The fantastic variations of Neil Gaiman's "American Gods"

Abstract

With the characteristics typical of postmodernist fiction, the novels written by Neil Gaiman, a British author of the imaginary, represent a contemporary perception of the imaginative literatures, regarded through the prism of hybridization. In consequence, in Gaiman’s work, different poetics and conventions, such as the fantastic and the marvelous, are combined to reveal various depictions of the supernatural. As a result, in order to examine the author’s style, it is necessary to ponder on the influence of the postmodernist on the choice of the genre. Furthermore, the analysis of the most important manifestations of the supernatural in Gaiman’s astounding novel American Gods (2001) should be preceded by a short introduction to the understanding of the terms “the fantastic” and “the marvelous.”