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 cultures 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.
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 Spoffords
DOutre 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 Ruffs Dialogues with H. P.
Lovecraft, James Kneale.- 8. The Oceanic Weird, Wet Ontologies, and
Hydro-Criticism in China Miévilles 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, Marius Henderson.- 12. Spaces of Communal Misery:
The Weird Post-Capitalism of Beasts of the Southern Wild, Marlon Lieber.
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.
