Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic

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 cultures 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 Miville, N. K. Jemisin, Thomas Ligotti, and Jeff VanderMeer, among others.