Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities

Description

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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xii Introduction: Ecologies and Geographies of the Weird and the Fantastic (Julius Greve, Florian Zappe)....Pages 1-12 Naturhorror and the Weird (Eugene Thacker)....Pages 13-24 Uncanny New Worlds in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “D’Outre Mort” and “The Black Bess” (Michaela Keck)....Pages 25-40 The Weird and the Wild: Media Ecologies of the Outré-Normative (Julius Greve)....Pages 41-56 Queering the Weird: Unnatural Participations and the Mucosal in H. P. Lovecraft and Occulture (Patricia MacCormack)....Pages 57-72 Geological Insurrections: Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin (Moritz Ingwersen)....Pages 73-92 “Indifference Would Be Such a Relief”: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff’s Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft (James Kneale)....Pages 93-109 The Oceanic Weird, Wet Ontologies and Hydro-Criticism in China Miéville’s The Scar (Jolene Mathieson)....Pages 111-127 “Through the Eyes of Area X”: (Dis)Locating Ecological Hope via New Weird Spatiality (Gry Ulstein)....Pages 129-147 Inexistent Ink: Michael Cisco and Quentin Meillassoux on Writing Worlds (Ben Woodard)....Pages 149-164 Notes on the Alluring Weirdness of (Materialist) Rumination and Regurgitation: Reading Ariana Reines and Jamie Stewart (Marius Henderson)....Pages 165-181 Spaces of Communal Misery: The Weird Post-Capitalism of Beasts of the Southern Wild (Marlon Lieber)....Pages 183-200 Back Matter ....Pages 201-208