MACMILLAN Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies)

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. Review “A fascinating exploration of weird fiction in the context of climate change and current economic and political systems. These are thought-provoking pieces that constantly probe and poke at their subject matter in a restless and very useful way.” (Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne (2017)) “From H.P. Lovecraft and Annihilation to The Broken Earth and Beasts of the Southern Wild, Greve and Zappe’s Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities offers an urgent ecocritical cartography for a planet that is never going back to normal.” (Gerry Canavan, Associate Professor of 20th and 21st Century Literature, Marquette University, USA) From the Back Cover 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. About the Author 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.