is the short form, common since the Ren., of fantasy (Lat. phantasia , transliterated from Gr. phanos “image” and later replaced by imaginatio ). In Western poetics the history, definition, and use of f. in crit. and psychology are inseparably linked to that of imagination (q.v.), the two terms being sometimes distinguished but more often used very similarly if not identically. Phantasia originally carried suggestions of creativity and free play of mind, a power generating images and combinations of images not previously found in nature or sense experience. Albertus Magnus uses the term this way, with imaginatio reserved for the static mental recording of perceived images. However, even in the Middle Ages, distinctions or inversions of the two terms occur. Aquinas simply uses them synonymously; in a later (failed) attempt to fix them, Addison does, too: usage did not stabilize in Eng. until the later 18th c. In Germany a variety of terms ( Phantasie, Einbildungskraft, Dichtungskraft, Perceptionsvermögen ) are employed throughout the 18th and 19th cs. without strict consistency. In Italy, fantasia generally retains its “higher” stature as a creative and altering power, while immaginazione pertains more to a form of memory, the retention and reproduction of sense impressions. However, even here there is no rule; Vico uses fantasia for both recollective and original, productive functions.
In the period 1660–1820, European crit. Self-consciously turns to the issue of discriminating f. from imagination. In Eng., despite early confusion, something of a norm is reached by the 1780s and 90s. Hobbes employed f. for the greatest creative range of mind, but rDryden at least once subordinates f. to imagination. Anticipating later developments, Dryden makes f. responsible only for the manipulation and rearrangement or juxtaposition of images already created or experienced; in poetic composition, f. is the power that distributes and arranges the images already invented. Imagination encompasses both powers, as well as their formulation in words and figures of speech. Addison claims no difference between f. and imagination but in practice tends to elevate imagination to a higher creative plane. As early as Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711), imagination is the stronger term, while f. suggests “mental abandon,” which Shaftesbury exemplifies by the same passage from Otway’s Venice Preserved that Coleridge later quotes in the Biographia to illustrate f.: “Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, ships of amber.”
In poetry, the elevation of the term imagination at the expense of f. occurs a litter later; until the romantic period, f. is generally used in poetic diction. Keats uses imagination heavily in his letters and in the late Fall of Hyperion; elsewhere, f. may be a fickle power of pleasure (“Fancy”), a power of endlessly novel and procreative embellishment (“Ode to Psyche”), or potentially synonymous with imagination (“Ode to a Nightingale”). It is significant that Wordsworth consciously chooses imagination as the key term in The Prelude; unlike Coleridge, however, he views f. and imagination as differing in degree, not kind.
For Coleridge, f. “has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definities. The F. is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space: and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word choice . But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association” ( BL , ch. 4). His definition has become a touchstone in part because it captures the essence of a set of emergent Eng. and Ger. distinctions. F. operates without a unifying design and does not meld, transform, or newly create images or ideas. Rather, it juxtaposes or connects them in a more mechanical fashion, appealing to novelty of sense impression instead of strength or grandeur of intellectual conception and power. Often described as “aimless” or “sportive,” f. suggests a phantasmagoria of passing, fixed images, whose mingling does not mutually transform or resolve or unify them into larger patterns. Ruskin continues to distinguish the two terms in Modern Painters .
In Germany, Wolff, Kant, Jean-Paul, Schelling, Hegel, Schiller, J. G. Fichte, I. G. Fichte, Tetens, and Goethe all make distinctions between f. and imagination, some elaborate, others casual. Schelling and at times Kant parallel the Eng. elevation of imagination ( Einbildungskraft ), while others, such as Jean-Paul, echo the It. supremacy of f. ( Phantasie ) as the highest creative power. Croce in the earlier 20th c. retains the It. primacy of fantasia , the equivalent of Eng. imagination, while immaginazione corresponds roughly to f. as Coleridge defines it. For bibl.
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