Tales of terror, mythoi of the macabre, phobic fantasies, and numinous narratives have played an integral role in collective cultural expression since antiquity. It was, however, in 19th-century Europe that weird fiction reached its first apogee as a cultural and political antithesis to the adverse conditions of modern life. It expressed Western society's collective disappointment with the Enlightenment's unrealized promises for a better world, capturing the agony of urban populations in suffocating industrial cities, the suffering caused by centuries of ongoing military confrontation, and the hopelessness of the common citizen in the wake of rapid and complex technological and political change. This volume presents a rational demystification of irrational cultural expressions, with the dual intention of being used as both an academic reference and a popular guide into the realm of chimeric cultural visions. It analyzes the correlation of urban mythologies and their concurrent cultural paradigms, tracing the impact of the collective subconscious through literature, comic-strips, cinematography, music, architecture, and art.
Andrew Gipe-Lazarou holds an MArch from Harvard University, USA, and a PhD from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He is a designer, educator, and researcher interested in the role of sensory learning in design practice and education and the impact of fictional narratives on the history of architecture and the city.Konstantinos Moraitis has been teaching at the National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A.), Greece, since 1983, and has been Professor Emeritus since December 2020, instructing the postgraduate seminar History and Theory of Landscape Design. He has a doctorate in History and Theory of Landscape Design from N.T.U.A., a D.E.A. in Ethical and Political Philosophy from the Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, and an MSc in Arabic and Islamic studies from the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece, and has published numerous architectural projects, scientific articles, and books about landscape theory and architectural design.
