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The Fantastic is a literary genre of writing or art which intrudes fantasy elements into a story (or picture) that is basically representational or real-feeling. It is this foundation (and intrusion) upon a sense of the real world that differentiates the Fantastic genre from Fantasy or the Surreal.
The most typical type of Fantastic story, one used many times, brings the Devil to a contemporary setting. The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov is a celebrated example of this.
As a literary technique, many writers have used the Fantastic to comment on social realities in an entertaining and indirect manner. It is also a strategy to defeat censorship.
There isn't a clear distinction between the Fantastic and Magical Realism, but the latter seems generally to include a higher proportion of non-real elements.
The Fantastic is sometimes known as the Grotesque, possibly because in the 19th century its practitioners wrote stories set in poverty, examined social problems, or featured strange personalities.
Examples of writers of Fantastic literature include E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nikolai Gogol, Oscar Wilde, Mikhail Bulgakov, Abram Tertz, and Bernard Malamud.
An example of a painter of the Fantastic is Marc Chagall, where one finds for example everyday elements of shtetl life defying a sense of gravity.
Fantastic was a fantasy magazine first published by Ziff-Davis who also published Fantastic Adventures.
In Elizabethan slang, a Fantastic was a rake; an "effeminate fool" or "improvident young gallant". The character Lucio in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is described in the Dramatis Personae as a Fantastic.
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