconsistent, inconstant, mercurial, temperamental, ticklish, uncertain, unpredictable, unstable, unsteady, variable, volatile, whimsical. See change/persist, continue/stop/pause.
So remarkable as to elicit disbelief: amazing, astonishing, astounding, fabulous, fantastical, incredible, marvelous, miraculous, phenomenal, prodigious, stupendous, unbelievable, wonderful, wondrous. See good/bad.
Conceived or done with no reference to reality or common sense: antic, bizarre, fantastical, far-fetched, grotesque. See true/false, usual/unusual.
Consisting or suggestive of fiction: fanciful, fantastical, fictional, fictitious, fictive, invented, made-up. See real/imaginary.
Particularly excellent: divine, fabulous, fantastical, glorious, marvelous, sensational, splendid, superb, terrific, wonderful. Informal dandy, dreamy, great, ripping, super, swell, tremendous. Slang cool, groovy, hot, keen¹, neat, nifty. Idioms: out of this world. See good/bad.

Antonyms: fantastic

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adj

Definition: enormous
Antonyms: little, small, tiny

adj

Definition: strange, different; imaginary
Antonyms: common, commonplace, conventional, customary, familiar, ordinary, plain, usual

adj

Definition: wonderful, excellent
Antonyms: bad, poor, unpleasant

Literary Dictionary: fantastic

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fantastic, the, a mode of fiction in which the possible and the impossible are confounded so as to leave the reader (and often the narrator and/or central character) with no consistent explanation for the story's strange events. Tzvetan Todorov, in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; translated as The Fantastic, 1973), argues that fantastic narratives involve an unresolved hesitation between the supernatural explanation available in marvellous tales and the natural or psychological explanation offered by tales of the uncanny. The literature of the fantastic flourished in 19th‐century ghost stories and related fiction: Henry James's mysterious tale The Turn of the Screw (1898)isa classic example.

Word Tutor: fantastic

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IN BRIEF: Hardly believable. Also: wonderful or superb; remarkable.

The dinner was so fantastic they helped themselves to seconds.

Wikipedia: Fantastic

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For other uses, see Fantastic (disambiguation).

Fantastic is a literary term that describes a quality of other literary genres, and in some cases is used as a genre in and of itself, although in this case it is often conflated with the Supernatural. The term was originated in the structuralist theory of critic Tzvetan Todorov in his work The Fantastic. He describes the fantastic as being a liminal state of the supernatural. A truly fantastic work is subtle and leaves the reader with a sense of confusion about the work about whether or not the phenomenon was real. Todorov compares this with two other ideas: The Uncanny, wherein the phenomenon turns out to have a rational explanation such as in the Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe; or the Marvellous, where there truly is a supernatural explanation for the phenomenon:

The fantastic requires the fulfilment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work -- in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations. ^[1]

There is no truly typical "fantastic story", as the term generally discusses works of the horror or gothic genre. But two representative stories might be:

Algernon Blackwood's story "The Willows", where two men travelling down the Danube River are beset by an eerie feeling of malice and several improbable setbacks in their trip; the question that pervades the story is whether they are falling prey to the wilderness and their own imaginations, or if there really is something horrific out to get them.
Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Black Cat," where a murderer is haunted by a black cat; but is it revenge from beyond the grave, or just a cat?

A clear distinction between the Fantastic and magic realism is that the latter does not privilege either realistic or supernatural elements, nor ask the reader or characters to do so.

The Fantastic is sometimes erroneously called the Grotesque or Supernatural fiction, because both the Grotesque and the Supernatural contain fantastic elements, yet they are not the same, as the fantastic is based on an ambiguity of those elements.

Examples of writers of Fantastic literature include:

many of Edgar Allan Poe's short works
Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose"
Mikhail Bulgakov
Algernon Blackwood's works
Sheridan Le Fanu's works in "In a Glass Darkly"
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series
E.T.A. Hoffmann's works, notably Der Sandmann, "The Golden Flower Pot", and "The Nutcracker and the King of Mice"
Gerard de Nerval's "Aurelia"

In Elizabethan slang, a 'fantastic' was a fop; an "improvident young gallant" ^[2] who was obsessed with showy dress. The character Lucio in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is described in the Dramatis Personae as a 'Fantastic'.

It should be noted that in popular usage, the word "fantastic" has become a casual term of approval, a synonym for "great" or "brilliant", and this has to a great extent supplanted the original meaning of the word. However, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary still lists the original meaning first, with the popular meaning listed second and described as "informal".

Footnotes

^ Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre[1], trans. by Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), p. 33
^ Thomas Overbury, included in A Wife: Witty Characters Written by Himselfe and Other Learned Gentlemen His Friends, c.1613

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		Antonyms. © 1999-2009 by Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more
		Literary Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved. Read more
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fantastic

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