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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.
List of contents
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.
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
