On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, Nalo Hopkinson wrote:
> NH: More or less what I guessed. The quotation from the antho is:
>
> Straight she's fantastical, they all do cry,
> But they will imitate her presently.
>
> Which I took to mean, coming ironically from Cavendish's mouth, "well,
> they all say I'm given to flights of fancy (and I did know that that would
> be a negative comment -nh), but they'll be imitating me pretty soon."
>
> -nh
>
Yes this makes good sense to me. The terms fantasy, phantasy, fantastic,
etc. were--if my fading memories of a graduate course in Romantic
Literature are correct (God, now we're talking early to mid-1970s!)--
all pretty much negative in normal usage until Coleridge popularized a more
positive meaning for them in his major work of lit crit, what was it called,
Biographia Literaria, or some such.
Mike Levy (who's feeling older by the minute)
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