Works of fiction are often criticized for their historical inaccuracies. But this practice poses a problem: why would we criticize a work of fiction for its historical inaccuracy given that it is a work of fiction? There is an intuition that historical inaccuracies in works of fiction diminish their value as works of fiction; and yet, given that they are works of fiction, there is also an intuition that such works should be free from the constraints of historical truth. The (...) puzzle of historical criticism is that these intuitions are obviously in conflict, and yet we wish to give up neither. In this essay, I address the shortcomings of two seemingly intuitive strategies for solving the puzzle: the puzzle cannot be solved by appealing to historical constraints of a work’s genre, nor can it be explained as an instance of imaginative resistance. Given the failure of these two strategies, I suggest that there is no easy way to account for our conflicting intuitions and that the puzzle is deserving of greater attention. (shrink)

The importance of the visual aspects of the fantastic reverberates even into theory, as shown by several researchers throughout the last decades. These researchers distinguished themselves from their predecessors, whose definition of the fantastic implied mainly an involvement of the intellect. From the many forms it takes, we will concentrate in this article on the thematic level of the text, or, more precisely, on the use of the mirrors and other forms of reflection as a form of exploration of the (...) self in the fantastic tales of the Belgian writer Thomas Owen. Vision becomes more than a common way of perceiving reality for the writer’s characters, now looking to shed a new light on the unknown and offering an insight on things beyond reason. (shrink)