Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic

This collection of essays discusses genre fiction and film within the discursive framework of the environmental humanities and analyses the convergent themes of spatiality, climate change, and related anxieties concerning the future of human affairs, as crucial for any understanding of current forms of "weird" and "fantastic" literature and culture. Given their focus on the culturally marginal, unknown, and "other," these genres figure as diagnostic modes of storytelling, outlining the latent anxieties and social dynamics that define a culture's "structure of feeling" at a given historical moment. The contributions in this volume map the long and continuous tradition of weird and fantastic fiction as a seismograph for eco-geographical turmoil from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, offering innovative and insightful ecocritical readings of H. P. Lovecraft, Harriet Prescott Spofford, China Miéville, N. K. Jemisin, Thomas Ligotti, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others.

Autorentext

Julius Greve is Lecturer and Research Associate at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany, and the author of Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (2018).

Florian Zappe is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany. He has published monographs on William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker and a variety of essays on (post)modern literature, cinema, and theory.

Inhalt

Foreword: Weird Geographies, Fantastic Maps

Robert T. Tally, Jr.

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: Ecologies and Geographies of the Weird and the Fantastic

Julius Greve and Florian Zappe

2 Naturhorror and the Weird

Eugene Thacker

3 Uncanny New Worlds in Harriet Prescott Spofford's D'Outre Mort and The Black Bess

Michaela Keck

4 The Weird and the Wild: Media Ecologies of the Outré-Normative

Julius Greve

5 Queering the Weird: Unnatural Participations and the Mucosal in H. P. Lovecraft and Occulture

Patricia MacCormack

6 Geological Insurrections: Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin

Moritz Ingwersen

7 Indifference would be such a relief: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff's Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft

James Kneale

8 The Oceanic Weird, Wet Ontologies, and Hydro-Criticism in China Miéville's

The Scar

Jolene Mathieson

9 Through the eyes of Area X: (Dis)locating Ecological Hope via New Weird Spatiality

Gry Ulstein

10 Inexistent Ink: Michael Cisco and Quentin Meillassoux on Writing Worlds

Ben Woodard

11 Notes on the Alluring Weirdness of (Materialist) Rumination and Regurgitation: Reading Ariana Reines and Jamie Stewart<...