Chapter Seventeen provides an ambitious synthesis of many of the concepts and authors addressed earlier in the volume in order to argue for two intertwining genealogies of modern fiction: on the one hand, the historical and social novel, and on the other, the Gothic, fantastic tales, and other non-realist literary forms. All these genres and forms encode questions of uneven development and often also express a sense of historical and epistemological disorientation. The chapter opens with examples of crossovers between fiction and other artforms to show the rich variety of forms and their influence on European culture. It then looks at cross-border influences and on individual nations’ different material conditions. Romanticism inherited and transformed a series of existing forms and themes, including travel literature, the epistolary novel, the Gothic, and the picaresque, into new forms, including the Bildungsroman, the fragment, the tale, and novella. These reflect an intense self-consciousness regarding historical time and place, even when they appear most ahistorical.

At the heart of Romantic supernaturalism was a newly ‘real’ or ‘material’ magic described by philosophers and aesthetic theorists including Friedrich Schlegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Théophile Gautier, Charles Nodier, and others. Rejecting the illusory marvels of the eighteenth century and recalling aspects of natural magic associated with Renaissance cosmology, Romantic fantasy reconciled science and enchantment, phenomena and noumena. This chapter explores how such a reconciliation happened, outlining the impact of post-Kantian Idealist thought, the role of pantheism, the social shifts initiated by eighteenth-century revolutionary and imperialist activity, and the emergence of Gothic culture. From these developments, a new magical mode emerged – a fantastic epistemology – with special implications for music. It allowed fairies to converge with insects, demons to merge into colonial Others, and supernatural spirits to enter the domain of the real. These ideas are fleshed out via close readings of Schubert’s Erlkönig, Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable.

Was there an indigenous Gothic in nineteenth-century Italy, a local reworking of English (and perhaps Continental) forms and models’? This chapter addresses this much-debated issue by making a case for the clear presence of Gothic motifs and structures in several Italian novels, from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827) (particularly in its earliest version, Fermo e Lucia, c. 1821–3) to Carlo Lorenzini’s Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883). The chapter discusses the contribution of the so-called ‘Scapigliati’ authors to the Italian Gothic and offers a survey of later writers from the verista and naturalista literary schools. Later in the century, Italian realist writers seem to veer into the realm of the supernatural. The chapter thus closes with looking at the anti-rationalist discourses that flourished at the close of the century, and at such hermeneutical modalities as spiritualism, mesmerism and occultism that became increasingly fashionable in the popular press. Vampire literature and the Italian legacy of German and English Gothic are also addressed, with references to, among others, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi and the national novelists of the first half of the century.