Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Ecologies and Geographies of the Weird and the Fantastic

   • Julius Greve, Florian Zappe

   Pages 1-12

3. Naturhorror and the Weird

   • Eugene Thacker

   Pages 13-24

4. Uncanny New Worlds in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “D’Outre Mort” and “The Black Bess”

   • Michaela Keck

   Pages 25-40

5. The Weird and the Wild: Media Ecologies of the Outré-Normative

   • Julius Greve

   Pages 41-56

6. Queering the Weird: Unnatural Participations and the Mucosal in H. P. Lovecraft and Occulture

   • Patricia MacCormack

   Pages 57-72

7. Geological Insurrections: Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin

   • Moritz Ingwersen

   Pages 73-92

8. “Indifference Would Be Such a Relief”: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff’s Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft

   • James Kneale

   Pages 93-109

9. The Oceanic Weird, Wet Ontologies and Hydro-Criticism in China Miéville’s The Scar

   • Jolene Mathieson

   Pages 111-127

10. “Through the Eyes of Area X”: (Dis)Locating Ecological Hope via New Weird Spatiality

    • Gry Ulstein

    Pages 129-147

11. Inexistent Ink: Michael Cisco and Quentin Meillassoux on Writing Worlds

    • Ben Woodard

    Pages 149-164

12. Notes on the Alluring Weirdness of (Materialist) Rumination and Regurgitation: Reading Ariana Reines and Jamie Stewart

    • Marius Henderson

    Pages 165-181

13. Spaces of Communal Misery: The Weird Post-Capitalism of Beasts of the Southern Wild

    • Marlon Lieber

    Pages 183-200

14. Back Matter

    Pages 201-208

    PDF

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.

• genre fiction
• weird fiction
• fantasy
• science fiction
• spatial literary studies
• geocriticism
• posthumanism
• H.P Lovecraft
• eco-horror

“A fascinating exploration of weird fiction in the context of climate change and current economic and political systems. These are thought-provoking pieces that constantly probe and poke at their subject matter in a restless and very useful way.” (Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne (2017))

“From H.P. Lovecraft and Annihilation to The Broken Earth and Beasts of the Southern Wild, Greve and Zappe’s Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities offers an urgent ecocritical cartography for a planet that is never going back to normal.” (Gerry Canavan, Associate Professor of 20^th and 21^st Century Literature, Marquette University, USA)

• Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

  Julius Greve

• Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

  Florian Zappe

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.