“Lurz is to be applauded for his ingenious and subtle account of how literature bleeds into life. His meticulous reading of Barthes attests to the blurred lines between the factual and the fictional and reveals that demystification is only a hair’s breadth away from bewitchment.”

Rita Felski, University of Virginia

“This exquisite book is an invigorating work of highly original scholarship, written in the assured yet never-ponderous voice of a meticulous, attentive, astute literary critic. The Barthes Fantastic moves adroitly between the smallest level of textual detail and the most big-picture questions in literary studies today. In renewing our appreciation of Barthes’s importance and usefulness in our current era, the book brilliantly succeeds in presenting us with a ‘Barthes who, fantastically, seems both the same as and other than the writer that so many of us love.’”

François Proulx, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“The Barthes Fantastic makes a vital intervention into the many-sided and often speculative world of Barthes studies with a single claim: Barthes’s critical practice relies heavily on the ‘fantasmatic.’ Original, searching, and forthright in its argument, this book takes us nearer to an understanding of Barthesian notions and finds the deep links between what, or rather how, Barthes is writing and what he is writing about.”

Andy Stafford, University of Leeds