Explore "The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Though the critic no longer feels that need of classifying and sub-classifying the genres which so preoccupied the contemporaries of Wordsworth, there are, in all the arts, certain local products that seem to necessitate a parenthesis.
Such, in fiction, is the use of the supernatural. It seems to have come from mysterious Germanic and Armorican forests, from lands of long twilights and wailing winds; and it certainly did not pass through French or even Russian hands to reach us. Sorcerers and magic are of the south, the Mediterranean; the witch of Theocritus brewed a brew fit for her sister-hags of the Scottish heath; but the spectral apparition walks only in the pages of English and Germanic fiction.