Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays analyzing ecohorror motifs in literature, manga, film, and television, illuminating ambiguities that arise from human encounters with nonhuman nature and examining the scale and effect of ecohorror in, and of, the Anthropocene.
Trade Review“Fear and Nature expansively defines eco-horror as not only a sub-genre of literature but as a cohesive mode operating across genres and media. Whether talking about Algernon Blackwood or Algernon Swinburne, Bong Joon Ho or Junji Ito, this volume explores the rhizomatic connections that make eco-criticism something that transcends genre, and makes a convincing case for its relevance not only today but as a way of reconsidering what has come before.”
—Brian Evenson,author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
“Fear and Nature straddles popular culture studies, horror and gothic studies, film and literary studies, and cultural studies. It is an expansive, ambitious, and exploratory book that is working to move the field beyond earlier works of ecohorror criticism by considering fresh approaches to the subject.”
—Bernice Murphy,author of The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness
“This foundational text is an optimistic thrust of possible reimagination, one that does not “foreclose the future or discourage activism.””
—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
“This representative and symbolic book is highly recommended to readers as it can offer them the ethics and responsibilities towards nature.”
—Tohidur Rahaman Journal of Ecohumanism
“This book is definitely going to be one of the more authoritative texts in the field for a while, due to its sharp, language-building introduction, the chapters’ wide applications of ecohorror theory, and the scholars’ tendency to use their work to open up conversations rather than simply proving a statement and walking away.”
—Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres SFRA Review
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction: Ecohorror in the Anthropocene
Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles
Part 1: Expanding Horror
1. Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name
Dawn Keetley
2. Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror
Christy Tidwell
3. “The Hand of Deadly Decay”: The Rotting Corpse, America’s Religious Tradition, and the Ethics of Green Burial in Poe’s “The Colloquy of Monos and Una”
Ashley Kniss
Part 2: Haunted and Unhaunted Landscapes
4. The Death of Birdsong, the Birdsong of Death: Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Horror of Erosion
Keri Stevenson
5. An Unhaunted Landscape: The Anti-Gothic Impulse in Ambrose Bierce’s “A Tough Tussle”
Chelsea Davis
6. The Extinction-Haunted Salton Sea in The Monster That Challenged the World
Bridgitte Barclay
Part 3: The Ecohorror of Intimacy
7. From the Bedroom to the Bathroom: Stephen King’s Scatology and the Emergence of an Urban Environmental Gothic
Marisol Cortez
8. “This Bird Made an Art of Being Vile”: Ontological Difference and Uncomfortable Intimacies in Stephen Gregory’s The Cormorant
Brittany R. Roberts
9. The Shape of Water and Post-pastoral Ecohorror
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann
Part 4: Being Prey, Being Food
10. Superpig Blues: Agribusiness Ecohorror in Bong Joon-ho’s Okja
Kristen Angierski
11. Zoo: Television Ecohorror On and Off the Screen
Sharon Sharp
12. Naturalizing White Supremacy in The Shallows
Carter Soles
Contributors
Index
