Nominate Your 19th-Century F & SF Favorites

[Extollager]

I could add more to this myself, but let me throw it out for others too. Can anyone inform me about Jonas Lie?

The intended audience would be college students who like fantasy and/or sf and who might be receptive to reading earlier writing than what they are used to acquiring from bookstores, etc.

A Reading List for 19th-Century World Fantasy and Science Fiction

In the United States, “science fiction” became a publisher’s marketing category around 1940, and “fantasy” was established thus by around 1970. Much great writing was published long before the adoption of these industry categories. The following lists are not intended to be exhaustive; they are selections of outstanding works that are readily available.

Note: Today, distinctions between fantasy and science fiction may usually seem obvious. This wasn’t the case in the 19th century, and so a few works are listed twice, under each category.

FANTASY​

France


Germany
Brentano: “Rosepetal”?
Goethe: Fairy Tale (The Green Snake)?
Hoffmann: “The Sandman,” “The Mines at Falun”….

Great Britain

Coleridge: Christabel, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Kubla Khan”
MacDonald: “The Day Boy and the Night Girl” (“Photogen and Nycteris”), “The Golden Key,” “The Light Princess,” The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, Lilith
Morris: The Well at the World’s End

Norway
Ibsen: Peer Gynt
Jonas Lie?

United States

Hawthorne: “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher”

SCIENCE FICTION​

France
Verne: Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Germany:
Hoffmann: “The Sandman”

Great Britain

Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Wells: Short stories including “The Crystal Egg,” “The Sea-Raiders,” “The Country of the Blind,” etc.; The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds

Norway

United States

Hawthorne: “The Birthmark”
Poe: Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,”

If you didn't comment before, do you have anything to say on this topic now?

 

[Randy M.]

I may be broadening "fantasy" farther than you meant, Extollager.

FANTASY


France

Guy de Maupassant, "The Horla"


Great Britain

Good call on Coleridge. Would you consider Shelley's "Ozymandias"?
J. Sheridan Le Fanu, "Carmilla"


United States

Bierce: "The Damned Thing"

SCIENCE FICTION​

United States

Fitz-James O'Brien, "The Diamond Lens"
W. C. Morrow, "The Monster-Maker"

 

[Extollager]

I don't know that Id' say "Ozymandias" is fantasy... but the situation does feel like a proto-Lord Dunsany scenario, though. I wonder if that poem didn't mark the young Plunkett for life.

 

[Randy M.]

I don't know that Id' say "Ozymandias" is fantasy... but the situation does feel like a proto-Lord Dunsany scenario, though. I wonder if that poem didn't mark the young Plunkett for life.

Maybe that's it, that's the mood or atmosphere that I feel in the poem when I read it. Not so much fantasy as a hard look at our worth.

Randy M.

 

[BAYLOR]

The Lost Continent by C J Cutcliffe Hynd 1899. Its the fist novel set in mythical Atlantis. It's definitely fantasy and in terms of style an story telling and characterization, It reads like a modern fantasy book. It's excellent book and its the only thing by this writer that even remembered.

 

[hitmouse]

The Lost Continent by C J Cutcliffe Hynd 1899. Its the fist novel set in mythical Atlantis.

Really?
There's lots of Atlantis stuff going back to the ancient Greeks. Not all of it in the form of the novel I grant you.

 

[BAYLOR]

Really?
There's lots of Atlantis stuff going back to the ancient Greeks. Not all of it in the form of the novel I grant you.

I could be wrong but I think Plato was the first to talk about Atlantis but not in the form of a story.

 

[Extollager]

There's much about Atlantis in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, which I have taught, using a Penguin Classics edition.