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.
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1 Introduction: Ecologies and Geographies of the Weird and the Fantastic |
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1 | (12) |
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2 Naturhorror and the Weird |
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13 | (12) |
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3 Uncanny New Worlds in Harriet Prescott Spofford's "D'Outre Mort" and "The Black Bess" |
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25 | (16) |
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4 The Weird and the Wild: Media Ecologies of the Outre-Normative |
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41 | (16) |
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5 Queering the Weird: Unnatural Participations and the Mucosal in H. P. Lovecraft and Occulture |
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57 | (16) |
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6 Geological Insurrections: Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Mieville to N. K. Jemism |
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73 | (20) |
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7 "Indifference Would Be Such a Relief: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruffs Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft |
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93 | (18) |
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8 The Oceanic Weird, Wet Ontologies and Hydro-Criticism in China Mieville's The Scar |
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111 | (18) |
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9 "Through the Eyes of Area X": (Dis)Locating Ecological Hope via New Weird Spatiality |
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129 | (20) |
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10 Inexistent Ink: Michael Cisco and Quentin Meillassoux on Writing Worlds |
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149 | (16) |
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11 Notes on the Alluring Weirdness of (Materialist) Rumination and Regurgitation: Reading Ariana Reines and Jamie Stewart |
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165 | (18) |
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12 Spaces of Communal Misery: The Weird Post-Capitalism of Beasts of the Southern Wild |
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183 | (18) |
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| Notes on Contributors |
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201 | (4) |
| Index |
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205 | |
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.
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