Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
Table of ContentsForeword: Weird Geographies, Fantastic Maps
Robert T. Tally, Jr.
Acknowledgments
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 Spofford’s “D’Outre 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 Ruff’s Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft
James Kneale
8 The Oceanic Weird, Wet Ontologies, and Hydro-Criticism in China Miéville’s
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
Contributors
