Glimpsing the devil’s tale? Towards a visual narratology of the fantastic in illustrated editions of Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux

This article considers the illustration of Jacques Cazotte’s prototypical fantastic novella Le Diable amoureux from its publication in 1772 through to the twentieth century. Setting out and applying a theoretical approach based on narratological models proposed by Gérard Genette and subsequent theorists, it examines the role of the ‘spectator’ embedded within images in generating narrative ambiguity and provoking the hesitation on the part of the reader/viewer that Tzvetan Todorov identified as the key feature of the fantastic. The different types of spectator are defined and their interaction with textual narration analysed.